Video on eco prison in Norway.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Pretty interesting video from Al-Jazeera here on a prison in Norway where the prisoners spend their time learning agricultural skills and generally have a great deal of freedom:



Note though that there is still the threat of being sent back to a "real" prison if they try to escape and they obviously don't want that after having experienced life in this prison.


A lot of people trying to learn Norwegian have said that Norwegians generally speak English far too well to make this a possibility, because it takes quite a bit of study to get to the point that your Norwegian will be better than their English, but this video shows that even though they are quite good at the language they would clearly be more comfortable talking in Norwegian (if the reporter was fluent in the language for example) so there's still hope for those that have English as a mother tongue and want to learn Norwegian. A lot of the time when you hear tales about Country X where everybody is "fluent" in English it usually just means a functional fluency, but everybody is always more comfortable in their mother tongue. If you really intend to become fluent in Norwegian you can find a way to do it IMO. You just need to find a way to get a lot of practice in the language. Find a friend that will talk to you in Norwegian only for an hour or two in exchange for something - money, tutoring them in some other skill that you have, etc. Plus it's super easy (compared to other languages that is).

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess there are few other countries where prison inmates willingly communicate in english. Note that younger people tend to have better accents than these fellows. Congratulations on learning norwegian. I made the same point about the difficulties (and you're absolutely right that the main difficulty is our readiness to use english) on another thread related to german, it's good to see that some people aren't put off by this.

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