Is it easier to learn Icelandic if you know Norwegian?
Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic.
Is Norwegian or Swedish harder?
Swedish grammar is more complicated than Norwegian, both bokmål and nynorsk. The Swedish spelling is also more complicated. The difficulty with Norwegian is that there is no standard spoken language.
Is Norwegian a good language to start learning Icelandic?
Luckily Norwegian does help in understanding Icelandic, certainly more than other languages you could choose to learn (except Faroese, but that’s only spoken by 70,000 or so), so Norwegian is a good language to start from if you have a personal interest in them. 1) Norwegian is a Germanic language.
Is Norwegian difficult to learn?
Whilst learning Norwegian isn’t the most difficult language out there, there is definitely a small collection of common pitfalls that English speaking students tend to struggle with. Myself included.
How similar is the Norwegian language to English?
You can see how Norwegian word order is more similar to English than Dutch and German in verb conjugations here: English “I can speak German” becomes “Jeg kan snakke tysk” in Norwegian, with the same word order as English. In German however, this is “Ich kann Deutsch sprechen”, or “I can German speak”.
Does English have cognates in Norwegian/Dutch/German?
Yes, and moreso with Dutch than German (eten is eat where it’s essen in German, water is water, German is Wasser, etc. etc.). You can bring up example after example of cognates in both Norwegian and Dutch and point out places where one has an English cognate and the other doesn’t, but suffice to say they’re both about equal here.