User talk:Morecomplicated

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PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?. 16:25, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Greetings!

So, you're from Norway? Does that you mean you currently reside in Norway, or do you now live in an English-speaking country? Rand0 (talk) 01:33, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi!

I was born in Norway and live there. Norwegians typically are fluent in at least one foreign language, normally English. In most cases, you wouldn't be able to tell if they are native speakers or not when they write, but they do have a strong scandinavian accent when they speak.

Oh, of course. I'm from the United States, where not even half of the population knows more than one language, unfortunately. I often wish the United States would take after the rest more often and make bilingual, or even trilingual education the norm, and do other things the rest of the world does, like normalizing cycling as a common mode of transportation. Rand0 (talk) 06:56, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

It's a lot easier to Norwegians to learn English than it would be for a native English speaker to learn another language. Here in Norway, we encounter English all the time, I read and write documentation at work, post and read online forums, read novels and watch TV, all of this in english. I have a university degree, and all of my books were in english. If you keep practising something, you will get good at it. My english is not perfect, but seeing how a lot of native speakers can't spell, I don't really worry about not being taken seriously because of it.

Americans would be better at languages if they learned more languages at school, but I don't think there would be as many fluent speakers as what is the situation in Norway. I learned french, german and japanese at school, but I'm nowhere near as good at those languages as english because I don't practice them every day. In Norway, you can go to a bar and engage in intelligent conversation with the locals (after being fined for trying to buy a beer, or so it would seem with our high sin taxes).

Every single one of your university textbooks was in English? Wow! I learn something new every day. Rand0 (talk) 17:58, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, we had a preliminary course in philosophy, scientific method and logic, and that was in Norwegian, so was the linguistics course, but all of my other books were in English. The reason for this is that with a language with only 5 million speakers and only a few universities, it would be expensive and time consuming to translate all the textbooks for all the courses, it's better to just use the newest and best books.