November Update

Well, it has been a busy month! I have been accepted to teach in Vietnam, so I will be heading over there in January. I have also been writing a book, which is available to buy on amazon if anyone is interested. It is called 61 Tips to Succeed in any Language! and brings together many of the tips and tricks that I have picked up over my language learning career. It isn't that long, but it has solutions for many of they problems that people face when they learn a new language. It is my first ebook so I am especially keen to hear any feedback, both positive and negative!

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!

Et besøk

En av naboens katter besøkte moren mins hus da jeg studerte norsk der.

Hun stod på boken min og jeg kunne ikke skrive så jeg besluttet å ta meg en pause. Jeg rakte ut en hånd og strøk katten. Hun er dronningen av huset og det er ikke engang hennes hus!

 

Why Norwegian?

With around 5 million speakers, Norwegian might seem a rather bizarre choice of language to learn, especially by someone who has never even been to Norway. Here, I give my reasons for picking Norwegian:

1. It is probably the easiest language for English speakers

We often hear about how German is so close to English, how the words are so similar and how, millennia ago, they were one and the same. I have always thought this was a bit of a far-fetched claim. Yes, they descend from the same ancestor but so what? Personally, I've always found French words reveal themselves much more readily than their German counterparts, probably because after the Norman conquest so much of our vocabulary was taken over as well. A few centuries before the Normans though, the Vikings took over large parts of England and gave us so many basic words. Are, cake, egg, till (unTIL), they... all these words come from Old Norse and are still recognisable in Norwegian. This, as well as the shared family background, means that such basic phrases as

Jeg kommer fra England

or

Norge er et nordisk, europeisk land

are readily understandable to an English speaker. The grammar of all the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish and Swedish) has followed a similar pattern to English: the declensions have been lost, the conjugations have been simplified and the old genitive is now a clitic 's' showing possession. Of course, there are many differences as well in areas such as word order, but personally I have found these a lot easier to cope with than the various differences between English and German. 

2. The Scandinavian languages are often described as "mutually intelligible".

I am not going to make the claim that it's three languages for the price of one, that would be vastly underestimating the differences between the three languages, but it is true that native speakers of the Scandinavian languages can understand each other to a great extent as they share a lot of vocabulary and the grammar is often very similar. Out of the three, it is the Norwegians who often understand the other two languages the best, as well as being better understood by the others than, say, a Swede understands a Dane. For a foreign learner, however, understanding spoken Danish is a whole other story! Nevertheless, you can often get a general idea of what a Swedish and Danish text is talking about from your knowledge of Norwegian. To get fluent, you will need to study them properly, of course, but Norwegian gives you the best foundation possible in them. Icelandic is, though, an entirely different ball game and you will basically be starting from scratch! 

3. Norway is one of the most beautiful destinations on Earth. 

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this one:

Geiranger

More of the famous Norwegian fjords

A Stave Church

Bergen

Stortinget- the Norwegian parliament- in Oslo

4. Learning about a different culture.

This is often the reason cited for learning a language and it's a great reason- no matter what language you study, you're being given the opportunity to see the world through new eyes. Norwegian is especially fascinating as a foreign language as it is at once an ancient and very modern country, in Europe but not in the EU, independent and the centre of the Viking world but experienced many years of foreign domination under the Swedes and Danes. Its history has affected the language as well- Bokmal, the most used of the official standards, derives to a large extent from Danish, which explains the similarity in writing, but it preserves the Norwegian pronunciation, which is closer to Swedish. Nynorsk, the other standard, is an attempt at preserving the dialects of the countryside and this debate between the two sides has driven Norwegian language policy. Norway gave us one of, if not the, greatest playwrights of the 19th century- Henrik Ibsen, as well as one of its greatest painters- Edvard Munch. With any language comes a wealth of memories and stories and Norwegian is no different. 

I hope this inspires you, if not to learn Norwegian then maybe to pick up another language just because you want to. All languages are worth studying no matter how small and especially with the Internet, language learning has never been more accessible. 

Duolingo Part 1: My story

Duolingo is one of the most popular ways of learning languages these days with millions of learners using it everyday. A few months using it is supposed to give you the equivalent knowledge of the first year of a college level course, giving you all the grammar and around 2000 words depending on the course. Norwegian is one of the smaller languages on the site with 182,000 learners, but this doesn't change the quality of the course. It takes you right from saying hello, to discussing politics, dealing with the passive and finishing with a unit called Celebration, a nice way to finish!  I will go into detail about how Duolingo works in a later post and give it a proper review, but for now I will just talk about how I used it and got on with it. I completed it a few months ago now and I found it a great way to get used to the language.

I had done a bit of Norwegian before starting, but I was finding it difficult to consolidate everything I was reading. I found myself redoing the first unit of Colloquial Norwegian over and over again, not absorbing the vocabulary as well as I wanted and just not progressing. So when I got an email saying that the Norwegian course had been released, complementing the Danish and Swedish courses already on there, I was eager to begin!

I breezed through the units, greatly aided by how similar a lot of Norwegian word are to English and the friendly grammar. The website has a lot more features than the mobile app, and I found the grammar explanations simple. They aren't enough to develop a complete understanding of the intricacies of the language, but adequate to give you at least some idea of how the language you are studying works.

For me, vocabulary is where I normally stumble in language learning. I find learning grammar rules a fairly straight forward experience, especially when it comes to endings and things like that, but for some reason vocabulary is something I have to really study to get. Duolingo helped a lot with this, the spaced repetition is a great help and the activities really allow you to see the words in use. This is a real bonus because a simple glossary doesn't reveal shades of meaning, you need to actually see the words in context.

The Norwegian course on Duolingo has a lot of personality and you can really see the dedication of the team who made it. It is full of pop culture references and a sentence that seems really odd at first suddenly clicks and you realise its a movie title or quote. This adds a lot of fun to what could easily just become repetitive translation exercises and it's fun to see what you can spot.

I finished the course in about a month and went on to more traditional, book based courses. This would be my recommendation to people who have completed Duolingo, I think when you finish you have a lot of information swirling around and a book course lets you consolidate what you've been doing and the variety means you get a wider vocabulary than if you just use one course. However, I go back to it quite often. If say, there's a topic on the arts I'll go to Duolingo and redo that unit. It's great for grammar as well; after learning the rules and doing the exercises in the book, I'll do it again on Duolingo, where I find the activities there get you to recall it a lot faster and gets it lodged in your brain.

I'll post a full review soon, but in the meantime give it a go! It makes starting out at least in a language easy. Feel free to find me on Duolingo, my username is alexwilliamson92

Velkommen!

In 2014 I graduated from the University of Bristol in French and Czech. Here's me:

I love languages, as you can probably guess from my degree subject. Since this time, I have been really focusing on a new language: Norwegian. Yes, at around 5 million speakers it is possibly even less useful than Czech on an international level, but the country is fascinating and the language is really beautiful, so I have started this blog to share my journey with you! You will find details of what I have tried, what has worked, what resources weren't so good, interesting facts that I have come across, cool vocabulary and a whole lot of random stuff. Hopefully. Vi ses!