How to separate Norwegian from Danish in your brain?

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For those who successfully learned both of them as a foreign language, how do you keep them apart while speaking.

I learned Danish long before Norwegian, I use spoken Danish almost once a week. INow I have the opportunity to speak Norwegian, but it feels like speaking Danish with an accent… I try to separate input accordingly and only listen to Norwegian on Norwegian days, but still.

Please don’t say I should not learn the 2 together. I already learned and use Danish; I can hardly unlearn it.

Thanks

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Is this a bad thing? Doesn’t it mean that the language is comparible easy to learn for you due to your Danish skills? How do the people you speak the language to react?

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Well, my Danish sparring partner considers me pretty fluent but the Norwegians? I got some quzizzical looks and blank stares, so I assume the Danish does more harm than good in my case… Rules and words are easy enough to remember but there are many things that are different also. I keep a notebook with false friends I encounter during the conversation but I had hoped someone had lived through this, and could help :wink:

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I am one of the very few people in the world who speaks all the Norse languages at least to a conversational degree. It is very hard not to mix these two up. The Bokmål version of Norwegian is extremely close to Danish, especially in written form. I’d tell you to try to use the different accents to separate them. Try to remember the words with the pronunciation

The main differences I found I have to keep in mind when speaking Norwegian are:

  1. Use å instead of at in front of verbs, but not if there is a noun/pronoun in front of the verb. Det er morsomt å spise. Jeg tror at han spiser.

  2. Different word order to indicate ownership. Det er bilen min. Det er fruen min.

  3. Gutt og jente for boy and girl.

  4. Some words you don’t have in Danish “gøy” for example

  5. Slightly different versions of words like “mye” for much

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This is an interesting problem which I have experienced to an extent myself. I speak English and during 2024 began learning Swedish. I have since stopped actively learning Swedish, moved to Germany and started learning German and would now consider myself fluent in German. On odd days when I do a bit of Swedish for fun I can feel the two languages sort of bleeding together. I get the same problem when I try to speak English, since my brain is used to operating in German and accesses the German word or the German structure first. When I am satisfied with my German I want to pick up Swedish again and I have been thinking about this issue as well.

I do not have the exact same problem as you, but I have been wondering if there are language exercises which you can do to help separate/compartmentalise different languages so that you are more able to consciously access the language you want to speak without inadvertently switching over. I used to do this when I had little experience speaking German - my brain would want to say something that was beyond my German vocabulary to describe and, because I was consciously distracted with trying to put the sentence together grammatically, an English or sometimes a Swedish word would come out without me even noticing it. I have heard Swedes making this same mistake when speaking German.

This is very vague advice, but I think you should keep learning/using both languages but make separating them consciously a separate skill which you train alongside. I think making a comprehensive list of false friends, as you mentioned, is useful. If these are mistakes you are making without realising, perhaps you could try recording yourself speaking in Norwegian to see if there are any ‘Danishisms’ which are apparent when you watch it back. Perhaps rapidly switching between the two languages (like speaking for 2 minutes in Danish, then 2 minutes in Norwegian, then Danish again) might be way of training the brain to focus on one language at a time. There might be some established methods or scientific literature on this.

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I speak fluent Swedish and lived in Sweden and Iceland (Icelanders learn Danish and you see/hear it around) for many years. Most native Scandinavian speakers commonly both read and hear all 3 (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) and don’t even care if you mix them together.

There are some dialects of Norwegian which sound exactly like dialects of Swedish and not even native speakers (unless they come from that area) can or care to tell them apart. Same for some dialects of Norwegian vs Danish.

I see no need to separate them at all unless you are specifically trying to take a language exam in both Norwegian and Danish for school or professional purposes (usually that isn’t necessary either - because Swedish schools accept proof of Norwegian or Danish knowledge as a replacement to proof of Swedish knowledge, for example).

As others said, when reading, there are usually a few key words that tip me off that it is Danish or Norwegian. When speaking, I don’t care, I just try to copy the pronunciation of the other person as I go if they are having trouble understanding the Swedish I speak.

