Breakdown of Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnadsarbeid og får oss til å møtes oftere i hagen.
Questions & Answers about Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnadsarbeid og får oss til å møtes oftere i hagen.
Frivilligsentralen is a compound noun:
- frivillig = voluntary / volunteer
- sentral = center
→ frivilligsentral = volunteer center
The ending -en makes it definite singular: sentralen = the center.
So Frivilligsentralen means “the volunteer center”.
It’s written as one word because Norwegian usually writes compounds together:
- frivillig
- sentral → frivilligsentral
- then add -en → frivilligsentralen.
It’s capitalized here because it likely refers to a specific, named local institution (like The Volunteer Center in that community).
Both are related to a very Norwegian concept:
- dugnad: voluntary community work where people help each other without pay (cleaning a shared yard, painting a school, etc.).
- arbeid = work
→ dugnadsarbeid = dugnad work, i.e. the actual work that is done in a dugnad.
In practice:
Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnad.
= The volunteer center organizes a (community) work day / event.Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnadsarbeid.
= The volunteer center organizes dugnad-style work (the actual tasks).
The meaning overlaps a lot; dugnadsarbeid stresses the work itself, dugnad often sounds more like the event or occasion.
In this causative construction, Norwegian normally uses:
få (noen) til å (gjøre noe)
= make / get (someone) to (do something)
So:
- får = gets / makes
- oss = us (object form)
- til å = to
- møtes = meet (each other)
Putting it together:
får oss til å møtes = makes us meet / gets us to meet.
You need til here:
- får oss til å møtes ✅
- får oss å møtes ❌ (ungrammatical)
- får vi møtes ❌ (wrong case and structure – vi is subject form, but here we need an object: oss).
møte (without -s) = to meet (someone/something):
- Jeg skal møte henne. = I’m going to meet her.
- Vi skal møte læreren. = We’re going to meet the teacher.
møtes (with -s) is a reciprocal form = to meet each other:
- Vi møtes i morgen. = We’ll meet (each other) tomorrow.
- Kan vi møtes senere? = Can we meet (each other) later?
In the sentence:
… får oss til å møtes …
the idea is “get us to meet each other”, so møtes is preferred.
You could also say får oss til å møte hverandre, but møtes is shorter and more natural here.
Norwegian, like English, has different pronoun forms for subject and object:
- vi = we (subject)
- oss = us (object)
In this part of the sentence:
- The subject is Frivilligsentralen.
- oss is the object of får (the one being “made” to do something).
So:
- Frivilligsentralen får oss til å møtes. ✅
= The volunteer center makes us meet.
Using vi here would be like saying “makes we meet” in English, which is wrong:
- får vi til å møtes ❌ in this meaning.
Yes, it follows the normal verb-second (V2) pattern in a main clause:
- Subject:
- Frivilligsentralen
- Verb:
- organiserer
- Rest of the sentence:
- dugnadsarbeid og får oss til å møtes oftere i hagen
Then you get a second verb (får) in the coordinated part (… og får oss til å møtes …), but that’s still under the same subject Frivilligsentralen.
So the structure is essentially:
- [Subject] Frivilligsentralen
- [Verb 1] organiserer
- [Object 1] dugnadsarbeid
- og
- [Verb 2] får
- [Object 2] oss
- [Infinitive phrase] til å møtes oftere i hagen
- ofte = often
- oftere = more often (comparative)
- oftest = most often (superlative)
So:
- Vi møtes ofte. = We meet often.
- Vi møtes oftere. = We meet more often.
- Vi møtes oftest i helgene. = We meet mostly/most often on weekends.
In the sentence, oftere means the volunteer center makes them meet more often in the garden.
hage (garden) is a masculine noun:
- en hage = a garden (indefinite)
- hagen = the garden (definite)
Norwegian usually marks definiteness with an ending instead of “the” in front:
- English: in the garden
- Norwegian: i hagen
So i hagen means in the garden (a specific one, probably the shared yard or a particular garden everyone knows about).
Yes, you can say:
- Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnad.
The difference is subtle:
organiserer dugnad
→ sounds like organizing a dugnad event (a specific community work day).organiserer dugnadsarbeid
→ emphasizes organizing the work tasks that are done as dugnad.
In many contexts, both will be understood very similarly. Native speakers might not feel a big difference unless the context is very precise.
Norwegian present tense is used both for:
- Things happening right now, and
- Things that are habitual / generally true.
In this sentence, the present tense indicates a general, ongoing fact:
Frivilligsentralen organiserer dugnadsarbeid
= The volunteer center (regularly) organizes volunteer work.… og får oss til å møtes oftere i hagen.
= … and (as a result) makes us meet more often in the garden (as a general effect).
If you wanted it in the past, you could say:
- Frivilligsentralen organiserte dugnadsarbeid og fikk oss til å møtes oftere i hagen.
= organized … and made us meet more often (back then).