Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian? For an English native speaker, they're all relatively easy. But, Norwegian is definitely the easiest Nordic language to learn from the Scandinavian region. When it comes to Danish vs Norwegian, Norwegian is easier to understand.
SWEDISH. Swedish is the most popular Nordic and Scandinavian language on our list. It is spoken by approximately 10.5 million people around the world, in countries such as Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ukraine, and other Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway.
According to a study conducted by the Foreign Service Institute, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are among the easiest languages to learn for English native speakers. With only 575 to 600 hours of study, you can achieve fluency in these Scandinavian languages.
Danish language
Because of the several pronunciation variety that made Danish apart from other languages, specifically the vowels, hard prosody and consonants, it is often considered to be the hardest language to learn and understand. Danish is quite has a harder pronunciation than Swedish and Norwegian.
Norwegians are the clear winners when it comes to understanding their neighbors. There are three main reasons for this. First, Norwegian is quite simply the “middle child” — it's written like Danish, but sounds like Swedish. Second, Norwegians are used to hearing Swedish and Danish in public media.
Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Swedish (including Finland-Swedish) are all official national languages. Along with Faroese, Greenlandic and Sámi, they are the languages that our societies and culture are based on.
Norwegian is closer to English than either Danish or Swedish. In fact, it's often described as the easiest of the three languages to learn.
This is called the North-Germanic language family. Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are all closely related to Icelandic. Once you know a Scandinavian language, learning others will be much easier. If you have aspirations to learn more than one Scandinavian language, Icelandic is a decent choice to start.
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are all mutually intelligible, which means it's possible for speakers of all three languages to understand each other without too much effort. And if this is the main benefit you want to unlock, then Norwegian arguably makes the most sense to learn of the three.
Old Norse: The Language Of Ancient Scandinavia.
Scandinavian and Nordic Greetings & Useful Phrases
Hello – Hej! Good morning/day/evening/night – God morgon! / Goddag! / God kväll! / God natt! Goodbye – Hej då! Thank you (very much) – Tack (så mycket)!
The common origin of the Scandinavian languages means that they are relatively similar. Standard varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, though the extent of understanding varies.
Swedes have the best non-native English skills in the world, according to the eighth edition of the EF English Proficiency Index. Sweden's Scandinavian siblings Norway and Denmark also place in the top five. Of course, anyone who's visited Sweden, Norway or Denmark won't be surprised by the findings.
As previously mentioned, Swedish is easier to learn for English speakers because of how similar the grammar and even the words are. Finnish, on the other hand, is likely much harder for English speakers due to the fact that the language has completely different grammar and words.
Mutual intelligibility
Generally, speakers of the three largest Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) can read each other's languages without great difficulty. The primary obstacles to mutual comprehension are differences in pronunciation.
Originally Answered: Does Sweden people understand norwegian language and vise versa? Yes, we usually understand each other both ways. Norwegians usually speak norwegian to a sweden, and a swede usually speak swedish to a Norwegian, and both understands each other fine.
In addition, since it's the easiest and most intelligible of the Scandinavian languages, it's easier to learn Swedish if you wish to also decipher other Nordic languages such as Norwegian or Danish. Learning Swedish will always be worth it when you're an English speaker.
According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI), you'll need about 750 hours of study to become fluent in Swedish. This means that if you dedicate 12-15 hours a week to studying, you'll be able to speak like a pro in just a year!
With a little effort Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can communicate with each other speaking their own language. However, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes do not normally understand Icelandic and Faroese even though some Norwegian dialects share similarities to Icelandic.
Norwegian is said to be one of the easiest languages in the world for a native English speaker to learn. The reason is that from a linguistic perspective, the languages share a huge amount: the way verbs work, word order (with the V2 rule being a major exception!), and a large amount of shared vocabulary.
Today, all Norwegians are educated in both Bokmål and Nynorsk. However, only about 20 percent of them use Nynorsk or New Norwegian as their primary written language. Thus, if you want to learn Norwegian, you should go with Bokmål.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages. This means they are similar to English culturally and/or linguistically.
Finnish is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn because of the major linguistic differences between the two languages. Finnish shares almost none of the same vocabulary as English. It also has a complex grammatical structure that's quite different from English.
Other explanations offered for the “success” of English include the fact that the Nordic countries have relatively small and uniform populations which makes the teaching and learning of English easier, as well as the fact that most citizens are speakers of a Germanic language as their first language, which are in the ...