|
2013 has been the most amazing year I've had so far, in terms of self-developement. I've started to view almost every shortcoming that I've grown up with as a new opportunity to acquire skills/perspectives, and almost everyday feels like a step in the right direction. No more pissing my time away with useless shit that doesn't contribute to me in any productive way. As such, I've been thinking about all the different endeavors I want to experience in life.
It recently occurred to me that the furthest I've been from coastal BC is Alberta, and I'd like to change that. I'll be taking a trip to Korea in roughly two years to visit a friend (once his military service is over), but I'm setting myself up to have enough cash to visit somewhere else first. It's been a tough decision making process, but I feel satisfied with what I've arrived at. I've known for a long time that I've wanted to visit somewhere in Scandinavia, it was simply a question of picking a particular country and sticking with it.
My first choice was Sweden, because I love the way that Swedish sounds, and hearing about all the beautiful women may have been a factor. Regardless, I don't consider working on my game as a good enough reason to visit a country. I grew up in a very rural area where my recreational time was divided between getting plastered and spending time hiking in backwoods, most of the time alone (the hiking part, that is). It's been somewhat of a dream of mine to hike through the fjords and forests of Scandinavia, and that's the true reason that drives me to travel there. This first vacation isn't about enjoying huge cities and crazy nightlife (I'll get plenty of both in Korea), it's about traveling through small towns and remote areas; taking in amazing views.
I recently found out that the coastal fjords of Norway are regarded as some of the most beautiful
landscapes in the world, and the few pictures I've seen have given me all the convincing I need.
+ Show Spoiler +
Now that I'm decided, the only thing left for me to do is prepare for the trip. While I'm aware that a staggering number of Norwegians speak excellent English, I plan on reaching at least a basic conversational level for many reasons. I've always disliked the idea of visiting a country without getting to know the language on some level. Further, in the event that I do head through some very remote locations, I'd rather not get my nose broken by some giant farmer named Svend over something I could've avoided by explaining myself. Lastly, I plan on meeting as many awesome people as possible, and a great way to start a conversation is by asking people about their language and culture.
I've got a lot of questions floating in my head, but I'll try to stick to what I think is most important. If any kindly vikings have advice for me, I'd very much appreciate to hear it. If we end up meeting later on, the first round is on me.
So far I'm looking at traveling up the West coast, starting somewhere around Stavenger or Bergen,
and ending perhaps around Trondheim. Would this route give me plenty of wonderful sights, or would I be missing out on anything really worth seeing?
Given that I may be traveling on the West coast, would it be better to familiarize myself with Nynorsk instead of Bokmål, even though Bokmål appears to be the standard for foreigners to learn?
If I had to spend a few nights in some small towns, any idea if the locals might be not so friendly? I look vaguely Scandinavian (tall-ish, blond), and I'm not the type to start shit. It's not that I'm assuming the locals are dicks or anything, I'm just very familiar with how annoying small town folk can be, growing up on an island with 2000 people.
I'm assuming that traveling by coast will mean lots of ferry rides, amirite?
What are the best movies/shows/bands out of Norway? I don't plan on having shitty pronunciation.
Nothing comes to mind, but are there any natural dangers I should be aware of, i.e. wildlife or terrain hazards?
When might be the best time to travel there? Spring is probably best for me, but I know fuck-all about the climate.
That's all I can think of which is relevant, but I'd love to hear anything else if you think it's useful to know. Thanks for any input. Luftputebåten min er full av ål! 
|
Norway839 Posts
Random stuff:
Norwegian lesson:
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjellvettreglene
9 rules of common mountain sense.
Good weather site: http://yr.no
Nynorsk and bokmål are the two written languages, pretty much everyone write in bokmål so I'd go for that.
Dialects on the other hand sound like bokmål, nynorsk and everything in between, some are even further off. If you're travelling across the country you'll find expressions/words being worded entirely different from place to place XD
Ferry rides are quite common and are extremely chill (relaxing).
