Sentence Forming Words

Generally, when you want to say you've been learning Norwegian, or you've started, you don't want to spout out a bunch of random Norwegian words, you'll probably want to form sentences. This is also, obviously, important groundwork for the rest of the language.

So, following will be some words that pretty much every sentence will have at least one of. Some of them, you may recognize from previous posts, but it's always good to see words again.

I - Jeg (Ja-ee)
Him - Han (Hahn)
Her - Hun (Hoohn)
Are - Er (Are)
Is - Er (Are)
Am - Er (Are)
Was - Var (Vahr)
Has/Have - Har (Hahr)
Had - Hadde (Hahd-deh)
A/One - En (Exactly the same way you pronounce the letter N)
You - Du (Doo)
You - Deg or Dere (Die/Deeh or Derah)*
At - På (Poh)
On - På (Poh)
Who - Hvem or Som (Vem or Sohm)*
What - Hva (Vah)
When - Når (Nor)
Where - Hvor (Hvor)
Why - Hvorfor (Vorfor)
How - Hvordan (Vordan)
The - en (Same as En above)*

These words are generally used in sentences, I'll give some examples soon, but first I need to clear up some things. På has many different meaning, these depend on context. It is also not the only word for "in".

As for the stars at the words for "the" and "you" this is because you use du in certain situations, deg when referring directly to the person, and dere when referring to multiple people (I suppose the English equivalent would be 'all of you'?. The other thing is the word en. At the beginning of a word, it is singular, for example 'en hund' means "a dog" however, at the end of a word it becomes definite, in other words, it means the. Thus you get 'hunden' which means "the dog". There are other rules to this of course, especially for feminine, masculine and neuter words, but I will cover those later on, this is the basic idea. For the word who, it also changes from som to vem depending on use (sometimes even dialect). For now we will just use "vem".

Lets see some examples:

Hvor kommer du fra? - Where comes you from? (Where do you come from)
Har dere hunder? - Have you dogs? (Speaking to two people, or a group)
Hvor ar hunden? - Where is the dog?
Når er du her?  - When are you here? (Maybe asking someone when they will be in your town)

Brace yourself, this is a longer sentence;

Hyggelig å hilser på deg! - Nice to greet (on) you! (Basically, good to see you)

I hope these few example sentences have sort of explained a few uses of the words for 'you' among other words. I know there are some words in these sentences that aren't covered in my posts yet that I haven't put any pronunciation for, but they will probably get covered in the future.


To finish, some inspiration to learn more:

Voe, a fairly popular blogger from Norway

Until next time, ha det!