r/norsk • u/dwchandler • Dec 30 '18

Søndagsspørsmål #260 - Sunday Question Thread

This is a weekly post to ask any question that you may not have felt deserved its own post, or have been hesitating to ask for whatever reason. No question too small or silly!

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u/cosmitz Jan 02 '19 edited Jan 02 '19

Just starting to learn norwegian, giving it a light breezy start on duolingo. But even with speaking natively Romanian and having an extremely good grasp of English, both languages i don't fully know/remember the grammar of but i can speak and write them without effort instinctively, for some reason i have problems with what i guess they're called 'indefinite articles'.

In english, you basically only have a/an which is based on fluency of language. In romanian you do have female/male/neuter articles, similar to norwegian, so it's easy to understand why and how to use them, but i just seem to have a problem figuring out /which is which/.

I fail en/et so many times. I guess i'm happy ei is mostly depracated and used rarely, but i still can barely figure out when it should be like 'en/et eple', or 'en/et skilpadden'. What's the rule for this? Can't really use romanian as a direct correlation since i really don't think it works the same way attribuiting gender. For us, a dog is a male (un/doi) noun ('un caine' singular, 'doi caini' plural), while a sheep is a female (o/doua) noun (o oaie, doua oi) and knife is neuter (un, doua) noun (un cutit, doua cutite). Fun fact, we have just like a handful of words that use o/doi, like (o fraga, doi fragi). And the rule i think is called for us is just 'count them and see what you get, with mostly all soulless objects being neuter', which in retrospect is entirely retarded if anyone wants to learn romanian.

Coming back to it, how can i figure out the gender of a noun in norwegian?

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u/RoomRocket Native Speaker Jan 02 '19

It's not deprecated!

But to your question, words ending with -ing and -e tend to be feminine which is the only "rule" that I know of.

In compound nouns it is the last word that determines the gender of the noun.

Otherwise the trick is to memorize. Most words are masculine, if I remember correctly, so when in doubt try masculine.