This is how much easier a spoken language Norwegian is than French: I could understand as much spoken Norwegian in two months as I could French in five years.

There is a reason the French have dictée competitions — French is one of the most difficult spoken languages to understand. I don’t have any interest in learning any more Norwegian than I currently know, but I think I could easily learn to understand pretty much all spoken and written Norwegian in less than a year. By contrast, that same task in French has taken more than a decade.