Norwegian women are beautiful, especially if you can find the ones that appreciate white skin and don't go all out carrot on themselves. Luckily you will be away from the major cities so that should be okay. I'm pretty sure that being a foreigner among Norwegian women gives you a slight bonus too.
Bring a lot of money.
|
If you start of in Stavanger, you should visit "Preikestolen". (google it and you will see cool pictures)
It's a platau high up on top of a fjord where you can get a beautiful view and a thrilling experience. It's about 2 hour hike from the start location. Hardest part is probably getting up to the area where it is. Though should be plenty of tourist busses going there during this time.
|
Nynorsk or bokmål is a hard decision to make. According to wikipedia, the official language varies accordingly:
![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/M%C3%A5lformer_i_Norge.png/486px-M%C3%A5lformer_i_Norge.png)
So if you want to travel up the West coast, "logically" you should choose Nynorsk. However... a lot of people do use Bokmål, even though their dialect is closer to Nynorsk or even though Nynorsk is what they were taught in school. And then there are those that simply write out their dialect instead of reverting to official spelling. If that wasn't trouble enough, it turns out that the pronounciation of Norwegian is very far from what's written. It's almost (but not quite) as bad as English, so you really have to make an effort to connect the sounds and letters. Speaking of sounds, the sounds change a lot as well. From Stavanger and upwards past Bergen, the /r/ sound is pronounced kind of like the French /r/, but as you get further north, you'll encounter a "rolled r" which "rolls" several times and as you get to Trondheim it's only rolled once.
It's kind of a non-pedagogic advice, but I think that perhaps the choice of Nynorsk or Bokmål isn't, in the end, very important for your purposes. I think the two most useful skills you could have, would be syntactic bootstrapping and experience in mapping sounds to phonemes. Syntactic bootstrapping is understanding what kind of word you hear because you understand the rest of the sentence and what kind of word would be missing. For example, if you hear someone say "He [something] slowly", you know that there's a verb missing. What I mean by mapping sounds to phonemes is for example if you hear someone say "He rans with the gan ander the glowing san", then you understand that this person pronounces "u" as "a". There are pages and articles describing the differences in dialects in detail, but I think it may be a lot to remember. If you're able to learn a lot of words and how sentences are usually constructed (although this, too, can vary somewhat), that's probably what will give you the best results in the shortest amount of time.
You're asking about the best movies/shows/bands, but for movies/shows, I'm afraid that you'll have to settle with whatever you can get your hands on with subtitles. There's not an awful lot of Norwegian media with English subtitles, so you may not be able to pick and choose as you like. However, you may find international children's television (cartoons, Disney etc) dubbed to Norwegian helpful. Either, there's subtitles included or you've seen it before anyway, so you know what they say.
However, if you don't care for subtitles, you may be able to access Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK) online TV content if you use a proxy in Norway. The url is tv.nrk.no. Lots of stuff there.
As for music, a lot of Norwegians prefer singing in English, and then a lot of those that sing in Norwegian revert to Bokmål (actually Oslo dialect) instead of their own dialect, so again, for your purposes, there's not that much to choose from. If you like hip-hop, though, I know that there's a group rapping in Bergen dialect, Spetakkel, which is one of the dialect areas you'll be passing through. I don't listen to them myself, but I've heard that they're quite okay.
Beware, though, that your mind may not be wired to recognize all the Norwegian sounds, so even if you listen to a lot of Norwegian, you may not pick up on all the distinctions. One way to re-learn (because you knew when you were a baby) to identify those sounds, is to articulate them, even though they sound the same as to you as another sound that is articulate differently. Slowly and steadily, you'll be able to recognize the differences (like Japanese people re-learning the difference between l and r). The Norwegian "ø" and "y" can be especially difficult, because you need to protrude your lips outwards in addition to just rounding them as you do with English "ooh".
