[perlgeek]

Well, as a foreigner, if you want to learn "the language", you have to start with something.

Since the majority speak some dialect of bokmål, and most courses teach it, that's what you end up with.

I watch some series in Norwegian, e.g. Ragnarok. I understood most of it, though some of the dialects were kinda hard to understand.

But it seems a moot point, basically nobody in any language speaks the "high" language, but some kind of dialect version of it.

[Tor3]

Again, it's not a dialect of bokmål. That would sound like bokmål is actually a spoken language and there are dialects of it. It is not. It's the other way around - bokmål is an attempt to create a written language with common elements for a lot of people, and the same was done for nynorsk - it's just that for bokmål the selection was more from certain city areas in the south, and nynorsk more from dialects elsewhere, but that's actually a too easy description. In my own dialect, which originates very far from where bokmål was created, there are tons of similarities but also tons of differences, and the same can be said for just about every dialect.

When teaching Norwegian to foreigners there's really only one practical way of doing that - use an artificial "spoken" bokmål so that the students can actually match speech to written words. That's just a crutch in order to learn the language (after you're done the real learning starts). That doesn't mean that "spoken" bokmål (or nynorsk for that matter) is real outside the learning institution.

[actionfromafar]

I think the fact that Norway has two standardised written forms makes you think a lot more about the discrepancy between written and spoken language.

English, say, also has many spoken forms but more or less one written form.

If you learn written English and then move to the Highlands or Australia you are also in for some heavy learning.