@ninalanyon And now you're a fluent Norwegian speaker! Academic qualifications are not the be-all and end-all in life - fortunately.

@FreddieUK My experience of academic language education in both the UK and Norway in school and as adult education is that most of it is worthless, an utter waste of time and effort. It took me five years to learn Norwegian to a usable degree even with 200 hours of classroom instruction and that only after I had to visit more outlying districts where English was less common. Having to speak Norwegian to order a beer or a pizza was worth more than any amount of grammar lessons.

Our three children went half time to barnehage from the age of about three and a half and were indistinguishable from the natives within six months with no formal instruction at all. Later on two of them had formal German lessons at school, No. 3 chose Spanish; none of them can speak either language, nor read it without the aid of a dictionary. In fact No. 3 has picked up more Japanese via anime and online games than he has retained Spanish.

@ninalanyon Immersion is the best way, I agree.

@ninalanyon He says "ha en dag" instead of "ha en god/fin dag"

@LordBarbossa "Ha en god dag." isn't very common where I live but it is definitely used more now than it was forty years ago. Seems like creeping Americanisation to me when shop assistants say it.

@ninalanyon it's relatively common around here.