Learn Norwegian for Free: Bokmål, Dialects and First Steps

Norway has two official ways to write Norwegian and no official way to speak it. A child in Bergen says eg, a child in Trondheim says æ and a child in Oslo says jeg, all meaning "I", and presenters on national television keep their own dialects. You can learn Norwegian for free despite all that variety: Qlango is free to start, and a Norwegian university offers free online courses.

If you want to learn Norwegian, that sounds like a problem and turns out to be manageable. Start with Bokmål, the written standard the large majority use and almost every course for foreigners teaches. Get the core grammar down in the first weeks, because there isn't much of it. Then spend the following months training your ear on real people, dialects included. On the US Foreign Service Institute's scale, built for English-speaking diplomats, Norwegian sits in the easiest category, at around 24 weeks of full-time study.

Norwegian at a glance: about five million people speak it as a first language, nearly all in Norway; it has two official written forms, Bokmål and Nynorsk, is a North Germanic language close to Danish and Swedish, and has 29 letters, with æ, ø and å at the end

Where Norwegian is spoken, and why there are two written forms

About five million people speak Norwegian as their first language, nearly all of them in Norway. For roughly four centuries, until 1814, Norway was ruled from Copenhagen and wrote Danish. When that union ended, Norwegians set about building a written language of their own, and they did it twice. Bokmål, "book language", grew out of the Danish written norm as Norwegians spoke it. Nynorsk, "new Norwegian", was assembled in the nineteenth century from rural dialects. Both are official, both are taught at school, and Nynorsk is strongest in the fjords and valleys of the west, where you'll see it on signs and in local papers.

Norwegian is a North Germanic language, and Norwegians are often said to understand both Danish and Swedish better than Danes and Swedes understand each other. Written Bokmål and Danish are especially close. Our guides to Danish and Swedish cover the neighbours. The alphabet has 29 letters, with æ, ø and å at the end.

What makes Norwegian easier than most

Verbs don't change with the person: jeg er, du er, hun er. The past is var for everyone. The verb comes second in a statement, so "tomorrow I'm going to Bergen" is i morgen reiser jeg til Bergen, tomorrow travel I to Bergen. Plenty of words look familiar: hus, vann (water), bok (book), vinter.

Then come the false friends. Rar doesn't mean rare, it means strange. Fart means speed, and a fartsdump is a speed bump, which English-speaking visitors photograph with suspicious regularity. Full means full, and also drunk.

Norwegian false friends: rar means strange, not rare; fart means speed and a fartsdump is a speed bump; full means full, and also drunk

What takes longer

Tones

Norwegian, like Swedish, has a pitch accent: two melodies a word can carry. Tanken with one melody is "the tank", with the other "the thought". Context almost always rescues you, and you'll be understood with the wrong melody, but tones are what make a foreigner sound foreign long after the grammar is right.

Three genders, more or less

Bokmål has masculine (en bil, a car), feminine (ei jente, a girl) and neuter (et hus, a house), but it lets you treat feminine nouns as masculine, so "the book" is either boka or boken. Both are correct. Pick a style and stay consistent.

Norwegian Bokmål genders: masculine en bil (a car), feminine ei jente (a girl) and neuter et hus (a house); feminine nouns may also be treated as masculine

The double "the"

With an adjective, Norwegian marks "the" twice: det store huset, the big house, with det in front and -et on the end. Danish uses only the first; Swedish, like Norwegian, uses both.

Dialects

Jeg becomes eg in Bergen and much of the west, æ in Trondheim and the north, and ikke (not) turns into ikkje in many western dialects. Vocabulary and melody change too, sometimes from one valley to the next.

Two ways to count

In 1951 the Norwegian parliament introduced a new way of saying numbers: tjueen (twenty-one) instead of the older enogtjue (one-and-twenty). Both are still heard, so learn to understand the old one even if you say the new one.

One neat accent, and then lunch in Bergen

Beginner material usually gives you one neat accent, often from around Oslo, which is a sensible place to start, and some of it presents that accent as the whole of "Norwegian". Then you move to Bergen or Stavanger and can't follow your colleagues at lunch. Nobody can teach you every dialect, and nobody should try, but you should know from the first week that variety is normal and listen widely. Watch Skam, the series about Oslo teenagers that found fans far beyond Norway, then find something set in the west or the north and notice what changes.

First Norwegian words

Hei: hi
Ha det: bye, short for ha det bra, "have it good"
God morgen: good morning
Takk, tusen takk: thanks, thanks a lot
Vær så snill: please, for a real request
Ja, nei: yes, no
Unnskyld: sorry, excuse me
Jeg forstår ikke: I don't understand
Snakker du engelsk?: do you speak English?
Hva heter du?: what's your name?
Skål: cheers
Takk for sist: thanks for last time, said when you meet someone you last spent an evening with

A month-one plan to learn Norwegian

Week 1: sounds and greetings. Learn æ, ø and å, the long and short vowels, and the phrases above. Read aloud every day.
Week 2: nouns and the present tense. Forty nouns with en, ei or et and their definite forms, and the present tense, which ends in -r for everyone: jeg snakker, du snakker, hun snakker.
Week 3: word order. Practise starting sentences with a time or a place and putting the verb second: i dag, i morgen, på jobben ("at work").
Week 4: listening widely. Twenty minutes a day of Norwegian television with Norwegian subtitles, from at least two regions, and short messages to a Norwegian speaker or another learner.

By the end you're partway through A1 on the CEFR scale. If you live in Norway, keep the official tests in mind for later: Norskprøven for adult immigrants and Bergenstesten for university study.

How can you learn Norwegian for free?

Start with Qlango. Download it free on Android or iOS, or open it in your browser, choose the language you learn through, and take your first A1 lesson, which takes about five minutes. It's free to start, and it teaches the neat Bokmål you can lean on before the dialects arrive.

Then add these free resources:

Norwegian on the Web: a free online course for beginners from NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, with a second part for intermediate learners.
CALST: a free pronunciation trainer, also from NTNU, for practicing the Norwegian sounds that English doesn't have.
NRK TV: Norway's public broadcaster puts its programmes online for free, including Supernytt, the daily news for children. Not everything is available outside Norway.

Use Norwegian on the Web alongside Qlango in month one, CALST whenever a vowel won't come out right, and NRK when you're ready to hear how Bergen and Oslo really sound.

How Qlango helps

The Norwegian course in Qlango goes from A1 to B2, which means talking with Norwegians on most everyday and work topics without either side having to simplify. Lessons take a few minutes, and words come back for review right before you'd forget them, which is what spaced repetition is for. Flashcards cover the quick reviews. Word Duel, with a Hard mode for when the easy one stops being a challenge, and MinuteRush make vocabulary practice something you'd do voluntarily, and statistics over weeks, months and years show the long view.

Premium adds offline learning, handy on a ferry or at a hytte with no signal, and an AI teacher you can ask whether it's boka or boken as often as you like. The language you learn through is up to you, and the full list of languages and levels shows the options.

Takk for sist is the phrase to have ready the morning after your first evening out with Norwegian colleagues. Let Qlango's A1 course give you Bokmål and jeg first, then collect eg and æ as the people around you hand them over.

Is there an app to learn Norwegian?

Yes. Qlango teaches Norwegian from A1 to B2 on iPhone, Android and the web, and it’s free to start.

Comparing apps? Read our guide to the best language learning apps or see the Duolingo alternatives.