Bokmål or Nynorsk — which should I learn?

Bokmål, for almost everyone. Norway has two official written standards: Bokmål, used by the large majority and by most national media and publishing, and Nynorsk, built from rural dialects and used by a substantial minority and in parts of the west. Every Norwegian learns to read both at school, so writing Bokmål is understood everywhere. Learn Nynorsk if you are moving somewhere it dominates, or you have an academic reason. Otherwise it is a second written form of a language you are still learning to speak.

Why does everyone speak a different dialect?

Because Norway has no single prescribed spoken standard, and dialect is used publicly in a way that would be unusual in France or Britain — on national broadcast, in parliament, by professionals at work. Speakers do not switch to a neutral form for outsiders because there is no agreed neutral form to switch to. The practical effect for a learner is that comprehension is harder than the 600-hour figure implies, while production is not: your own consistent Bokmål-based speech is understood everywhere.

Is Norwegian easier than Swedish or Danish?

FSI gives all three 600 hours and does not separate them, so the published data says no. What learners consistently report is that Norwegian occupies a useful middle: its spelling is closer to its pronunciation than Danish, and its pronunciation is closer to Danish and Swedish than either is to the other, which makes Norwegian speakers the best-placed of the three to understand their neighbours. That is a claim about convenience rather than about difficulty.

Will Norwegian let me read Danish?

Written Danish and Bokmål are close enough that reading across is straightforward after a little exposure — the two written standards share a great deal of history. Spoken Danish is a different matter, and Norwegians themselves report finding it hard to follow. This is the standard Scandinavian asymmetry: the written languages are nearly a single language, and the spoken ones have diverged, with Danish having moved furthest from its own spelling.

How much of a problem is the pitch accent?

Small, and worth knowing about so that Norwegian intonation makes sense to you. Like Swedish, Norwegian uses the melodic contour of a stressed syllable to distinguish a limited set of word pairs. Context resolves nearly all of them, and getting it wrong produces a foreign accent rather than a misunderstanding. It is also the feature that varies most across dialects, which is a further reason not to spend early hours perfecting one version of it.

How long does it take to learn Norwegian?

The US Foreign Service Institute reaches professional working proficiency in Norwegian in about 600 class hours, its easiest band — the same figure as Spanish and Swedish. At an hour a day with a tutor, conversational Norwegian (B1) lands around 14 months. The grammar is close to English and simpler than German in every respect. The two complications are unusual: Norway has two official written standards, and its spoken dialects vary more, and are used more openly in public life, than in most European countries.

FSI baseline: 600 class hours
Difficulty band: similar
FSI category: Category I

Norwegian sits at the floor of the Foreign Service Institute's easiest band: 600 class hours to Speaking-3 / Reading-3, the same figure as Spanish, Swedish and Danish.

The two standing warnings:

Those are classroom hours, not app minutes. Full-time small-group instruction with qualified teachers.

600 hours is professional proficiency — arguing a point in your field, reading a newspaper unaided.

The two written standards

This is the feature no other language on this site has, and it confuses people before they start.

Norway has two official written forms. Bokmål is used by the large majority, and by most national media and publishing. Nynorsk was constructed in the nineteenth century from rural dialects, is used by a substantial minority, and dominates in parts of the west.

Both are official. Every Norwegian learns to read both at school. Neither is a dialect of the other; they are two standardised ways of writing the same language.

For a learner the answer is Bokmål, unless you are moving somewhere Nynorsk dominates or have an academic reason. Bokmål is understood everywhere, it is what most materials teach, and it is closer to written Danish, which gives you a bonus reading language.

Knowing that the choice exists matters more than the choice itself. Learners who do not know encounter Nynorsk text, conclude their Norwegian has failed, and lose confidence over a formatting difference.

Where the time actually goes

Comprehension, because there is no standard spoken form

Norway does not prescribe a spoken standard, and dialect is used publicly in a way many European countries do not — on national broadcast, in professional settings, in parliament.

Nobody switches to a neutral spoken form for you, because there is no agreed one to switch to.

The effect on a learner is asymmetric and worth planning for:

Production is fine. Speak consistent Bokmål-based Norwegian and you are understood anywhere.
Comprehension is harder than 600 hours suggests, because you are not learning one accent, you are learning a range.

The remedy is exposure breadth rather than exposure volume — deliberately listening to speakers from different regions, early, rather than perfecting one.

The grammar is genuinely simple

Worth stating because it is where Norwegian is unambiguously cheap. Verbs do not conjugate for person. There is no case system beyond pronouns. Word order is close to English, with one main rule about the verb's position that takes a week.

Two genders in the standard written form, marked on the article and on the definite suffix, and — as in Swedish — definiteness attaches to the end of the noun rather than standing in front of it.

If you have come from German, most of what made German slow is simply absent.

Vocabulary is Germanic and half-guessable

The usual Germanic advantage, and the usual hazard: a substantial layer of words that look like English and have shifted in meaning. The cost is small and it is concentrated in exactly the words you use most.

What each level actually costs

Goal	Method	Estimate
A2 — simple everyday exchanges	App, 20 min/day	around 300 hours, ~2.5 years
B1 — hold a conversation	Tutor, 1 hr/day, 5 days	around 315 hours, ~1.2 years
B2 — work, study, argue a point	Tutor, 1 hr/day, 5 days	around 460 hours, ~1.8 years
C1 — professional proficiency	Intensive class, FSI-style	600 hours, ~5.5 months full-time

The Scandinavian bonus

Written Norwegian gets you a long way into written Swedish and Danish, and Norwegian speakers are generally the best placed of the three to follow the other two — Norwegian sits between them in both pronunciation and spelling.

