Norwegian and English are both Germanic languages and that makes them related to each other. Just how related? Take a look at this sentence from nettavisen.no, a Norwegian news site:
Nordmann falt ut av vindu - døde
Well, Nordmann you can seperate into Nord (looks like English word “north”) and mann (sounds like English word “man”). So what do you think Nordmann means?
Ok then, how about the next few words: “falt ut av vindu“. If you say falt out loud it kind of sounds like falled, which is the incorrect past tense of to fall. But what if you couldn’t make that connection? Well, you could skip a few words and see the word vindu. You could probably figure out that this means window. So what bad things happen at a window? One could fall out of one. Plus, “falt ut av vindu” sounds like “falls out of window”.
The last word is døde. If you look at that word by itself, you can’t really tell what it means. But you do know that a Norwegian fell out of a window, right? So what’s interesting about that? It would be more interesting if he died…I sound sadistic right now. But anyways, newspapers care mostly if someone has died. Now, the adjective of dead in Norwegian is død (an e is added at the end because Nordmann is definite singular).
So right now we know about a Nordmann who apparently falt ut av vindu and is now døde. But where did this happen? What else happened? Here’s the next/first sentence:
En nordmann falt natt til lørdag ut fra et hotellvindu i Aalborg i Danmark, og døde av skadene, melder danske TV 2.
Well, you could probably tell that en nordmann means a Norwegian (en is just a indefinite article like a/an in ENglish. In this case, en is used as an indefinite article for a masculine noun).
We already know falt is the pass tense of fall (which is fell). So let’s look at the next three words natt til lørdag. This is a bit confusing…the word til in the middle sounds like ’til (until) in English. So maybe it means from natt until lørdag. You might need a little bit of basic Norwegian knowledge to understand this bit. Natt means night (not too different). Lørdag means Saturday. So natt til lørdag means night to Saturday.
Ut fra et hotellvindu are the next few words. Ut sounds like out. Fra means from. You’ll learn this very early when/if you learn Norwegian because it’s in the phrase jeg kommer fra… which means I come from. Let’s skip the word et. Next is hotellvindu. You can separate this into two familiar words hotell and vindu. Hotell looks like a misspelled version of hotel and we already know vindu means window. So ut fra et hotellvindu means out from a window of a hotel. Now remember et? This is the indefinite article for neutral gender words.
Now, there’s a city called Aalborg in Denmark. The next few words identify the location of the hotell. They are i Aalborg i Danmark. You know that Aalborg is a city in Denmark. Danmark looks like Denmark (except misspelled), right? So you know that Aalborg is IN Denmark. What do you think i means (hint: in)?
Next they say that the nordmann fell out of the window of a hotel in Aalborg, Denmark, og døde av skadene. Og means and. We already know døde means dead and av means of. So he is “dead of” something…but what? Skadene is a variant of skade which means damage. So he died of damage? A damage to a person usually comes in the forms of wounds/bruises/scars/etc.
The last few words are melder danske TV 2. Hmmm…TV 2 sounds like something to do with television. Maybe this story appeared on television and maybe TV 2 is some kind of channel? Maybe this channel is in Denmark (therefore it makes the channel Danish), where the death occurred? What does melder mean? It is the present tense of å melde, which means to report. So Danish TV 2 reported this, probably.
So, let’s conclude that sentence. It means the following: A Norwegian fell Friday night from a hotel window in Aalborg in Denmark, and died of his injuries, according to Danish TV 2. That sounds right…
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