Dialogue

Vocabulary (Review)

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Lesson Transcript

Norwegians love it when people speak their language, but there may be times when you won't catch all or any of their words. Maybe they will use an unusual dialect word or their accent or speed might be a problem for you. When this happens, asking the speaker to say it again can make the difference between understanding a crucial piece of information and spending the rest of the day trying to figure out what it was! The following phrases will not only give you a better sense of the language, but will also help you tune your ear.
In Nynorsk, the most common way of requesting someone to say something again is to say
Ein gong til.
Let’s break it down:
(slow) Ein gong til.
Once more:
Ein gong til.
The first word, ein, is translated as “one.”
(slow) Ein.
Ein.
The second word, gong, means “a time or occasion that something happened.”
(slow) Gong.
Gong.
Together, the phrase ein gong means “once.”
(slow) Ein gong.
Ein gong.
Finally, we have the word til. This word has lots of different meanings, but here it means “in addition.”
(slow) Til.
Til.
All together, that’s
(slow) Ein gong til.
Ein gong til.
We can translate this phrase as “Once more.”
You could also ask “Could you repeat that?”
Kan du gjenta det?
Let’s break it down:
(slow) Kan du gjen-ta det?
Once more:
Kan du gjenta det?
The first word, kan, as you might expect means “can” in English. We'll take this together with du, giving the useful component kan du? (“can you?”).
(slow) Kan du?
Kan du?
Next we have gjenta which means “repeat.”
(slow) Gjen-ta.
Gjenta.
After this comes det; a word which means “it” or “that.”
(slow) Det.
Det.
The whole sentence is
(slow) Kan du gjen-ta det?
Kan du gjenta det?
“Could you repeat that?”
When the reason for not understanding is that the other person is speaking too fast, you may want to say “Could you speak more slowly?” In Nynorsk, this is
Kan du snakke langsamare?
(slow) Kan du snak-ke lang-sa-ma-re?
Kan du snakke langsamare?
The first two words, Kan du, as we know means “can you?”
(slow) Kan du?
Kan du?
Snakke, which comes next, means “speak.”
(slow) Snak-ke.
Snakke.
Finally comes langsamare; a form of the word langsam, which means “slow” or “slowly.” This form of the word, with -are at the end means “slower” or in this case, “more slowly.”
(slow) Lang-sa-ma-re.
Langsamare.
Let’s hear the whole phrase one more time:
(slow) Kan du snak-ke lang-sa-ma-re?
Kan du snakke langsamare?
“Could you speak more slowly?”

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