Table Of ContentColloquial Norwegian
The Colloquial Series
Series adviser: Gary King
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iii
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Colloquial Norwegian
A Complete Language Course
Kari Bråtveit, W.Glyn Jones and
Kirsten Gade
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1995 Kari Bråtveit, W.Glyn Jones and Kirsten Gade
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-97630-4(cid:13)(cid:10) Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-11009-2 (book)
ISBN 0-415-11010-6 (cassettes)
ISBN 0-415-11011-4 (book and cassettes course)
Contents
About this book 1
1 Pamela og Håkon Pamela and Håkon 5
2 Håkon på jobb Håkon at work 15
3 På innkjøp Out shopping 27
4 Hjemme At home 37
5 Familien The family 48
6 På hytta At the holiday chalet 58
7 Et familiebesøk A family visit 68
8 Til bords At the table 79
9 En vanlig dag Everyday life 87
10 Skolen i Norge Norwegian schooling 99
11 Været The weather 109
12 Togreiser Travelling by train 120
13 I byen In town 131
14 Turister Tourists 141
15 Sykdom og sunnhet Sickness and health 149
16 Utseende Appearance 159
17 Fritiden Spare time 168
18 Litt norsk historie Some Norwegian history 178
19 Norske aviser Norwegian newspapers 186
20 Livet i Norge Life in Norway 196
A simple guide to pronunciation 206
Ready-reference grammar 210
vii
Key to exercises 215
English-Norwegian glossary 225
Norwegian-English glossary 244
Bibliography 281
Index 282
About this book
Colloquial Norwegian contains 20 lessons, each introducing about 100 new
words. Each lesson is built around a series of smaller units and includes: texts,
dialogues, grammatical explanations, examples of ‘Language in use’, and
exercises.
At the back of the book you will find a brief guide to Norwegian
pronunciation, a short review of main grammatical points, a key to exercises, and
English-Norwegian as well as Norwegian-English glossaries.
Below, we explain in more detail about the aim of the various units and the
best way of working with them. If you are to derive maximum benefit from the
book, we suggest you should not skip this introduction!
Texts
Norwegian is closely related to English, so the early texts aim to be so simple
that learners with English as their mother tongue will be able to understand them
in main outline if not always in detail. Later, as the texts centre on more
specialized subjects, each will be furnished with word lists to help you
understand.
The sentence structure in the texts is not normally difficult, but some passages
contain a vocabulary drawn from special areas. In such cases we have found it
useful to provide lessons with relevant headings. Thus, there are many words
concerning the weather in Lesson 11, (‘The weather’), and terms relating to
parliamentary elections in Lesson 20, entitled ‘Life in Norway’.
The passages represent the written language and are intended (a) to be
generally informative, (b) to expand vocabulary and (c) to illustrate grammatical
points which are then discussed immediately afterwards. You will then be able to
concentrate on those aspects of the texts which are of most interest to you, in the
sense that although ideally you should learn all new vocabulary as it appears, this
is not strictly necessary if you want to move on. We do, however, strongly advise
you to use the passages as illustrations for the Language sections immediately
following. It is important for the understanding of language that the examples
given in these grammatical sections should also be seen in context.
2
Dialogues
The dialogues represent the spoken language, which often cannot be translated
word for word. Here we are dealing mainly with phrases, not words. This does
not, however, imply that the dialogues are less important. On the contrary, they
contain the everyday language which you will meet in the street, in the home,
and anywhere else where people communicate orally. Without this language of
communication you would find yourself in difficulties when faced with a
situation in which oral communication was necessary. We therefore advise you
not to neglect any of the dialogues. If you have the cassettes, you should work
with each of them in the following manner:
1Listen to the dialogue until you can understand it. That will inevitably take
some time. Your first impression will be that the readers speak very fast, but
a deliberate attempt has been made to maintain a normal speed so that the
dialogue should not appear artificial. Listen first with the text before you,
and then with your book closed. You can learn much merely by listening.
2Now—with your book open—try to imitate the replies one by one. You can
do this by stopping your tape after each line of dialogue and repeating it
parrot-fashion. Make a real effort to get as close as possible to both sound
and intonation.
3When you are satisfied with your efforts, you can test yourself as follows:
Play one line of the dialogue and answer it with the next before playing that
on the tape. As you play the taped version, you will be able to decide for
yourself where your mistakes (if any) lie. Now, repeat the process, taking
the part of the other speaker in the dialogue.
The dialogues, like the texts, are also closely related either to the ‘Language points’
or to the ‘Language in use’.
Language points
We use as few grammatical terms as possible, but they can, of course, not be
avoided entirely, and therefore to help those learners who have not previously
had experience of grammatical terms—or have forgotten them—we have tried
visually to illustrate each new term as we introduce it.
The general principle employed in introducing grammar is to go from the easy
to the more difficult. Thus, we do not aim at dealing with verbs in their entirety
first, then nouns, and so on.
No grammatical problem is introduced unless it has been illustrated in the
preceding text passage or dialogue. While working the grammar, you should
therefore constantly keep an eye on the text above.
We have used a series of patterns to help you with word order. This method
has a particular appeal to those whose method of learning is visual. Moreover, a
