Breakdown of På foreldremøtet får læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål.
Questions & Answers about På foreldremøtet får læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål.
The pattern få (noen) til å (gjøre noe) is a causative construction. It usually means:
- get someone to do something, or
- make someone do something (but usually in a fairly neutral or soft way, not necessarily forceful).
So:
- får læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål
≈ “the teacher gets the parents to ask more questions”
or
≈ “the teacher encourages / prompts the parents to ask more questions”.
The core idea: because of the teacher’s actions, the parents end up asking more questions.
You must include til å in this construction. The pattern is:
- få + person (object) + til å + infinitive
So:
- få foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål
= get the parents to ask more questions
Without til å, the sentence would be ungrammatical:
- ✗ får læreren foreldrene stille flere spørsmål – wrong in Norwegian.
Other verbs that work similarly are hjælpe noen til å, lære noen til å (in some dialects, less common in standard Bokmål), but få noen til å is the classic pattern you should memorize.
Norwegian main clauses usually follow the V2 rule: the finite verb (here: får) must come in second position in the sentence.
- The first “slot” is På foreldremøtet (an adverbial).
- The second “slot” must be the verb får.
- The subject læreren must then come after the verb.
So:
- På foreldremøtet får læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål. ✅
- På foreldremøtet læreren får foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål. ❌ (verb not in 2nd position)
If you move the subject to first position, the order changes accordingly:
- Læreren får foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål på foreldremøtet. ✅
Here, læreren is first, so får is still in second position.
Foreldremøtet is the definite singular form: “the parent-teacher meeting”.
Using the definite form here usually implies that:
- it is a specific, known meeting (for example, the one that took place yesterday, or the one mentioned in the conversation), or
- it is a typical situation, as in “at (the) parent-teacher meetings (in general)”.
Compare:
På foreldremøtet får læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål.
→ At the parent-teacher meeting (the one we are talking about), the teacher gets the parents to ask more questions.På et foreldremøte får læreren ofte foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål.
→ At a parent-teacher meeting (any such meeting), the teacher often gets the parents to ask more questions.
Both are possible, but the original sentence suggests a specific or understood meeting.
In Norwegian, på is very commonly used with events, meetings, and organized activities:
- på møtet – at the meeting
- på kurset – at the course
- på festen – at the party
- på skolen – at school
So på foreldremøtet is the natural choice, meaning “at the parent-teacher meeting”.
I foreldremøtet would sound odd or overly literal, as if you were physically inside the meeting as an object; it is not used in normal Norwegian for this meaning.
You can also say:
- Under foreldremøtet – “during the parent-teacher meeting”
But på is the default preposition for being at such an event.
Both are related to “asking”, but they are used differently:
å stille spørsmål
Literally “to pose questions”.
This is the common collocation for asking questions in a neutral, slightly formal way.
Example:- Elevene stiller mange spørsmål. – The pupils ask many questions.
å spørre (someone, om noe)
Means “to ask (someone) (about something)”. Focuses more directly on the act of asking, often with a direct object (the person).
Examples:- Jeg spør læreren. – I ask the teacher.
- Han spurte om tiden. – He asked the time.
In this sentence, we are talking about asking questions, not just asking in general. So stille (flere) spørsmål is the natural phrase. Saying:
- … får læreren foreldrene til å spørre mer
is understandable but less precise; it sounds slightly incomplete (ask more what? ask whom?). Stille flere spørsmål is idiomatic and specific.
Flere is the comparative form of mange (many) and is used with countable plural nouns:
- mange spørsmål – many questions
- flere spørsmål – more questions (a greater number of questions)
Key differences:
- flere = more (countable things, plural):
- flere bøker, flere spørsmål, flere foreldre
- mer = more (uncountable things, mass nouns, or an abstract “more”):
- mer vann, mer tid, mer informasjon
So flere spørsmål = “more questions (in number)”.
You would not say mer spørsmål; that is ungrammatical.
Mange spørsmål is just “many questions”; flere spørsmål implies an increase compared to before.
Both nouns are in the definite form because they refer to specific, known people in this situation:
- læreren – the teacher (that particular teacher for the class)
- foreldrene – the parents (of the pupils in that class)
In the context of a parent-teacher meeting:
- everyone knows which teacher is involved
- everyone knows which parents are involved
So the definite form is natural.
If you said en lærer / foreldre here, it would sound like a generic description of any teacher and any parents, not the specific group at that meeting.
No. That structure is not idiomatic Norwegian.
Norwegian does not use få (at) + finite clause the way English sometimes uses “get that …”. The natural pattern is:
- få + person + til å + infinitive
So you must keep the til å + infinitive:
- Læreren får foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål. ✅
A clause like at foreldrene stiller flere spørsmål could appear after other verbs, for example:
- Læreren ønsker at foreldrene stiller flere spørsmål.
– The teacher wants the parents to ask more questions.
But not after få in this meaning.
Norwegian present tense får can cover:
- Actual present time – describing what generally happens at such meetings.
- Habitual / general statements – what the teacher normally does.
The sentence as given can be understood as:
- “At the parent-teacher meeting (in general, when this happens), the teacher gets the parents to ask more questions.”
If you want to talk about a specific past event, you would use the past tense:
- På foreldremøtet fikk læreren foreldrene til å stille flere spørsmål.
– At the (that) parent-teacher meeting, the teacher got the parents to ask more questions.
So both får and fikk are possible, but they refer to different time frames. The verb form must match what you want to say about time.