Norwegian RefuPeas: How is your English SO perfect???

 Oh, my English isn't perfect, but thank you anyway.

kids here learn English from the age of 6 (year 1), in year 8 most also add another language (for DS16 it was German.) Unfortunately, their teacher was absolutely .....not up to the standard she should have been   (So that meant I had to brush up on my German....hadn't used it in 25 years, but the good thing is that I now can watch youTube videos in German and understand most of it). This year (year 11) he switched from German to Spanish, but they continue with English until they finish school when they're 19. When they move on to college or university, at least some of the classes or books will be in English (depends on what they study, of course.)

Also, and this might be even more important: movies and TV series aren't dubbed! (Only for very young children). 

I am Norwegian and I have to admit I learned a lot of my English watching television. In Norway we never dubbed tv-shows that were in English. In a lot of European countries they will have voiceactors doing the dialogue in their native language (Italian, Spanish, German etc), so they are not really exposed to people speaking English. There are actually someone in Germany who is 'Julia Roberts' or 'Arnold Schwarzenegger', because they try to use the same voice for the same star in all of their movies. This might have changed, but that's how it was in a lot of European countries.

I was born in 1979, and during the 80's we only had ONE television channel. And the whole country watched the same episode of Dynasty every Friday But with subtitles. I would listen to the English dialogue, and read the translation in the subtitles. Of course you will pick up some English from that! We had both American and British tv-shows, so we were exposed to both of those cultures.

I started learning English in school in 4th grade. My children started in 1st grade. Because we are so close geographically to Great Britain, we learned the English-English, with words like 'colour' and 'neighbourhood'.

To this day we are extremely exposed to the English language, using English/American words/slang in our everyday conversations. We watch American movies, travel to London on the weekends, listen to songs in English.... At most universities, many of the textbooks will be in the original English. Norwegian is too small of a language to make it worth it to translate and print books in. So we use a lot of the original books in their original language. We do of course, have Norwegian textbooks aswell, but those are mostly written BY Norwegians.

Personally I have lived in Australia. Many Norwegian students live overseas to study, as the courses offered in our own universities can be limited or competative to get into.
We also travel a lot. Generally, we are pretty wealthy and have the means to travel for pleasure. And living in Europe, you don't have to travel far to be in a completely different culture and climate.

When I was in 8th grade, we had to choose a secondary foreign language aswell. My school only offered German, so I did four excrutiating years of German classes. I'm not particularly GOOD at it, but I can have a limited conversation in it. Never had much use for it though. I don't meet a lot of Germans/Austrians.

When you come from a small country with only 5 million people in it, speaking a language not a lot of people worldwide speak... you HAVE to learn another language that will make you able to communicate with people from other countries.

Most of what have been mentioned above goes
for Denmark (and Sweden too) I think

Great post AmeliaBloomer This is something I've often thought about although not just Norwegians I must admit. As far as I can see most other European countries and many others further afield too, do far far better than we do at teaching a second/third language. I have Swedish friends and even when visiting as a child we conversed entirely in English and I was sort of embarrassed that I didn't know anything beyond Tack.

Hats off to you guys for your language achievements even if it's the norm for you  

Hmmm, I think my accent (although the Scandinavian in me is evident ;-) ) leans more towards American these days. When I was a kid, that would seriously have affected my grades, though.

I don't think the schools are as strict about it nowadays, at least not in my experience.

(But there is no way I'll ever spell "colour" "color"   )

TV may be a big part of it (as several said) but it comes down to the education system also (as also was mentioned). We do such a bad job here in the United States compared to most European and Scandinavian countries. Although it is somewhat common these days (probably depends on where you live) for kids to start a foreign language in middle school it is entirely possible not to be exposed to one until high school! ugh. I think that's awful, because as we all know -- at least all of us who have tried to learn a foreign language as an adult -- the older you get the harder it is. In general... yes, there are always those people who just "get it". But most of us aren't like that. 

When I first started teaching English in Burkina Faso in West Africa I had classrooms full of kids from poor villages with absolutely nothing in the way of school supplies or anything -- and English was at least their third language, maybe even fourth. ! They had their own language, and maybe another local language, and then French when they started primary school, then English when they hit 6th grade. The kids from French-speaking countries who stayed in school ended up being able read and write in two foreign languages. 

Yeah, we could do a whole lot better in this area!

Scary!! 

I'm not Norwegian but I have Norwegian friends back in Ireland, their English is beautiful and I love their accents.

I get the TV thing for sure. My stepmother came to the US from Vietnam and although she knew some English, she purposely watched TV to learn more. To this day she reads the crossword puzzle answers after my father finishes so she can continue to learn slang and idioms. I will say that I think a big part of learning English in other countries is language immersion. My stepmother not only learned Vietnamese, but had to learn French as well. I think when you learn more than just your native language, and learn it well, it helps bridge the understanding to other languages too.

AmeliaBloomer - you're right, I completely forget that English isn't the first language of our Norwegian friends here  

I met a woman from PTO who was from Sweden. She hardly has an accent, and I can only detect it because she told me she was Swedish. Before she told me I had no idea! She was kind of disappointed (jokingly) because she felt like she wanted people to know she was Swedish.

There is a realityshow that has its season premiere on Sunday. I am so excited about it, because it is just an adorable realityshow.

The show is 12 Norwegian-Americans coming to Norway and learning about all things Norwegian. Especially the episodes where they eat certain Norwegian foods are hilarious! They get to travel to the homestead where their great grandparents lived before they emigrated to America, and it becomes very emotional for them.

I highly recommend it if you are a Norwegian-American, you learn a lot of fun stuff about Norway, thw contestants are very supportive of each other and most of it is in English so you would understand most of it.
It's called 'Alt for Norge' (All/everything for Norway), and you can find some episodes on youtube, or maybe on the channels homepage TVN.no

I have become used to both British English and American English through books, movies and music. But I lived in Australia for a few years, so I know quite a bit of Aussie slang aswell.
And I am quite proud of the fact that I can recognize where people are from based on their English accent; US, England, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. I can rcognize a few American accents, or at least what part of the US. The Southern slang is easy to identify for instance, so is New York/New Jersey and Boston.

I love language. I should have become a linguist!