Memorize the Top 100 Norwegian Words: A Flashcard Study Guide

Deck HS3887 — Norwegian Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words on Flip It holds 99 English→Bokmål cards (yes, 99 — the title rounds up). It is a frequency list, not a phrasebook, so you get the skeleton of the language before any topic vocabulary: pronouns, prepositions, the dozen verbs Norwegians repeat all day, then a closing block of family, colour and household nouns.

You'll cover: den/det, en/et, og, i, på, med, av, til, fra, ved, som, ikke, er, være, ha, kan, vil, komme, gjøre, gå, se, vite, få, tenke, si, hva, hvem, hvordan, når, hvis, nå, her, der, bare, veldig, mer, ja, nei, mann, kvinne, barn, far, mor, bror, søster, venn, familie, dag, år, tid, arbeid, hånd, hus, vann, mat, penger, bok, skole, navn, sted, land, stor, liten, lang, gammel, ung, vakker, god/godt, ny/nytt, dårlig, riktig, venstre, hvit, svart, rød, blå, grønn, gul.

Eight cards that show you the shape of the deck

Fix three cards before your first review

1. Cards 89 and 90 look like a pair and aren't. right → riktig, left → venstre. Riktig means correct, never the direction. The direction is høyre — add it, or you will ask a bus driver for the "correct" side of the road.
2. "She" is missing. jeg, du, han, vi and de are all here; hun (she) and dere (plural you) never appear. Write those two cards yourself — a pronoun paradigm with holes in it is unusable.
3. small → liten and little → liten are the same card twice, and so are big → stor and great → stor/flott. Suspend one of each: duplicate backs train recognition and quietly punish production.

The gender the deck promises and never delivers

Card 8 is a/an → en/et, so the deck tells you Norwegian nouns carry gender — then hands over every noun bare: hus, bok, mann, vann. That is the most expensive Bokmål shortcut there is, because the definite article is a suffix that depends on gender: et hus → huset, en bok → boka, en mann → mannen, et vann → vannet. Edit the twenty-odd nouns so each back carries its article (house → et hus – huset). Ten minutes now beats relearning them all in a month.

Verbs: infinitives on the cards, present tense in real speech

Every verb here is a bare infinitive, and er (card 9) is the only conjugated form in the whole deck. Norwegian present tense is mercifully regular — add -r: komme → kommer, tenke → tenker, se → ser, arbeide → arbeider. Then there are four irregulars, and they happen to be the four you need hourly: være → er, ha → har, gjøre → gjør, vite → vet. Put the present form in each card's hint field.

One pronunciation note the deck leaves out

All hint fields are empty, so nothing tells you that hv- words drop the h: hva = "va", hvem = "vem", hvordan = "vordan", hvis = "vis". The d goes silent too: det = "deh", de = "dee". Read every card aloud from the first pass, or you'll end up with 99 spellings and zero listening comprehension.

Study order: cards 1–54 are the function words that hold sentences together — drill those daily until they're automatic. Cards 55–99 are concrete nouns and adjectives, and those stick faster paired with an image than with an English gloss.

Open Flip It, look up deck code HS3887 ("Norwegian Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words") and start with the first 54.

Next steps: Learn Norwegian by Frequency: The 1000 Most Common Words picks up exactly where these 99 stop, and Norwegian Food Vocabulary supplies the thematic words this deck skips.