The Focus of This Lesson Is to Learn Two Ways of Conveying Your "Name."
Hei. Jeg heter Ola.
"Hi, I am called Ola."

Heter is the present form of å hete. You will rarely have to use the infinitive form of this verb, so remembering heter is in itself enough.

Although both characters (Ola and Kari) use different greetings, there is no difference between male and female in Norwegian speech. Thus, the only difference between jeg heter ("name") and mitt navn er ("name") is that they look and sound different. Their meaning is exactly the same.

Exclusion of "Am"

Notice that we can directly translate mitt navn er in English as "my name is," while with jeg heter, you would have to add a verb to make even remote sense of the phrase. In Norwegian, we do not often use "am (adjective)" like in English. Without delving too deeply into why it is different, instead do yourself a favor and think twice before translating any phrases such as "I am...," "you are...," and so on directly to Norwegian.

Let's look at some concrete examples.

For Example:

1. Jeg er tørst. (with "am")
   "I am thirsty." (with "am")
2. Jeg drikker. (without "am")
   "I am drinking." (with "am")

Examples from This Lesson

1. Hei. Jeg heter Ola.
   "Hi. I am called Ola."

Heter

Norwegian is quite straightforward. There are seldom any pitfalls or complex mazes that prevent you from using the language skillfully. That said, Norwegians tend to take the shortest route possible to arrive at a point. Long sentences are therefore rarely found in spoken and, most often, written Norwegian as well. To accomplish this, Norwegian has certain words that make up meanings that would take English several words to express. A word like this is heter. In English, this would commonly translate to "being called." We mostly only use heter for referring to people's names, as in jeg heter ("my name is" or "I am called"). Yet, heter can also take on other meanings pretty similar to the way we use "to be called" in English. We shall look at these uses in another lesson in a more advanced series.

Keep It Simple in Norwegian

As you can see, Norwegians like short, concise sentences. Hyggelig is one of those words that go with every conversation, whether what is implied is "Nice to meet you," "Nice meeting you again," or "(It was) nice of you." The best part of it is that Hyggelig is no less formal than the long version of each phrase, making it an essential word in your dictionary. Norwegians use this all the time along with other practical words like takk ("thank you") and jepp ("yes"/"correct"). It is these words that will, in the end, prove most handy during your Norwegian studies.