Yngvar wrote:
“Words can be fairly different, or even totally different, (e.g. “for eksempel” = “til dømes”) and there are also grammatical differences.”
But we have that situation in British and American English as well (e.g. pavement/sidewalk). Not that it makes it easier for learners, but sometimes I feel that the differences are exaggerated.
I’m sure speakers of any language can produce a text or a speech with differences in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation that it becomes a lot less intelligible to the other party.
I am confused…is the difference between Nynorsk and Bokmal just in writting, but not in speaking?! Can one understand a Nynorsk speaker if they learned Bokmal?! and the other way around?! I am confused between what you mean between accent and dialect. Is the difference between them like how we speak in California vs. How they speak in the south? Or New York even? Or is the difference as big as American vs. British…Scottish…Australian.
Well, I suppose that the differences in writing correspond to some differences in speaking too.
Anyway, I’m more and more pessimistic about the future of Norwegian at LingQ. I think it’s the first beta language that has had no lessons added within the first two days. No lessons, no tutors, nothing at all…
I would have a suggestion, but I fear someone would kill me if I made it, so I will shut up.
Of course there are differences in speaking (“pavement” sounds different from “sidewalk”, right?), but regardless of the language you’re learning you will always meet new vocabulary, regional pronunciation, grammar differences.
Jay, you are too radical… I didn’t mean to ask for Norwegian to be deleted. Just for another, more demanded language to be added: Esperanto, Turkish, Catalan, Ancient Greek, etc. It is more and more clear that the languages most Facebook voters LIKE are not the ones that we, LingQ members, want to LEARN (or to TUTOR and PROVIDE CONTENT for).
E.g., Catalan has got only 39 votes so far, but it is the second most voted language among my LingQ friends, after Esperanto.
What’s more, the whole Facebook voting is a joke. Who seriously is still on Facebook after the last announcement: “Time Line - the chronicle of your Facebook life” – and all your data, photos, vieos, etc. are not under your control, because Facebook keeps them even after deletion! Therefore, following this link may be the best decision in your life : Log into Facebook
There seem to be more fun voters than real language learners and LingQ members.
Is it really so difficult to program a voting function within the LingQ application?
"But we have that situation in British and American English as well (e.g. pavement/sidewalk). Not that it makes it easier for learners, but sometimes I feel that the differences are exaggerated. "
Not that I have studied this closely, but as far as I can tell, in the American/British case there are words here and there that are different. Pavement/sidewalk, elevator/lift, many musical terms etc. Other than that the main difference is the accents, and a few basic spelling differences like color/colour.
Bokmål/Nynorsk have a lot of differing words, the main problem being that many of them are very basic words. E.g. “We” in Bokmål is “vi”, while in Nynorsk it’s “me”.
The word “some” is in BM simply either “noe” or “noen”,
while in NN it’s “nokon”, “noka”, “noko”, “nokre” or even “somme”, depending on the gender and situation. In other words it’s also an example of difference in grammar.
Maybe I’m being ‘too pedagogical’ here, and maybe I’m thinking too much of beginning learners only, but it just seems really confusing to me to use both BM and NN for learning. If nothing else you have to be very careful to make sharp mental distinctions between the two forms if your goal is not only to understand something when you see/hear it, but to use the language yourself.
In terms of the written language, For simplicity’s sake I’d say Maria is quite spot on with likening it to the difference to that of American English and British English.
As of today the dominant written language is Bokmål, who’s used by around 85 to 90 %.
The exception being official state documents who’s available in both languages.
Though the written standard languages Bokmål (Book language) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian) are but that, written languages.
Spoken Norwegian is a language dominated by dialects, where the east Norwegian dialects are closest Bokmål and the west Norwegian dialects are closest Nynorsk.
The largest spoken dialect is Standard East Norwegian and is closest to Bokmål, though this to my knowledge no official status.
Standard East Norwegian also often also confused with Oslo dialects, these are in there rudimentary form quite similar; but Oslo dialect is again quite divided by sociolects, that is not the case for Standard East Norwegian.
As for what to learn, usually I’d recommend Bokmål and Standard East Norwegian for simplicity and practicality. But given the nature of the learning here it’s really a matter of taste; there is no real social sigma with talking a dialect, some crass sociolects on the other hand might be frowned upon like in most countries.
"I am confused…is the difference between Nynorsk and Bokmal just in writting, but not in speaking?! Can one understand a Nynorsk speaker if they learned Bokmal?! and the other way around?! I am confused between what you mean between accent and dialect. Is the difference between them like how we speak in California vs. How they speak in the south? Or New York even? Or is the difference as big as American vs. British…Scottish…Australian. "
Bokmål and Nynorsk are the two official written forms of Norwegian. Put simply, while Bokmål basically is a sort of ‘norwegification’ of Danish (Denmark ruled Norway for hundreds of years), Nynorsk is a result of nationalism in the 19th century, when they tried to make a ‘real Norwegian’ norm of writing as opposed to Danish, by gathering dialects and making a sort of hybrid out of those.
As for writing vs speaking, given the constructed nature of Nynorsk, not that many people actually speak it purely, they speak dialects that are more or less close to it. Bokmål is fairly close to how people speak in the south east of Norway (the most densely populated area), including the capital. The closest relation between written Bokmål and spoken language is probably found on the west side of Oslo, where it seems ‘speaking properly’, means speaking pure Bokmål or even Riksmål (which is a more conservative version).
“Can one understand a Nynorsk speaker if they learned Bokmal?! and the other way around?!”
