There's a new guy working at one of the local stores

@FreddieUK I laugh bc I wish I coumd skip the "good" part of the sentence, not bc he says it wrong

@FreddieUK Norwegian isn't a difficult language! Especially for English speakers. The syntax is very similar and quite a lot of the vocabulary is recognizable, especially if you speak with a Newcastle/Northumberland accent. The biggest difficulty is the huge variety of accents and dialects that simply make it difficult to recognize the words that people are saying. Even native speakers sometimes have difficulty; for instance when a boy from Trøndelag, same age as No. 2 son, moved to our village (about 40 km south of Oslo) the whole class at school had trouble understanding him speak.

Well actually around Oslo the biggest difficulty is that practically everyone speaks pretty good English so there's not much pressure to learn Norwegian. I often find that it's when I speak to immigrants that I really need to speak Norwegian because it's sometimes the only language we have in common.

@ninalanyon I can have a good guess at reading Norwegian as I do with Swedish and Danish, but pronouncing it is very difficult I think. The Swedish friends I have told me that the tonal inflections that they have are not expected from foreign speakers. I wonder if that's the same for Norwegian?

@FreddieUK A more authoritative answer would come from @LordBarbossa but my opinion is that Norwegian is less tonal than Swedish, most of the letter values are the same or very similar to English.

However the Norwegian alphabet has three more letters than English: ø, æ, å, and the pronunciation of y is difficult.

å is a little bit like the English word awe. The word båt means boat and if you say [i]boat[/i] with a strong Tyneside accent you will have almost exactly the Norwegian version.

ø is somewhat like the u in huh

æ is one that I can never really get right even though I've been speaking the language for decades now.

y is also difficult to get right. The usual advice is to form your lips as though to say oh but then say ee.

My experience is that most Norwegians are tolerant of foreigners having bad Norwegian accents. I think that this is partly because of a generally held opinion that no Norwegian accent or dialect is of higher status than any other. Many people from the Oslo area might find someone with an impenetrable accent from Trøndelag difficult to understand but that usually won't mean an instant negative opinion of the person themselves.

However quite a few Norwegians are well aware of how good their English (especially young people in and around Oslo) is and become impatient with foreigners who sound foreign and they will just switch to English. That still occasionally happens to me when I visit Oslo.