As for natural hazards, Norway is really quite a safe country. Don't fall down from any high places and don't get between animal mothers and their offspring and you'll be okay. We have one venomous snake in Norway, the hoggorm, but it's not lethal to adults unless you're allergic. It's not especially aggressive, so give it a wide berth and it won't bite you. We have a few predators, but I've been a lot out in the woods and I've never seen anything larger than a fox. Personally, I'd feel safer out in the forest at night than in a taxi line with drunk people...
|
@Snute
Thanks for the tips. I I'll tackle that list tonight. I've never seen more than a sentence written down, so it's nice to know that I can actually understand a little bit of the written language. Looks like there's some carry over from when I learned German, in terms of vocab.
@Phan2m
Looks amazing, I'll make sure it's on my list.
@iMAniaC
I've noticed in the few tutorials that I've seen, that my attempts at guessing how a sentence sounds is hilariously far from the real thing. I plan on studying quite a few languages later on, so I guess it's good that I get a taste of my own medicine (i.e. English pronounciation).
That's really good to know. As long as I can gather the gist from either writing system, that should be fine. They seem similar enough that as long as I know a relative idea of spelling, I can probably make out the words. As for syntactic bootstrapping and phoneme mapping, I'll give them lots of attention. This is the sort of advice that you don't get anywhere else .
Subtitles are a bonus, but not integral. Since I'll probably be doing a lot more listening that speaking/writing as it is, I think exposure will be very important. Thanks for the link.
Gotta get to work, thanks for all the info!
|
I see you leaned German before.
Norwegian should be incredibly easy for you.
I speak German and English and studied Icelandic for a year before I decided to try my hand at Norwegian. Compared to a language like Korean or Arabic you will progress like 15 times faster if you have previous knowledge of multiple germanic languages. I think you can reach basic fluency in a year if you study every day.
I don't know how good your German is but I used Norwegisch AKTIV multimedia course and was quite happy with it, it has 40 lessons, teaches 4500 words with audio, complete Norwegian grammar and has cultural notes for 60€ or some googling 
As for movies I only really saw Orions Belte, The Kautokeino Rebellion and Ofelas (it is in Davvisámegiella with Norwegian subtitles).
There is a Norwegian-American television series called Lilyhammer about a NY mobster who retires in Norway.
|
Im really impressed that you're taking the effort to try to learn the language before travelling, that's something I'll never be able to when i go to none english speaking countries.
As for the sights, the west coast south of Trondheim i spectacular, but if you're only visiting Norway once in your life you shouldn't miss out on Lofoten imo. It lies farther to the north and has amazing scenery with mountains and fjords, plus a rich culture for fishing wich still is very active today. I might be a bit biased as Im from the northern parts of Norway(not Lofoten itself), but I think it's a must see.
When it comes to the climate, Norway is in the northern parts of europe so it's cold, though there are warm days in the summer. All along the west coast and the north theres alot of rain even in the summer time, so keep that in mind when you're packing and going hiking. I would reccomend going later in the summer or early fall if your planning on visiting mountain peaks as you'd have to deal with more snow in the spring. And as Snute said, bring alot of money, it's awfully expensive here. Shitty food can cost as much as luxury meals, so be abit picky about where you eat.
Btw, I wouldn't be worried about getting knocked out by some farmer, as long as you dont meet him coming drunk home from the town on a sunday morning or something  I've found that the overwhelming majority of the people in remote areas here are really friendly.
|
Goddamn that pic of the village at the foot of the mountain is amazing.
|
That picture is Gudvangen, and depending on the weather conditions it can be absolutely breathtaking. It's a really popular tourist destination for obvious reasons.
Also worth considering is dropping by Ålesund. If you travel by Hurtigruten (which I recommend if at all possible), Ålesund is on its list of destinations, and if you travel during the summer, Hurtigruten also traverses Geirangerfjorden to enter Geiranger which is considered the top travel destination in all of Scandinavia.
Speaking of which, if you haven't seen it yet, in 2011 the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation transmitted non-stop the 134-hour voyage of Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, said to be the most beautiful sea voyage in the world. Here's a YouTube video of the entire 134-hour trip distilled down to 37 minutes, or if you prefer, watch the entire freaking thing in a single gigantic easy-to-seek VOD.
Welcome to Norway. May our weather favor you, because it is a finicky bitch that regularly breaks tourists in twain.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KbWsztc.jpg)