People who use Bokmål will usually understand Nynorsk without any trouble, but there might be the occational word here and there that they don’t recognize. (When it comes to actually producing a text of perfect Nynorsk themselves, I think most Bokmål users have problems, they might get some basic stuff right, but not everything.) The other way around, I would think it’s more uncommon for Nynorsk users to have problems with Bokmål simply because of its much stronger spread across society through publications, tv etc. This why I’m saying it’s much more useful to consentrate on Bokmål. In 2003, 91% of Norwegian publications were in Bokmål.
I would second what hape said: “ the whole Facebook voting is a joke. There seem to be more fun voters than real language learners and LingQ members. Is it really so difficult to program a voting function within the LingQ application?”
First off you have no control as to who votes on Facebook. It would make more sense to see people need to subscribe to LinqQ before they can vote. It would show how serious they are about actually learning a language. Somehow I don’t believe that because people outside the community vote for a language you can expect many will later join to learn that language. I think it makes more sense to have the voting on the LingQ website itself for LingQ members only.
It may be wiser to run two polls. The first asking what languages people want to learn and the second asking what languages people want to provide content for. LingQ may be better to go with the leader of the second poll as a lot of eager people wanting to learn a language without much content will not make a beta language flourish. However on the other hand if you have a lot of content for a beta language people are more likely to start using LingQ to learn it than one that has very little.
Y’know, I think the whole facebook thing is probably more about reaching out to new folks, who’ve never even heard of LingQ before. (And I guess that’s kind of understandable, seeing that Steve can’t afford big-time Werbung…)
But I agree: I think it’s pretty screwed-up if folks who don’t even have a free membership of LingQ are getting to decide which languages come next!
One solution would be if languages were added TWO at a time - one having been voted for by facebookers, and one by LingQers. (But I don’t see that happening either…somehow…)
“One solution would be if languages were added TWO at a time - one having been voted for by facebookers, and one by LingQers. (But I don’t see that happening either…somehow…)”
That’s what I would suggest, too, but I didn’t write it because I supposed it would be useless.
I thought they had put the poll on facebook in the hopes of it promoting the website. I agree that if random people are voting, we may get languages with no content. But if it’s serving its purpose of advertising LingQ, then I guess it’s successful.
I was waiting for Dutch, and now it’s here, so I certainly understand the frustrations of those who may be waiting for a language, or the frustrations of those who might want to provide content but can’t.
But one language a month seems reasonable to me. I’m sure that within a year, we’ll have most of the languages that most people will want to study. If it happens that beta languages aquire no content/tutors for a significant length of time, they can always be removed.
“I thought they had put the poll on facebook in the hopes of it promoting the website. I agree that if random people are voting, we may get languages with no content. But if it’s serving its purpose of advertising LingQ, then I guess it’s successful.”
How many people became (paying) members thanks to that Facebook poll on beta languages?
As for Norwegian in particular, I share the doubts of those who wonder whether we will get any content. But even that is not the end of the world. People can use non-LingQ beginner resources and then afterwards use LingQ to import content from the internet. Just having a slot lined up with dictionaries is useful even if there is no beginner content.
“How many people became (paying) members thanks to that Facebook poll on beta languages?”
Probably very few - possibly none. I don’t really know.
I would prefer to see languages selected based on what active LingQ members would like to study and provide content for, but that’s not where LingQ has gone. I think in a year or so, it’ll work out to the same difference anyway.
But if there’s a member out there who is ready to provide lots of beginner content in Turkish, it would be wiser, in my opinion, to add Turkish. One active content provider is really all you need. Most of the Dutch content has been uploaded by one person.
"Probably very few - possibly none. I don’t really know. "
That’s my supposition, too.
“I would prefer to see languages selected based on what active LingQ members would like to study and provide content for, but that’s not where LingQ has gone. I think in a year or so, it’ll work out to the same difference anyway.
But if there’s a member out there who is ready to provide lots of beginner content in Turkish, it would be wiser, in my opinion, to add Turkish. One active content provider is really all you need. Most of the Dutch content has been uploaded by one person.”
I agree. I have uploaded most lessons for Latin and they have been read by hundreds of users.
I will use those Latin lessons someday too. I suppose it’s also important to remember that LingQ is a work in progress. Even if the Norwegian library ends up empty for 6 months, maybe some ambitious person will come along and fill it. But before someone puts all the work into preparing a library, it would probably help to know that there will be learners.
It might be nice if there was some internal statistic in LingQ based on what languages we would like to learn, how badly we would like to learn them, as well as which languages we are prepared to provide content for.
As far as languages go, Norwegian is fairly obscure. Anyone generally interested in Scandinavia would probably start with Swedish (as it’s a more populous country with more well known people/things than Norway).
I suppose one thing going for Norwegian is that supposedly Bokmal Norwegian is the best base if you’re interested in communicating across Scandinavia because it’s the easiest for everyone to understand, and the easiest base from which to understand other Scandinavian languages/dialects. I don’t know if that’s true though - it’s just something I heard.
Personally, I’m interested in Scandinavia as a region, but not any of the 3 countries more than the others, so I would probably start with Swedish because it’s the most populous of the 3 and seems to have the most media. Not that I’ll be starting any of them soon…
I have another idea for the polls. If they move them to the LingQ website. Give those that pay more for a higher level of LingQ service more votes or allow people to use so many points to buy votes. Give the people that sign up for a free account one vote and go up from there. Make people “put their money where their mouth” is so to speak.
You can still announce the polls on Facebook and whatever sites you want. This will still help promote LingQ.
Another thought is open up the beta languages and say that if X number of LingQs signup to provide content in a new Beta Language that the Beta Language will be added.
Another thought is to do a poll the first half of the month of the LingQers as to what language they would provide content for. Top languages go into the vote during the second half of the month (preferable on LingQ) but also could be on Facebook to select the language. That way you have a good chance to end up with a new beta language with some content. Maybe do the second poll on both Facebook and LingQ and weight the results to give more leverage to the LingQ votes.
