As you can see, it is organised by grammatical principle and the lesson is designed around that rather than a conversational topic. So the first lesson is all about nouns and includes the subtopics of the indefinite and definite article. For a lot of modern learners, this could be a bit difficult at first as most people don't have experience of learning languages in this way and it can seem quite technical, especially as chapter 3 has the rather esoteric title of "The S-Genitive". However, I found that after Duolingo, I really wanted more in depth grammar explanations. I found that, whilst it was great for vocabulary, Duolingo's approach of minimal grammar based around inferring the rules didn't work as well for me. This is especially true for verbs. Fortunately, Norwegian verbs are a lot less complicated than, say, their French counterparts, they only have about five different forms and they don't change for person. However, in the past tense you have four different regular endings and a host of irregular verbs and no matter how many times I repeated the lesson on Duolingo, I never understood exactly how to tell what endings went on what verbs. Luckily, pages 28 to 50 are focused on verbs in this Teach Yourself book.
As you can see, it's very text heavy. There are actually no illustrations in the whole book, which might be a concern for visual learners. This is one of the larger lessons, and it follows a pattern of outlining the forms one of the classes of verbs, how to recognise what verbs fall into that class, then providing some translation exercises. Now, this is strangely where Duolingo and the traditional approach overlap. Duolingo is centred around translation, and whilst there are a few mix and match exercises, most of it is rote translation and so despite the modernity of the platform, it really isn't so different from what this series was doing. The main differences are that rather than a phrase or sentence at a time, here we have a short paragraph (top right). Also, rather than guessing as you go, here we have new vocabulary presented just before the passage (bottom left), and the text is aimed toward developing recognition of the forms that have just been explained. It is actually not as dry as it might seem; it is really encouraging when you find you can translate lengthy passages early on and of course the full translation is provided at the back of the book.
Of course, there are downsides to this course, not least of which is its age. The texts obviously make use of fairly archaic language in both the Norwegian and the English and colloquial language isn't really touched upon. Also, and I don't know if this relates to other books from this series, but I did come across a few editing errors, for example one of the exercises says "hun" and then the key at the back will try and tell you the answer is "he". If I hadn't already done some Norwegian on Duolingo then I imagine that causing a bit of confusion, though luckily I was able to pick it up.
So, does this book have any use for the student in 2015? I think it does. You don't want this as your only study book just because, as mentioned, the language is old fashioned and as far as I am aware there is no audio for it, both of which means that should you actually find yourself in Norway, you might find it hard to get yourself understood. With that in mind, however, and making use of other resources, I found it to be an excellent, thorough way to consolidate grammar. If you are a bit more academically minded and what a further challenge after Duolingo, I would definitely recommend giving this a go!
Note: I found my copy on amazon for £3
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