Det var helt texas!

According to buzzfeed and tumblr, "texas" is used to mean something wild and crazy!

Apparently it comes from associations of the "wild west" and people's belief that all cowboys come from Texas. There's a lot of discussion around it, but it's really interesting to see how different aspects of culture get translated between languages.

Update #3

What's new:

• I have added more links to the resources page, specifically to news sites for easy Norwegian news.
• On Monday I reviewed Norwegian on the Web, a great, free, online course complete with audio and exercises.
• Another Duolingo post, this time about the common complaint that it doesn't teach you "useful" phrases. Is this really a problem? Read my post to find out!

I am also looking into teaching English abroad, specifically in Vietnam. I am hoping to do this in January if everything goes to plan, I'm thinking that this will be the focus of a new blog. I am not sure how this will affect this one, I hope to still learn Norwegian and make regular posts but we will just have to see!

 

 

 

The biggest problem with duo...?!

As with anything that is different to what came before, Duolingo has split the camp between lovers and haters. Some people swear by it, convinced that it is the only way to learn a language in the 21st century. Others see its bright colours and game-like approach as unserious, injecting too much fun at the expense of actual advancement in the language. Of the many arguments levelled against Duolingo though, one that keeps coming up time and time again is the fact that the sentences aren't useful for conversation, that phrases you need straight away come up later in the course or not at all and that the sentences that are there are often artificial or just plain weird.

Strange as some of them are, I actually don't see these as a drawback, in fact, I'd go as far to say that learning to translate such phrases as "the elephant drinks milk" etc goes a long way to making sure that the structures of the language themselves stick in your mind, rather than just learning rote phrases. Duolingo works by teaching you vocabulary then getting you to use it. This is different to how a phrasebook works, where you "learn" a phrase as a whole utterance, ready to be brought out when you need it in a specific context. At most, a space will be left blank to insert the noun you need, but besides this, it's a highly specific way of learning language that isn't encouraging you to actually make use of the language. The strange sentences often used by Duolingo work by encouraging you to instead take vocabulary out of isolation- they aren't specific to a certain situation. For example, instead of learning the phrase "jeg vil reise til Norge", you instead learn the words on their own, ready to be brought into various other sitautions. It might start off with "jeg vil reise til Norge" but before long it will be "katten vil reise med fly". It really doesn't matter that no cat on this Earth has ever thought to itself "I can't wait for the next time I go on a plane", the point is, it's asking you to create completely new sentences, using the vocabulary you have learnt and then manipulating it with the structures that you have picked up.

Duolingo does teach you enough to be able to order in a restaurant, book a hotel room and navigate the rail network, just not directly. It teaches you the vocabulary and the structures behind this, then it's up to you to put it together when you go on holiday. Here's the thing: studies have compared completing the Duolingo skill trees to the equivalent of a first year college level course. Now, how many people enroll on a college language course before their holidays? And how many college courses spend the first term role-playing restaurant scenarios? There are quicker ways to learn these things before your holiday, the fact is that Duolingo isn't for that purpose, it is to get you actually understanding the language and using it, not to prepare you for a weekend break in various European cities. Courses exist just for this purpose, and they're a lot better at it than Duolingo, but they won't bring you to B1 level.

Reliving my childhood (in Norwegian)

I keep on talking about how good it is to watch videos to get exposure to Norwegian, but what do you watch? Well, on the Duolingo Norwegian page on Facebook someone posted this gem.

Episode 1 of the Pokemon anime in Norwegian! I absolutely loved this show when I was about 10, as so many people my age did, and it's fantastic to have a half-decent excuse to watch it again. I am finding it quite difficult to follow though. The speech is a lot faster than what I am used to from my course materials, but I watched the first episode twice and the second time round I did get a bit more.

The best part though is definitely the fact that the theme tune was dubbed into Norwegian! Sing with me now,

Pokemon.
Fanger alle nå, fanger alle nåååhååå.
POKEMON!

