My English is mostly a product of my inability to read fast enough to keep up with the subtitles on TV and in movies, a problem which forced me to learn to understand English much faster and better then I otherwise would have to. Still, I sometimes find it quite troublesome, so I was open to alternatives. Naturally, I would jump at the idea that English is indeed very confusing and makes no sense at all. Not for the first time, Wikipedia had shed some light at a seemingly insolvable mystery. This mystery turned out to be quite unsolvable, and surely would not be worthwhile. I figured it was best that I would stop torturing my fragile and confused brain with this weird language. Instead, I might try something more dyslexia-friendly.
I’ve wanted to learn a new language for some time, but it seems I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. English and French are among the more difficult ones (for “special” people like me) because the spelling is so.... well, messed up. Now it seems it is time to give up this language before my brain crashes, like it occasionally does with the effect that I become temporarily word blind (as my diagnosis suggests) and can’t read for a little while, or even explodes and leave me permanently analphabetic. I’m actually a little (or actually a lot) surprised that my brain haven’t come up with some kind of natural defence against it, like spontaneously falling asleep or something when I try to read or write it. The prospect is indeed dark and gloomy but hopefully there is still light at the end of the lingual tunnel.
Reading long books in Norwegian Bokmål (literarily “Book Language”) is getting increasingly dull, but I’m hopelessly hunted by the incurable feeling that things can always be done differently and better if I could only figure out how. I started easy with getting a book in Swedish (Baby Jane by Sofi Oksanen) to see if I could manage to get through it. It turned out to be easy as pie. This left me full of confidence and dyslexia forgotten along with the times when I complained loudly about being made to read a school book in Danish... which is basically the same language as Norwegian on paper. I decided it was time to try something new.
I’ve started to learn different languages before, but I could never really decide which one to focus on. This was clearly a major problem. But I remained confident that it could be done, if I could just figure out how. I can be quite persistent when I set my mind to something. Actually, it’s more like my mind take a liking to certain things with no regard to what is actually useful to know, and then I think about it nonstop weather I want to or not. It’s really annoying. Like this audio book that I’ve been listening to at work lately. It’s in Swedish, which is pretty straight forward for most Norwegians to understand, but there are always new words and phrases to figure out, so after listening to it for a while, I find myself thinking in Swedish for hours afterwards. I can’t seem to get a Norwegian thought in edgewise. When I talk, it even starts to sound a bit like Swedish, even though it’s Norwegian, if that makes any sense. Also, once when I and a friend went to Iceland, we were excited to learn some Icelandic. My head ended up totally hell bent on figuring it out and was constantly comparing it to Norwegian, with the result that I became pretty much incapable of saying even the most basic things in English (true story!). When we did speak English, we also mixed Norwegian in with the English because some words are the same in Norwegian and Icelandic (“ja”, “nei”, “takk” etc). This is where my brain draws the line at lingual oddities and refuses to follow. Just to top it up, some of the shopkeepers and guides unexpectedly spoke Norwegian to us, which left me unsure if they spoke Norwegian or just some particularly understandable Icelandic words. If I hadn’t been concentrating, I was sometimes even unsure if it hadn’t been English. Having just reminded myself of all of this, I start to wonder if learning more words in strange, foreign languages is a very bad idea. Why, oh why can’t I get a brain-transplant? I’ll take one that doesn’t want to learn anything and doesn’t get itself into problems like this.
I decide to listen to Wikipedia. One of the languages that were listed as being more suitable for people like me was Finnish of all things. I always thought Finnish sounded funny and have been interested in it ever since way back when I used to watch MTV with Finnish subtitles whenever there was nothing on Norwegian, Swedish or Danish MTV. Considering how similar the languages of the other Scandinavian countries are, one might wonder if Finland has been adopted and moved here from somewhere far away. In school, we were told long ago never to even think about trying to learn Finnish or Sami because it is apparently way too difficult for anyone to work out. This could only be viewed as a challenge. Finnish sounds just funny enough, is just difficult enough and dyslexia-friendly enough that it can only be viewed (by me at least) as the perfect challenge. Also, it is just useless enough that there is no pressure on me to ever really figure it out. When will I ever need to know Finnish? It’s just a bonus if I do.
Finnish is indeed challenging, but it’s actually going better than expected. I haven’t memorized a whole lot of words yet, but I’m starting to get a feel for it. And more importantly, I’ve managed to keep up the enthusiasm! Which is by far the most important thing. I started out at PurposeGames.com to learn a few words to start with (numbers, months, weekdays, colours, names of European countries etc). Asides from that, my vocabulary (it feels a bit bold to call it that) is mostly restricted to what I have been able to decipher from Finnish news. One of the first words I learned was “lumilautailu” (snowboarding) and that trend still sticks, so now I can understand quite a bit when I read news stories... as long as it’s on snowboarding. It is pretty easy to learn the spelling too because it actually makes sense! My brain doesn’t protest violently the same way it still does every time I write English. I thought Wikipedia was a bit off, as it seemed to good to be true, but it turns out they were spot on... or at least whoever wrote the article was.
The other day, I finally managed to get my hands on a little Finnish – Norwegian dictionary. So now I look up all kinds of stuff that pops into my head.
There will probably be more on this later as my enthusiasm flourishes and the people around me become increasingly bored with listening to me :P
One thing that particularly annoys me about English is this business with dividing words that in Norwegian would be written in onewordlikethis. In Norwegian we call it “orddelingsfeil” (word dividing errors?) and it makes all the alarm bells in my head go off even though I know very well that it’s not the same in English :P
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