Norwegian: The First Hundred Hours

Back in March, I decided I wanted to learn Norwegian. This was partly motivated by a general enjoyment of and interest in learning language, but primarily motivated by my becoming completely hooked on Ylvis. I decided to keep track of how long I spent learning the language, and I have just hit a total of 100 hours. I thought I'd detail exactly what I managed to get through in those first hundred hours (note that I only included time where my primary goal was language learning, not my incidental exposure to Norwegian by watching Ylvis).

On average I've spent about 25 minutes a day working on Norwegian, but there has been a lot of variability - some days I've spent close to 2 hours, some I've spent only a few minutes, and some I've skipped altogether.

The first thing I did was to buy Teach Yourself Complete Norwegian. This was originally a printed book with audio CDs, but I bought the Kindle version which had the audio tracks embedded, which was pretty cool. This was a nice introduction to the language, but I felt like it encouraged me to rush through the material. The book took me about 20-25 hours to work through, and to be honest after another 75-80 hours I still feel like I'm just consolidating the material.

Basically my issue was that I never knew whether I ought to be spending time memorising what I was reading. I ended up using Quisition to learn the vocab lists at the end of each dialogue, which turned out to be not such a great idea. The vocab lists used English glosses which were appropriate for the context of the dialogue, but they often weren't the best general translation to learn, plus it was never clear if they were citation forms or inflected forms. It would have been more helpful to have learnt the vocabulary list at the end of the book. Plus I could have taken the time to memorise the tables of irregular words. But I think at the time it was all a little overwhelming.

When I had finished the book, I expanded the vocabulary I was learning with wordlists from Free Norwegian Lessons and NorwegianLanguage.info (still using Quisition). I also started learning words from the frequency list at Wiktionary. I wanted to use a frequency list firstly because it contains words that are actually common, rather than ones chosen by someone else, and also because it lists inflected forms rather than citation forms. I chose this frequency list over others available because it is taken from subtitles and therefore emphasises words common in speech rather than in writing. It's a bit messy though - in particular a bunch of the words are Danish rather than Norwegian. But I'm gradually working my way through it, and so far I've learnt (the actual Norwegian words out of) the most frequent 800 words on the list.

Another task I worked on simultaneously with learning vocabulary is translating some song lyrics (mostly Ylvis songs) from Norwegian to English. My strategy for this was to write out the Norwegian words, look up the meanings of any words I didn't know and write those down, and then try to write a rough English translation of each lines. Where I could, I then compared this with any official or unofficial English translations I could find. I realised doing this that I tended to actually already know most of the vocabulary; it just went by too fast in the songs for me to understand in real time. But I find this exercise really useful for applying the vocabulary and grammar that I know to actually understanding real Norwegian.

Around this time I found a really useful post on Tumblr called Jeg lærer norsk which has heaps of links to useful Norwegian resources. The first link I used was Norwegian on the Web, an online course at a similar level to the Complete Norwegian book, although with a slightly different focus. I liked being able to do exercises on the computer and get immediate feedback on whether my answers were correct, rather than having to look up answers at the back of a book, but I think it overall wasn't quite as easy to follow as Complete Norwegian. Still, if you were looking for a free introductory Norwegian course I think this would be a good choice.

The Jeg lærer norsk list also has links to heaps of exercises that are supposed to go along with physical books. These couldn't be used as a standalone course because there are no explanations of anything, just the exercises (and also because the instructions are entirely in Norwegian). But I found it very helpful to get additional practice at a level that I had already studied. I also found it to be a more naturalistic way to learn grammar. Instead of being presented with sets of grammar rules, I was attempting to produce something grammatical, and if I made a mistake then the correct form was modelled for me. This really helped me to internalise the rules so that the answer came more intuitively. I have worked through the exercises for two books so far -- På vei and Norsk på 123. I much preferred På vei because it had just the right amount of similar exercises for me to make generalisations. At first I liked the large amount of listening exercises for Norsk på 123, but I soon realised that most of them were just dictation exercises and often I had little comprehension of what I was listening to.

While I was working on the online exercises, I also bought two physical books - Norwegian Verbs And Essentials of Grammar and an Norwegian-English Dictionary. Both of these are mainly useful for reference. I also added the verb conjugation tables from the grammar book to my lists I am learning through Quisition. I try to work on my Quisition flashcards every day, and on most days this probably takes up at least half of the time I spend working on Norwegian.

The final resource I have used in my first hundred hours is the Learn Norwegian with Karin YouTube channel. The videos are not particularly comprehensive or ordered in a helpful way so I don't think they would be very helpful on their own. But I found them useful for two reasons. Firstly, they do a great job of demonstrating pronunciation slowly and then at normal conversational speed. Secondly, they include colloquial speech patterns that are not present in written Norwegian (for example, contractions). So these videos are really helpful for working on listening as opposed to reading and writing.

Writing this blog post has made me realised just how much I've actually managed to get through in 100 hours. I'm still a long way from being able to understand Norwegian that hasn't been specifically scripted for learners, but I'm getting there. I tried the Alfaskolen Level 1 placement test and scored 84%. They expect a score of 90% after completing a one semester course using På vei as a textbook. I'm fairly happy with that, and it also confirms my feeling that I still need a bit more practice at a beginner level. But I'm almost ready to move on to the next level.

So what's next? Well I still have 4200 words to work through on the frequency list, and about 100 verb conjugations to learn. There are 4 more books' worth of online exercises linked to from Jeg lærer norsk, plus heaps more links for me to look through. I think I'll have plenty to keep me busy for the next 100 hours...