Is learning Scandinavian languages easy or hard and is it easier for a scot to learn these languages?

Question

i would mostly like to learn norwegian or icelandic or even swedish but I'm not very good at languages well french but does that mean i will be bad at other languages

Answer 1

Well first of all, i know with grammar and the formal way of speaking the languages you listed, specifically icelandic and norwegian, it's incredibly hard to learn, even for natives it's hard to get pronunciation right on everything.

Answer 2

It all depends on you.

I can speak a bit of German, for instance, and I find reading Swedish in basic situations is totally possible. I find reading other languages (at least European ones) fairly easy. But ask me to speak, and I'm ridiculous. I have friends who picked up the slang in a few months here in Helsinki (not Scandinavian, I know, but anyway), and I'm rotten for slang but I do understand well enough to go to school in Finnish. I know a guy here who gave up on Finnish and studied Swedish instead 'cause it was so much easier. :)  (Swedish being our second language here.)

But anyway: it takes lots of work, and time, and you'll discover your language strengths. I don't think learning a new language is too hard for anybody, and I've been here for 6 years and my skills are STILL totally rubbish. I know I'll get it all eventually. :)

Answer 3

An American pen pal of mine, who speaks the Scandinavian languages to a small extent, said that Swedish was probably the easiest foreign language he ever studied.

(Although he speaks several other languages fluently, so he is obviously very skilled in this area).

The difference between Swedish and Norwegian is rather small, they can almost be viewed as dialects of a common language.

So if you study some of them you get "2 for the price of 1".

Danish is also quite similar, at least in writing, although in my experience the Danes are often better to understand Swedish than Swedish people understands Danish.

(Maybe they are more clever than us Swedes :-)

PS: I've been to Scotland, lovely place.

Answer 4

Obviously there are people who learn languages faster than others, but remember that some languages result to be more easier than others to learn if they actually belong to the same linguistic group as your language. Since french is a language that is developped from the latin you may find it even MORE difficult to learn it because your native tongue is a language that is developped from the germanic language! So, I think that a scandinavian language could be in some way quite "easy" to learn. Hence that icelandic is quite different from the scandinavian languages because it is very old in its use because it hasn't develepped with the years which means that it has remained as it was in the year 1000(when nordic litterature was born and the nordic languages started to evolve from old norse). This means that it is very difficult to learn because the grammar and sounds have remained as they were(very complicated).

regarding norvegian and swedish(also danish) they are quite easy because of the fact that the grammar is very similar to the english grammar which helps alot! For example: when you need to conjugate a verb, it's enough to change the pronoum of the person but the verb endings remain the same(for example, in french it's more difficult because you need to conjugate all verb endings so they fit with the pronoums).

The pronunciation could be more difficult for you because there are some sounds that could be difficult because they aren't in your language, but again  a person that has a native language of the same linguistic group, is already quite advantaged!