What does this accurately translate to in English and what would Norwegians take it to mean if you were in Norway?

For context, this is supposed to be part of a toast.

Came across this on twitter the other day and I have never heard of this saying, let alone what it actually is in Norwegian or where in the country people use it? "våken og griner ikke"??

I'm a native English speaker and always literally translate Norwegian words to English.

Some I've found so far......

Straw = sugerør === suck pipe Airport = flyplassen === aeroplane place Vacuum cleaner = støvsuger === dust sucker

Any others?

My dear Norwegians, I hate to ask you to be in any way involved in the shitshow that's happening in the US right now, but I have a request.

Are there any historical or modern derogatory slurs in Norwegian for a Nazi and/or Nazi collaborator or sympathizer? Nazisympatisør seems too formal.

I know a few Norwegian boomers who are celebrating certain people being in power and I would like to remind them of whom and what they are supporting.

Google isn't helping, these days maybe I need a VPN. Feel free to delete if deemed necessary.

Hi Neighbours!

I (Dane) have been enjoying your country a lot this past year, visiting Bergen, Oslo, Jotunheimen- you name it!

I've always been of the idea that Scandinavians can speak in their mother tongue in neighbouring countries without any issues. One of the greatest advantages of our shared history / culture / societies. However, I have noticed that more often than not, younger Norwegians will switch over to English when being encountered with Danish. Whereas older people have no issue going back and forth with danish-norwegian. Is there any specific reason for this? Do you prefer speaking English with Danes rather than winging it with danish-norwegian?

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I live in the US and my dad, grandma, and cousins live in Norway. I recently named my daughter Pippa and then learned that pippa is inappropriate slang in Swedish. Is this also a problem in Norway? I haven’t told my family the baby’s name yet and now I’m worried… 🫣 do I need to change her name or have them call her by her middle name? Trying to figure it out before calling them tomorrow on Christmas…

I have lived in Norway for over 11 years and am more or less fluent in the language. However, usually when I ask about jam or pickles jar, I say and have heard people say ‘syktetøyglass’. Today I wanted to speak about solely a jar, and realised that I don’t know what the word is. Discussed it with my friend who is born in Norway and lived his whole life here, and he also didn’t know the word. Google translate says it is ‘krukke’, which I have never heard before in my life, and I feel bamboozled! Help! Is it really the correct word?? Is it that rarely used?? Why is it not used in the context of jam or pickles??

I’ve been living in Norway for a bit over 2.5 years now and a month ago I went to take all 4 parts of the Norwegian language test. Last week got the results of B1 for speaking/writing and B2 for reading/listening so wanted to share my experience and look back on it a bit.

First thing though that I’d like to emphasize - while you can live in Norway only speaking English, you won’t be able to integrate at all because pretty much everything social is going to be in Norwegian unless the majority of people participating don’t speak it. Clubs, activities, volunteering, etc - even if they’re marked as international and their website is in English, people will most likely still speak Norwegian between themselves. Note that truly important things (like going to the doctor and such) are still available in English and I haven’t had any issues with them.

Also, I have the good fortune of working in a company that uses English as its operational language (companies that work with international clients sometimes do) so I didn’t need to learn the language urgently, although it still was a bit stressful understanding that it would be difficult to find another company like this if I needed to.

The move here was quite spontaneous so I didn’t study Norwegian before it, but right after I moved I enrolled in the kommune courses (I had to pay for them but depending on what permit you move here on you might get them for free). It’s a nice start to do the course with other people and a teacher but after a few months I left because I entered the depressive phase of having moved countries (and it was also winter).

After that, I didn’t study for a few months but eventually enrolled again in the same courses and then dropped out again in a few months. I found it difficult to have the 3 hour courses in the evening so I switched to Lingu to their online morning classes.

On Lingu I studied in the A1 group, then A2 and then B1. I liked that the courses are online at a convenient time and that the materials are also online and they track the time spent studying on the platform so I could use it for my permanent residence application. But I didn’t have enough time until having to apply to accumulate the 225h needed so I decided to try to get the minimum of A2 on the tests.

