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Originally Posted by dradeel
But either way, Norwegian is much easier than English grammatically.
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As far as i know, Norwegian (like all Scandinavian languages) has 2 or 3 grammatical genders, that disqualifies it as being grammatically simpler than English right there since English has no grammatical gender.
Grammatical genders are always a nightmare for non-native speakers of any language since you have to learn by heart the gender of every single noun. In every sentence you have to always wonder 'is this thing masculine, feminine, neuter?', that's very complicated and causes non-natives to make many gender mistakes (mistakes which sound generally ridiculous and annoying to native speakers for whom it comes naturally that a 'table' is feminine for example).
Not to mention that in some of those languages with grammatical genders, adjectives and past participles also agree in gender with the nouns they qualify, so the whole sentence become gender dependant and if you make a single mistake it just sounds totally wrong.
Obviously the fact that English has no such grammatical difficulties (nouns have no gender, adjectives and past participles are invariable) is what makes it a simple language to learn.
And to get back to Norwegian, i could also mention that Norwegian (again like all Scandinavian languages) has the particularity to have a post-positioned definite article that gets attached to the noun (and agrees in gender and number with it) and therefore pretty much acts like a declension.
Again, English is much simpler, the definite article "the" is invariable and always before a noun.
(For people who don't quite get it, when you say 'the door' in English, it becomes the equivalent of 'doorthe' in Scandinavian languages, the definite article is attached to the end of the noun and acts like a declension, and of course the definite article has to agree in gender and number with the noun it is attached to.)
Also, as far as i know, Norwegian is devided into many 'varieties' (Bokmal, Riksmal, Nynorsk, Hognorsk, and so on) with sometimes rather important grammatical differences (some have 3 genders while others only 2 if i'm not mistaken) and that doesn't exactly look like something simple from a non-native point of view.