Easy to read Norwegian news

One of the best ways to expand your vocabulary and knowledge of a language is getting as much exposure to it as possible by introducing it into your everyday life. One of the ways that you can do this is using it to get your daily news fix, but if you're just starting out this can be frustrating, having to constantly look up words. Fortunately, there are news websites in simple language, but even then, if you are a complete beginner, you might need a bit more guidance. If you've just begun Norwegian and you're looking for some short, snappy articles to get you into the language, Nyheter i bilder (news in pictures) could be for you. This site combines very short, simple news with symbols so you don't have to look up words you don't know, you can just see the meaning. Sound weird? Yeah, it is, and seeing the odd little doodle of a terrorist can be a bit jarring.

 But it does get you using the language, and the symbols mean that you aren't relying on English translations but actually seeing the meaning of the word directly. Even if you know a bit of Norwegian, this can be a good way to expand your core vocabulary- the basic words that make up 75% of communication but you still might not be 100% up to scratch on.

It's also a good way of seeing the really simple structures that you can use in your own writing and speaking. Have a look at how they word their articles and see if you can write something similar on a current news story or an episode from history or anything really...

Revolusjon i Frankrike

Folk i Frankrike var ikke fornøyd.
De likte ikke kongen.
De ville en ny regjering.
Kongen var dreptes av den ny regjeringen.

Who would have thought the news could be so fun ;)

NoW: Norwegian on the Web

Norwegian on the Web (NoW) is a complete online course offered for free by NTNU, a university in Trondheim. On first glance it takes the form of a book based course, being laid out in chapters with a dialogue followed by grammar notes and exercises. The online nature of it though means that you can access the dialogue straight away when you need it and you get instant feedback on the exercises. I hadn't used this course yet and realised that I was wasting a great opportunity to get a free course from a respected university. Therefore, I have decided to give it a proper go for this blog, having a look at how it compares to what else is out there and where it can fit in to your Norwegian studies.

The Course

When you first access the website, you are presented with a nice, clean web page from which to navigate the course. The contents of the page is a guide on how to use it. This is a good way to begin as, though it is very similar to how a book based course would work, the Internet nature of the course means that there isn't necessarily a clear beginning and end so this gives you a god grounding on the best way to work through it.

There are 10 chapters in the course, which at first doesn't seem like a lot. However, each chapter contains around four dialogues and it's best to think of these as being separate lessons; they build on each other to gradually strengthen your vocabulary and grammar and each comes with their own exercises and grammar notes. There is a table of contents which you can use to base your study around.

Here we have chapters 1 and 2 and we can see that the first text or dialogue is "From Oslo by train". The next column tells you what the expected learning outcome is and then we have grammar and pronunciation. This gives you a good idea of how to progress through the chapter, doing each item in turn from left to right.

The Lessons

The first lesson follows Ken and his journey from Oslo by train to Trondheim. The big difference between NoW and, say, Duolingo, is how heavy the course begins. This is very similar to how a book-based course with audio works. You are exposed to the language in context from the beginning and you really need to take your time listening to the dialogue, learning the vocabulary and working out the meaning before you progress. This is where sites like Duolingo have an advantage over more "traditional" approaches; by turning language learning into a game and easing the student in, you ensure self-motivation is kept strong. However, that is not to say this approach is that difficult to get to grips with, it just means that at the beginning it requires more work if you have no experience in the language at all. I always find that once I get into a course like this, it actually gets easier (before obviously getting harder again when more advanced language is introduced, but by this time you know how to go about learning it).

Here, you are presented with a dialogue and they actually do you a massive favour here by giving it to you in a slow version as well so if you are struggling, you don't just give up, you can just reduce the speed. You have a few options on how you go about using this. You can either listen to the full dialogue first, then again reading the text and see how much you understand straight off, or you can bring up the vocabulary and listen whilst reading the meaning of the words. They make this easy for you, just click on the "vocabulary" link on the left hand column under "Ken".