Spoken Danish remains hard, for Norwegians as much as for you.

If your goal is the region rather than the country, this is the argument for starting here.

The obstacle the hours cannot show

The same one Sweden and the Netherlands have: English proficiency is very high, and conversations switch the moment your Norwegian sounds effortful.

The 600 hours measure study, not access to practice, and access is the binding constraint. Ask to stay in Norwegian; it works, and it has to be done every time.

What actually works

Choose Bokmål and stop thinking about it. The decision is smaller than the anxiety it causes.
Listen to several regions from the start. Comprehension is the real cost, and breadth beats repetition here.
Learn nouns with their gender, as in every Germanic language.
Do not chase the pitch accent. It varies by dialect and rarely changes meaning.

How you study matters more than which language

The same target, the same hour a day, five different ways of spending it.

Hours to B2 in Norwegian, holding everything else equal. The slowest method that gets there takes 2× the fastest — a wider gap than the one between neighbouring FSI difficulty bands. The hatched bar never arrives at all, however many hours go into it.

Run this for your own pace

Common questions

Bokmål or Nynorsk — which should I learn?: Bokmål, for almost everyone. Norway has two official written standards: Bokmål, used by the large majority and by most national media and publishing, and Nynorsk, built from rural dialects and used by a substantial minority and in parts of the west. Every Norwegian learns to read both at school, so writing Bokmål is understood everywhere. Learn Nynorsk if you are moving somewhere it dominates, or you have an academic reason. Otherwise it is a second written form of a language you are still learning to speak.
Why does everyone speak a different dialect?: Because Norway has no single prescribed spoken standard, and dialect is used publicly in a way that would be unusual in France or Britain — on national broadcast, in parliament, by professionals at work. Speakers do not switch to a neutral form for outsiders because there is no agreed neutral form to switch to. The practical effect for a learner is that comprehension is harder than the 600-hour figure implies, while production is not: your own consistent Bokmål-based speech is understood everywhere.
Is Norwegian easier than Swedish or Danish?: FSI gives all three 600 hours and does not separate them, so the published data says no. What learners consistently report is that Norwegian occupies a useful middle: its spelling is closer to its pronunciation than Danish, and its pronunciation is closer to Danish and Swedish than either is to the other, which makes Norwegian speakers the best-placed of the three to understand their neighbours. That is a claim about convenience rather than about difficulty.
Will Norwegian let me read Danish?: Written Danish and Bokmål are close enough that reading across is straightforward after a little exposure — the two written standards share a great deal of history. Spoken Danish is a different matter, and Norwegians themselves report finding it hard to follow. This is the standard Scandinavian asymmetry: the written languages are nearly a single language, and the spoken ones have diverged, with Danish having moved furthest from its own spelling.
How much of a problem is the pitch accent?: Small, and worth knowing about so that Norwegian intonation makes sense to you. Like Swedish, Norwegian uses the melodic contour of a stressed syllable to distinguish a limited set of word pairs. Context resolves nearly all of them, and getting it wrong produces a foreign accent rather than a misunderstanding. It is also the feature that varies most across dialects, which is a further reason not to spend early hours perfecting one version of it.

If you already speak one of these

Our estimate applies a reduction for each, and each has its own write-up.

German — cuts roughly 30% off
Dutch — cuts roughly 30% off
Swedish — cuts roughly 30% off
Danish — cuts roughly 30% off

Where to study Norwegian

Matched by the same rules the calculator uses, at a B1 target with no prior related language. The rules were written before any of these were added and the ranking code cannot read commission rates — a test rewrites every payout and checks the order does not move.

AnkiFree · Structured self-study course · up to C2earns us nothing
Anyone who needs to retain vocabulary — free, and better at spaced repetition than every paid app.
Not for: People who want a curriculum — Anki is a tool, not a course
Language ReactorFree · Structured self-study course · up to C1earns us nothing
Intermediate learners who want native input from video with dual subtitles, at no cost.
Not for: Beginners — unscripted native speech below A2 is noise, not input
Rocket Languagesabout $260 once · Structured self-study course · up to B2
Learners who want one structured course covering grammar explicitly, bought once rather than rented.
Not for: Anyone who wants live correction from a human — this is a recorded course
Pimsleurabout $150 once · Structured self-study course · up to B1
Learners who want to speak from the first lesson and can give it thirty focused minutes of audio a day, hands-free.
Not for: Anyone who wants to read or write the language — the method is almost entirely spoken

Your own target and budget change this list — run it for your case. Prices carry the date they were checked and go stale; confirm on the merchant's own site before paying.

Sources

Where the baseline figure on this page comes from. Everything applied on top of it is our own estimate.

Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute
The class-hour bands every estimate on this site starts from, and the definition of the proficiency they lead to (ILR Speaking-3 / Reading-3).
FSI Language Difficulty Ranking — fsi-language-courses.org
Which languages sit in which band. The State Department publishes the categories as an image, so per-language assignment comes from independent reproductions that agree with each other and with the official hour bands.

By Kevin Fan. Native Mandarin speaker who learned English as a second language — the same pairing this site prices at 2,200 hours, done from the far side. Builds and maintains the estimate model and every page on it. Last reviewed 2026-08-08. How we work these numbers out, including which coefficients are our own estimates.