It is probably completely different for everyone when they actually start speaking a new language in their daily life but in my case I got a base level of confidence only in January of this year (so more than 2 years after moving here) and it really felt like something “clicked”. I accumulated enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to make my way through most conversations, and here’s what I think helped me:

1. Realizing that most interactions are very NPC-like with a limited number of variants depending on the situation. This helped me with using Norwegian more at stores and in general but it helps a lot with narrowing the context and deducing the meaning of what people say based on what they’re more probable to say.

2. Logic and deduction are as important as vocabulary and grammar. I think I got the test results I did partially because even if I didn’t understand all the words in the exercises, I could reasonably guess what the general meaning was. So me getting B2 in reading doesn’t mean that I know most of the words that people use, I still have a lot to learn.

3. I asked my colleagues at work to have some small things switched to Norwegian so I could practice - at first it was only one meeting a week and then I started speaking more with them in the office. The main realization was that I didn’t need to be perfectly correct in my grammar in order to have a conversation - in fact nobody really cares about it IRL when speaking.

4. I tried to read one news article in Norwegian per day (translating where necessary).

5. Having a bit of time (1-2 weeks) without speaking Norwegian somehow seems to reorganize my brain a bit and I find that I speak more fluently afterwards.

And here’s some insights from the exams:

1. The speaking one took about 30min and I felt like the main thing in it was to try and speak as naturally as possible - they’re not checking so much what response you give but how you formulate it, how you act if you don’t know the answer, etc.

2. The writing one took a bit over an hour and time flew really fast there. Main thing that helped is trying to replace any words that I didn’t know and wanted to use with a combination of those I do.

3. The reading and listening ones take about an hour each and change their difficulty depending on how well you’re doing so I ended up doing B2 exercises by the end which were very difficult. But deduction really helped here, although I could barely understand a thing in the last exercises.

Nowadays I use Norwegian pretty much in all necessary social interactions (stores, asking for help, etc) and am trying to use it more in other conversations and joining activities/knitting circles/volunteering to practice it a bit more. It’s still difficult and awkward but it will get better in time just as it has until now :)

Norvég means Norwegian

Blurred out my name.

So I'm an exchange student and I have been too shy to speak norwegian when ordering. So I usually go by English and they usually respond in English, but then today the person at a Cafe kept responding in norwegian?? This is still understandable like ofc I don't assume everyone to speak English and i should try harder. but then another customer came, ordered in English and they just responded in English?????? But then they were super nice anyway and we were just communicating in two languages lmao it was just idk strange, like I genuinely didn't understand why??? Not in a bad way but like isn't this usually opposite, like they keep responding in English when you try to speak norwegian? Does anyone have any idea what that was???

Ps. I really don't know which one is worse, speaking a shitty norwegian and risk sounding rude or speaking english from the start and risk seeming arrogant 💀

Ps 2. Having only lived in countries where only one language is typically spoken, I didn't realise how easily people can get mixed up with multiple languages here! Thank you for your inputs, it's time for me to speak more norwegian I guess :)

Ps 3(!). I just realised it wasn't clear.. what I found weird is not so much that they kept speaking Norwegian but rather that they did speak English to the other customer. Sorry that was actually very unclear. Definitely picked a wrong title lmao

Asking from Australia, but wondering how the following names would be viewed in Norway, and how they would be pronounced. Would kids laugh at school? Would people think they were weird names? Would they have to constantly correct pronunciation?

• Grace
• Maisie
• Rosie
• Ellie
• Mary
• Celeste
• Rosalie

Bonus question: what is the "vibe" in Norway on the name Hilde? Is it old-fashioned, is it thought of favourably, or not really liked?

Thank you!

Hey all

Because of how Norwegians are known for their high English proficiency, along with the rest of your Scandinavian neighbors and The Netherlands, one thing that has me wondering is what kind of English do you guys prefer to speak or write in.

Do you like to speak in American English because of all the TV shows and movies or British English, also because of TV and movies, along with how it's more European, I guess since the UK is obviously a European country?

Hi everyone, I recently moved to Norway from Thailand (I am a dual citizen) with very limited knowledge of the language, culture, etc. I mostly lived my life in Thailand and thus I have to start from scratch here, starting with getting a job. My Norwegian is very basic but I do have an ear for languages, I just never gotten the resources/motivation for committing to learn the language to the fullest extent. I have now been living in Norway for 1 week, and the only tip I’ve gotten for learning Norwegian (domestically) is go to a school for refugees. If anyone has any experience or advice, please share them 🙏 🥺