Norwegian Grammar Essentials: 76 Flashcards and the 5 Rules They Skip

Norwegian grammar has a reputation for being easy, and for once the reputation is earned: verbs never change for person, so jeg lever, du lever, de lever all use the same form. The Flip It deck Norwegian Grammar Essentials (deck code BJ6247, 76 cards) gives you the core system, plus a large dose of language history. Here is how to study it efficiently.

The deck in three blocks

• Cards 1-9, overview: North Germanic family, Bokmål vs Nynorsk, mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Danish, the 29-letter alphabet ending in Æ, Ø, Å.
• Cards 10-55, the grammar: three genders, suffixed definite articles, plurals in -er/-ar, the -s genitive, reflexive possessives sin/si/sitt/sine, moods and tenses, weak and strong verbs, ligge vs legge, adjective agreement, comparatives in -ere/-est, the double definite, pronouns, pitch accent.
• Cards 56-76, history and sounds: Old Norse, the 1397-1814 union with Denmark, Landsmål and Riksmål, Samnorsk, Høgnorsk, Sidemål in schools, Urban East Norwegian, Språkrådet, flapped vs uvular R, retroflex consonants.

Study block 2 first; blocks 1 and 3 are background you can review weekly.

Core cards

Fix these cards as you go

• Card 28 lists a "future" tense. Norwegian has no future inflection; it uses modals: skal (plan), vil (intention) or kommer til å (prediction). Rewrite the back with those three.
• Accusatives stop at three. Cards 47-49 give meg, deg, oss. Add the missing ones: han → ham, hun → henne, de → dem.
• Cards 61 and 62 share a back. Landsmål means "language of the land", Riksmål "language of the realm"; give each its own gloss so you can tell them apart.
• Card 6 is dated. The 4.32 million figure is from 2012; Norway now has about 5.5 million inhabitants.
• Cards 9 and 42 have broken fronts. Read them as "Which letters appear only in loanwords?" and "What happens if you drop the adjective after den/det/de?"

What the deck never teaches

Like its Swedish sibling, this deck is a rule index with no exercise cards, and it skips the rules you use in every sentence. Write five cards yourself:

1. V2 word order: the verb comes second, so a fronted word forces inversion: I dag spiser jeg fisk.
2. Ikke placement: after the verb in main clauses (Jeg spiser ikke), before it in subordinate clauses (fordi jeg ikke spiser).
3. Perfect tense: har + participle: jeg har bodd.
4. Modals + bare infinitive: kan, må, vil, skal, bør.
5. S-passive: Huset selges (the house is being sold).

Tip: pair the causative verbs ligge/legge and sitte/sette together; drill them with a quick sentence (Boken ligger på bordet / Jeg legger boken på bordet) rather than as definitions.

Related reading

Grammar sticks faster with vocabulary to hang it on: see Memorize the Top 100 Norwegian Words and Learn Norwegian by Frequency: The 1000 Most Common Words. Swedish learners can compare with Learn Swedish Grammar: 77 Flashcards.

Find BJ6247 in the library on Flip It.