If you REALLY want to separate them in your brain and always pronounce/write them accurately, you need to form two separate friends groups, one of only Norwegians and the other of only Danes. They will help you keep the two languages separate.

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Thanks that makes sense. I was watching a Noreegian show, and many people there did also speak Swedish. The only way to notice were the subtitles and the mention of sentences like: “you are the Swedish coworker?” As an intermediate Norwegian learner with little exposure to Swedish I wouldn’t have noticed

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Agree. But isn’t 1. exactly how it’s pronounced in the Copenhagen accent?

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I think as a Danish Learner Bokmaal is quite clear its like Danish except you dont swallow half the words but how to seperate the two that a tough one. Perhaps you could just do cross talk?

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This is not a very big issue if you have correctly identified the problem. The problem is more about what you should focus on in Norwegian. It is so different to itself, so Norwegians in general are used to hearing a wide range of dialects and accents. For a learner the question is which Norwegian to learn to talk in, not really how you pronounce your “Scandinavian”. If I were you I´d just speak scandinavian words in a neutral accent if you just want to be understood. If you have been in the countries (I went to Roskilde festival a lot) you see how they talk to each other. They do not understand every single thing if they don´t make adjustments to their word selection/accent, they often ask for clarification and some even switch to English.
Classe Ekman - Utrikeskorre i Oslo (Robert Gustafson) you see this kind of situation made fun of here.

If you want to speak in a “passable” manner in each language it isn´t impossible (Frank Von Helvete as Cornelis Vreeswijk, Mads Mikkelsen speaks fluent Swedish, David Dencik, Iben Hjejle) but it is far easier for Danes to pronounce Swedish and Norwegian, so you are already in a better position. Some Norwegians sound Danish, a friend of mine from Roskilde went to Bergen to live there and was walking with a guy for a few hours and then said “Which town in Denmark to you come from?” and he said “I am Norwegian”. I think probably more what is happening is you´re just pronouncing a word wrong or saying it in a way that confuses them as they aren´t sure what language to expect. Norwegians don´t understand Danish people very well, just better than Swedes can. Danes don´t understand all Danes, especially from Jutland to Zealand.

In my opinion, in order to really understand the differences between the language you need to learn them from a children´s point up, as literally most adults can just speak to each other in modified versions of their languages and get by fine. Read Norwegian children´s encyclopedias and young literature, and watch and listen to kid´s shows, this is where the differences will be more pronounced. Children from Scandinavian languages are not often competent in the other language (Norwegians do tend to watch a lot of Swedish kid´s TV though). In one of the Språket podcasts, one of the Swedes living in Norway said he actually hates Norwegians speaking “svorsk”, essentially Norwegian with the words changed wrongly to Swedish, because he thinks the Norwegians sound stupid when they do this as they think they are really speaking Swedish, but for him it is like the French accent from Allo Allo being considered “French”.

To build your skills, there are three language podcasts listening to, Språket from Sveriges Radio, Klog på Sprog on DR and Språksnakk on NRK. If you listen to these podcasts regularly they often mention the differences between the three languages and misunderstandings that exist.
Språket - alla avsnitt | Sveriges Radio - quite a few episodes about Scandinavian dialects, Norwegian and Danish.

Språket - Gör som Skavlan - snakke svorsk! - Podcast - particular pod about a famous TV show house Skavlan, his shows are on youtube as well very funny to watch the Scandinavians talking to each other.
Good shows:
“Ett språk är en dialekt med en armé och en flotta” | Språket | Sveriges Radio
Gurka på svenska och agurk på norska, hur är det möjligt? | Språket | Sveriges Radio
Vent, jeg skal bare hente Noora sin sykkel | Språket | Sveriges Radio
Vad är skillnaden på en dialekt och ett språk? | Språket | Sveriges Radio
Norska + danska + svenska = sant | Språket | Sveriges Radio

Norsken, svensken och dansken - alla avsnitt | Sveriges Radio regular show on SR

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Thank you for the detailed answer and especially all the useful links. I bookmarked all of them as they will take some time to work through! Loads of info there!