This brings up the vocabulary list on the right of the page so you can still listen and read the text. If you are completely new to the language, I'd probably go about using the lesson like this:

1. Listen to the dialogue at full speed without reading. Close your eyes to make sure you're concentrating fully!
2. Play it again, maybe at the slower speed, whilst reading the dialogue. See how much you can pick up without looking at the vocabulary. With a language like Norwegian you'll probably surprise yourself. 
3. Now look at the vocabulary for any words you don't know. Remember the list just gives you the dictionary form of the word so it might not look exactly the same. You can click on the vocabulary here to get the pronunciation of the word in isolation. Repeat what you hear.
4. There is an English translation, accessed by the left-hand menu. Look at this if you're still struggling or just want some clarification. For the first few lessons you probably won't need this as much but as you progress it will be useful to get the meaning of more idiomatic expressions. 
5. Listen again, trying to understand as much as you can. Repeat until you understand most of it.

Once you've understood the dialogue, you're ready for the exercises!

The Exercises

This is where I feel NoW really comes into its own. The exercises are varied and really drill in what you'e been studying.

This one, for example, is a gap fill exercise reinforcing the personal pronouns. Because it focuses on one aspect at a time, it allows you to get to grips with the grammar in an more indirect way. Later exercises look at vocabulary and take the form of a crossword or matching exercises that allow you to recognise common phrases. Of course, because it's online, you get instant feedback and this allows you to go back and strengthen something you may have missed first time round. For example, I realised I really need to look at numbers again as I struggled with these. There are also listening exercises that focus on the dialogue you have been studying and make sure you can recognise individual words in a sentence.

Here, you listen to the text and fill in the gaps. These ones are a bit trickier because it's asking you to analyse the text as a whole. For me though, listening is always my weakest skill in any language I look at so this will definitely be a feature that I make use of. Other listening exercises ask you to listen and repeat and so you can focus on getting your pronunciation as close as possible to the speaker's. This isn't marked so it's up to you to decide if you're close enough to move on.

Grammar and Vocabulary
Each chapter has a complete vocabulary list that also gives you the inflections of the words. This is a clear differentiator with Duolingo, where the Norwegian course still lacks a vocabulary list. It also sets it apart from book based courses, where vocabulary lists are a standard feature but inflections are never given. This is a good reference to have and allows you to develop your own writing ability, using these as a basis to create your own texts.

A grammar overview is also provided. This is again, another great reference to have and means you know where to look if you have questions on the text you've been looking at. The grammar for the lessons is just a quick overview but NoW also provides a downloadable reference grammar that compliments the course.

How well will I be able to speak after doing this course?
 In the description of the accompanying textbook, it states that chapters 1-7 will bring you up to A1 level, and the last chapters will take you to A2.

Conclusion
The NoW course is a brilliant, free resource for learning Norwegian. If you can't afford textbooks then this is a great alternative. Even if you do have books, the amount of audio with related exercises provided means that this is a great resource for finding listening practice in a more structured way than just watching videos. I can see some people struggling to begin with, but the detailed vocabulary explanations and the English translations should mean that you have enough support to follow the course on your own at home.

Update #2

So I haven't posted in a few days because I've been helping my Dad do up his house and it was very tiring.
Anyway, now my plan for the next week is to have a proper look into NoW (Norwegian on the Web) and do a review. This is another free resource that I haven't actually used yet so I want to see if it stands up to the book courses and how it compares to other online courses.
Other things I have been doing to help my Norwegian have been listening to the radio and watching the Norwegian news on TV, but this has met with varying success! The podcasts KlarTale are pretty easy to understand as it's basically just a guy reading the news very slowly and clearly so it is good to get a feel for the rhythm of the language, but when you move onto watching the news, as you can on NRK you do notice a massive jump in the speed at which real news readers speak at. I did try the other day to watch the bulletin whilst doing housework and I repeated it a couple of times, but in all honesty at the moment a lot isn't really going in so it's more background noise at the moment. However, I think that is better than nothing as obviously you get the odd word and the more exposure you have to the language the better.
One good resource I used to use quite a lot is Lang-8, a website where you write something in the language you're trying to learn and someone corrects it for you. This is great as obviously you get to practice writing in the language and you get actual feedback on what you've written, which unless you're in a class you don't get normally.

That's it for now but check back for my experiences on NoW and anymore tips, sites and videos I come across over the next week!