The first days of July, we spent a great week on a Greek island where we enjoyed marvelous beaches and tasty food. In any shop and restaurant, locals would speak also English (and even Italian) so we had zero communication issues.

I thought it would be nice to know some basic expressions like “good morning” and “thank you”. Unfortunately, the vacation was over before I could learn anything more than kalimera (good day) and kalispera (good evening).

Idea

At the end of that vacation I had a streak of over 800 days on Duolingo (It looks like I kept playing after my first year).

Actually, I was getting stuck on the refresh level in Finnish were I keep typing On iltapaiva ja on aika syoda paivallista (It’s afternoon and it’s time to eat dinner), Näytelmässä on surullinen tanskalainen mies (In the play there is a sad Danish man) and similiar sentences. I got also 3-days trial of Duolingo plus where you have unlimited attempts so you can play as long as you smartphone battery lives or you run out of interest.

Since we had planned a trip in Southern Norway for August, a genius idea stroke me: why not using it to learn some Norwegian so I would not be unprepared like in Greece?

Was it a possible goal?

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers popularized the “10000 hours rule” stating that it takes approximately 10000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in any (cognitively demanding) field. Well, even if I just played all day and night long I would have reached less than 1000 hours.

But since I did not aim to become an expert, Josh Kaufman’s theory that for picking up a new skill you need just 20 hours looked a little more encouraging.

And then I found Tim Ferris pushing the boundary to even a lower limit for learning the basic of a language: an hour! (I guess that with a 4-hour work week you can also take a little more time).

So, after all, it was not a crazy idea!

Practicing

Armed with this knowledge, some spare hours and the wish to not appear like a complete noob I was ready to learn (basic) Norwegian on Duolingo.

Honestly I played hard, peaking some days a couple of hours, since the weekly challenge got more complicated and competing in the first tier league is demanding. Indeed, I think that I played on average for an hour per day.

What I learned at home

Summing up the important basic stuff that I learned:

Present tense is equal for all persons: “I eat the cheese” and “they eat the cheese” is Jeg spiser osten and De spiser osten.
Interrogative forms are obtained by moving the verb in first position: Spiser du osten? (Do you eat the cheese?)
Negative forms are obtained by adding ikke after the verb Jeg spiser ikke osten (I don’t eat the cheese).
Many words resemble English: eple (apple), onkel (uncle), her (here), der (there), katt (cat), brod (bread), bakeri (bakery), kald (cold), varm (hot), dag (day).
Some are more similar to Latin derived languages: tre (three, exactly like in Italian), kontant (cash, 🇮🇹 contanti), advokat (lawyer, 🇮🇹 avvocato), billett (ticket, 🇮🇹 biglietto) and pizza (well this is universal).

Other cool stuff:

Some words are straight away cool for instance ATM is minibank and round trip is tur-retur.
Half past hour translates to half hour to the next hour: half past two is halv tre.
the word for beer øl is similar to Finnish one ølut. I guess they agree easily on important stuff.

During the vacation

When we landed in Oslo Torp we took et tog (a train) to the city center. I was nice to hear neste stajon (next station). We arrived around 9 p.m. in a (very Norwegian) Ramen restaurant and the waiter asked if we were fire (four).

In the following days I managed to:

read some ads the city Ja, vi elsker hosten (Yes, we love autumn) and God frokost, god sommer (Good breakfast, good summer)
tell my room number for breakfast Fire To Ni (529)
understand a person that thanked me Tusen takk (thanks a lot)
discover that a store sold shoes since it had a huge sign with written SKO over the door (shoe) and I was able to avoid the shop before Elena found it

During the week I kept playing (the streak does not go on by itself) but it was nice to see the words used in everyday situation.

Actually reading comes pretty easily given the limited knowledge.

Since most of the messages are written both in English and Norwegian it was easy to pick up new words like salg (sales, I was not able to completely avoid shopping), museet (museum), torget (market place), gate (street), sykehus (hospital) and many other.

Since virtually everybody can speak in English, Norwegian is not really needed. This hindered my will of trying to use the language with native speakers, having just one-off conversations.

Returning home

After a full immersion of a little more of one week, I came back to play just for fun on Duolingo.

For sure having experienced the language in Norway, makes it more real I would say. And now I am at the beginning of the second section focused on talking about interests.

But since the vacation is over it’s just a matter of pure curiosity keeping learning the language.

Conclusions

Spending something around 40 hours learning on Duolingo was enough to learn some basic syntax, words and sentences.
Listening and speaking exercises are important and I should focus more on those.
Reading, as usual, it’s way easier than listening and speaking.
The vocabulary, in part similar to Italian and English, and the relative easy syntax made the task easier.
I think I would pause the study of Norwegian since for at least some time I would not use it. But if we decide to visit the Lofoten Islands, I could come back to it!
For future abroad vacations would be nice to learn some expressions of the country language.
I had the confirmation that Duolingo is a good app to get the basic words of a language while having fun, unless Duo decides to threaten you!