Hacking the Norwegian Language: Learning Norwegian in a fast and furious manner.

Learning Norwegian felt like a challenge at first, but once I found a rhythm that worked for me, things started clicking fast. I combined reading books with Google Translate, watching English films with Norwegian subtitles, transitioning to Norwegian media, and utilizing news articles for practice. Familiarizing myself with Norwegian prefixes and suffixes increased my vocabulary comprehension, enabling me to engage with the language confidently. So, even though I didn’t study any textbook for Norwegian B1-B2 levels, I still got a B2 level in reading and listening the first time taking the test. Here’s exactly what I did:

📚 Reading Books with Google Translate + Audio

One of the most effective techniques I used was reading Norwegian books while using Google Translate as a support tool. I took photos of books and pressed the read-out-loud button of the app. That helped me learn a lot of vocabulary.

🎬 Watching English Movies with Norwegian Subtitles

To reinforce vocabulary and sentence structure in context, I watched English movies or shows — but with Norwegian subtitles. Since I already knew what the actors were saying, I could easily match the meaning of the Norwegian subtitles to the English dialogue. This gave me an intuitive feel for how Norwegian works — word order, idioms, and slang. It also helped me see vocab in action that I had just learned while reading.

🎞️ Transitioning to Norwegian Movies with English Subtitles

Once I felt comfortable recognizing basic words and sentence patterns, I flipped the setup:

• I began watching Norwegian movies or series (Wisting, Skam, etc.) with English subtitles.
• This was huge for listening comprehension. I was hearing how native speakers actually speak — not textbook Norwegian — with all the speed, intonation, and dialect quirks.

This phase helped train my ears, especially with how words connect in fast speech because in the listening test, there can be accents from various regions in Norway.

📰 Reading News on VG.no + Text-to-Speech

Another secret weapon in my toolkit was reading daily news on VG.no — a major Norwegian news outlet. Many articles on VG.no come with a listen to the news feature, which was perfect for practicing both reading and listening while increasing your knowledge on local cultures, which is also helpful for the speaking test.

🔤 Learning Norwegian Prefixes and Suffixes

In parallel with all the reading and listening, I also made an effort to study common Norwegian prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes and suffixes are affixes added to a root or stem to form new words or inflected forms in Norwegian. Prefixes are placed before the root or stem, while suffixes are added after it. It’s very helpful because I did encounter words I didn’t know when taking the reading test. However, since I understand word roots, prefixes, and suffixes, I could often guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, even if I hadn’t seen them before.

Prefixes

These are elements added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning. For example:

• u- in uvenn (“enemy”; venn = “friend”)
• mis- in misforstå (“misunderstand”)

These prefixes typically give words a negative or opposite meaning.

Suffixes

These are elements added to the end of a word to create new words (derivational suffixes), often with a different word class than the base word:

• -heit in godhet (“kindness”; from god = “good”)
• -leg in vennlige (“friendly”; from venn = “friend”)

Many Norwegian prefixes are quite similar to English ones, especially since both languages have roots in Germanic languages and have borrowed from Latin and Greek. Here are some common examples: