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.

Teach Yourself Norwegian 1967: The Old School Approach

One of the books which I have used quite a lot is the 1967 edition of Teach Yourself Norwegian. As you can probably guess, it uses the traditional grammar-translation method. Most modern courses are laid out by theme; chapter 1 normally covers introductions, chapter 7 might deal with food and restaurants etc. Not so here.

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

Duolingo Part 2: The Review

So here's the big one, my attempt at reviewing Duolingo Norwegian. In part 1 I told you about my own experience on Duolingo and how far it took me. Here, I am gong to look at how Duolingo works, reviewing its features and discussing how you can get the most out of it.

The Tree
Once you've signed up with Duolingo (a simple process, you can log in with facebook) and chosen your language, you are presented with this:

All the lessons are grouped into "skills"- the circles- and arranged in a "tree". From the start you are guided through your studies- you can't skip ahead unless you've already studied the language and pass a test- and the tree tells you exactly what you are going to learn and when. I personally think this is a great way of setting out a course. Everything is broken down into small topics and so, for example, you know that within the first ten lessons you'll have learnt names of some animals, how to talk about food, how to form the plural and some verbs. The fact you can see everything but not just rush ahead, as you could in a book, actually really encouraged me. I looked forward to learning about the arts and philosophy, which come quite late on, and so stuck the course out. If you're not into the arts, then there's skills on science, nature and fantasy, which was a really cool skill all about trolls and witches.

The skill icons change depending on your strength and how firmly it's planted in your brain. They turn coloured once you've unlocked them. Once their gold you've completed them and they're in your mind, though as you can see in the "Definites" skill, the strength bars start going down once you've left it for a while. This means you should go back and strengthen them. This is a really good aspect of the course, it actually lets you know what your weaknesses are and what you should revisit- just because you've finished a skill doesn't mean you can just forget it. For a lot of people, this is a bit of an obstacle in Duolingo, it's nice to have a gold tree and it takes a lot of work keeping it that way, but I think you can really use it to your advantage. Instead of just ploughing ahead, every time you start a session, before moving on, take time to revisit a past skill. This is especially important later on, when you're learning a lot of new words for some skills. It's fairly easy to keep the first twenty or so gold as they use a lot of vocabulary that overlaps with English, but later on you really need to keep it fresh in your mind to make the most of the later skills. Each skill consists of 2-10 lessons, each of which you need to pass to move on.

Lessons
Lessons consist of around 10-40 exercises but if you make mistakes, instead of sending you back to the start (as it used to- lose three hearts and you're out!) it simply extends the lesson, making you repeat certain words until you get them right.

That's an example of one of the early lessons and as you can see, it starts off quite simple. You simple have to select the picture of a woman, with the Norwegian written underneath. However, dn't be fooled, it gets more complicated:

Here, you're being asked to translate a full sentence of Norwegian using the words you've learned with the matching exercises, as well as introducing new vocabulary in the actual sentence. If you hover over the words, it gives you a translation. If you click on "Tips & notes" in the top left of the exercise, it brings up the grammar explanations for the unit. As you can see, there is a lot of support provided, but you quickly stop relying on the translations and start doing it yourself. This is a nice, rewarding way to learn- from the beginning you're dealing with actual sentences that you quickly learn to read and understand.

Other exercises involve listening and speaking. These can be a bit tricky as, for example, in the listening exercises the voice doesn't always pronounce things clearly and in the speaking exercises it might find your particular accent hard to understand, or, as I saw when my friend was studying French, you can just make an assortment of noises and it will congratulate you. As the voices are computer generated, you really do need to explore other options to get used to the sound of Norwegian, by watching videos or listening to the radio. This is possibly where Duolingo's biggest weakness lies, though from early on you're introduced to speech, this is limited. It's best to see this as a starting point, to here sounds in context, rather than a means in itself to become fluent at speaking and listening Norwegian.

What to do after Duolingo?
When you finish Duolingo, you might be asking yourself what do you do next? For the other, more popular, languages, you have the option of helping out with translating real texts, but this hasn't been rolled out to the new courses yet. Fortunately, there's a few options outside of the Duolingo world for you to look at and try. As I've said quite a lot, after finishing I had a lot of general ideas of the grammar floating around my head, but no organisation, and so for me I have been following various book courses. The ones I've found the most helpful are Colloquial Norwegian and Teach Yourself in its various editions. I've also been trying to watch videos and listen to the radio, but I am less disciplined when it comes to these two activities. Nonetheless, it definitely helps to hear Norwegian as it is actually spoken, outside of the context of the course.

When it comes to vocabulary, memrise is a really helpful website. It works on the flashcard concept, which is a feature notably lacking from the Duolingo Norwegian course but present in some of the others. Someone has even gone to the trouble of making a Duolingo course on memrise which brings together all the vocabulary from the course in a handy set of flashcards, all 2314 of them, organised according to the Duolingo Norwegian tree.

Of course, the best way to learn Norwegian is to... GO TO NORWAY! Unfortunately, this hasn't been an option for me yet but hopefully one day. I have heard that it can be quite difficult to get Norwegians to speak to you in their own language as they are taught English to a high level from an early age, but if you force yourself to stick with it, make a point of ordering in Norwegian and making yourself understood, then it should really help to get some proper exposure. This is nevertheless all hypothetical as I have yet to go to Norway, but it is definitely next up on my destination list!

Final remarks
The biggest positive about Duolingo, and this really cannot be stressed enough, is that it is free. I don't know of any other provider that has such a complete course for nothing, taking you from complete beginner to a good intermediate level in a short period of time. I think for a lot of people starting out in Norwegian, or any language Duolingo teaches, this really is the best way to begin. There are drawbacks, of course, and for the skills of listening and speaking especially, you will want to supplement your learning as you go. Try youtube videos where a native speaker gives you essential vocabulary or try fairytales where a lot of the simple vocabulary from the early Duolingo lessons will, again, be spoken by a real native speaker. Again, for grammar, after finishing the course I found it useful to consolidate what I had learnt with a "proper" course. This isn't to detract from the positives though. With so much vocabulary, you should be able to read at least simple newspaper articles, wikipedia pages on Norway, and simple stories in Norwegian. Don't let your journey stop once you've completed the tree, explore the language and make it your own.

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