Norwegian Food Vocabulary: Memorize 148 Words for Meals, Menus and Ordering

Flip It's Norwegian Travel & Food Vocabulary deck (code AP5738, 148 cards) promises twice what it delivers. There is no travel in it — no tog, no hotell, no billett, no flyplass. All 148 cards sit at the table: ingredients, fish, berries, cooking methods, tableware, and the handful of phrases you need to order and pay. Retitle it in your head as Norwegian at the Table and it becomes one of the tightest thematic decks in the library.

Ten cards from the deck

Everything the deck covers

Seafood: laks, torsk, sild, ørret, reker, krabbe, hummer, blåskjell, tørrfisk, sursild, gravlaks, fiskesuppe. Meat: oksekjøtt, svinekjøtt, lam, fårekjøtt, kylling, reinsdyr, elg, pølse, svinekoteletter, svinestek, kjøttbolle, kjøttkake. Dairy and grain: melk, ost, smør, fløte, rømme, yoghurt, brunost, brød, flatbrød, smørbrød, mel, havre, grøt, ris. Produce: potet, gulrot, løk, tomat, agurk, kål, erter, bønner, sopp, grønnsak, frukt, eple, appelsin, banan, sitron, rabarbra. Berries: jordbær, bringebær, blåbær, tyttebær, multe, kirsebær. Drinks: vann, kaffe, te, saft, øl, vin. Meals and places: frokost, lunsj, middag, kveldsmat, restaurant, kafé, meny, regning. On the table: tallerken, kopp, glass, gaffel, kniv, skje, flaske, bord, stol. Cooking methods: stekt, kokt, grillet, bakt, røkt, dampkokt. Taste and texture: varm, kald, søt, salt, sur, bitter, sterk, deilig, fersk. Named dishes: fårikål, lutefisk, gravlaks, lapskaus, brunsaus, vaffel, kjeks, kake. Seasoning: salt, pepper, sukker, sennep, dill, persille, kardemomme, kanel, ingefær, hvitløk.

Add the gender before your first review

More than a hundred of these cards are bare nouns with no article — and in Norwegian the article is the word. Ost is en ost, brød is et brød, melk is ei/en melk. Bokmål marks definiteness with a suffix that depends on gender (osten, brødet, melka), so a noun learned without its gender is a noun you cannot put into a sentence. Spend twenty minutes appending en or et to every noun back; it is the highest-return edit you can make on this deck.

Two backs to rewrite

"Bon appétit! → Vel bekomme!" is the wrong end of the meal. Vel bekomme is what the host replies after eating, in answer to takk for maten. Before you eat, Norwegians say God appetitt! Fix the front to "You're welcome (after a meal)" and add God appetitt as a new card.

"Please → Vær så snill" will make you sound like you are pleading, because that is what it means ("be so kind"). Norwegian has no politeness particle you bolt onto a request; you append takk: Kan jeg få en kaffe, takk. Add that whole phrase — it is the sentence you will actually use at the kafé.

Two more cleanups. Nine cards have identical fronts and backs — Egg, Bacon, Salt, Pepper, Restaurant, Glass, Dessert, Dill, Bitter — and test nothing, so suspend them. And both Salt and Salty answer salt, which makes reverse review ambiguous: keep this deck one-way, English → Norwegian.

Once the food is automatic, fill in the grammar words it deliberately skips with Learn Norwegian by Frequency: The 1000 Most Common Words in Flashcards.

Deck AP5738 — Norwegian Travel & Food Vocabulary — is in your Flip It library: start reviewing.