biscuit's languages

1000 hours of Norwegian

(Check out my previous Norwegian posts here.)

I've been learning Norwegian for 2 years, for a total of 1000 hours! I'm B2. My (ambitious) goal is to be C1 by the end of the year, and my current biggest weakness is speaking/writing. I've also been living in Norway for 6 months now!

The main idea of this update is that I've tried a lot of new things. Long list, feel free to skip around with the table of contents.

Table of contents

  1. Speaking
  2. Listening
  3. Vocab
  4. Next goals

Speaking

Talking to people

I can confirm I have officially reached the B2 milestone of being able to communicate with natives without imposing extra strain for either party (or whatever that exact wording is). I'm taking swing dance classes, which is extra challenging when you're trying to talk to people over loud music and the sounds of everyone else talking. I went to a board game night fully in Norwegian and it was really fine. I organized an entire event and texted the other people (almost) fully in norwegian. I've even been back to the språkkafe (language cafe) a couple times, but it continues to be boring so I have given up on that. My coworkers discovered I speak norwegian which was a good "american shocks norwegians by speaking fluent norwegian" kind of moment lmao. I can understand most things people say, though it is much more difficult if they're mumbling or if there's a lot of background noise.

Chorusing

The main idea of chorusing is to exactly imitate one short sentence over and over until you can say it exactly like the recording. It's supposed to help with intonation and pronunciation generally. I haven't ever done it before but I found a very cool article about it and decided to try it out (Quality Practise Pronunciation With Audacity – The Best Method! by Olle Kjellin). Basically, I've taken some audio from my favorite podcast (leseklubben) and cut out clips that are 2-3 s long each. Then I listen to the 2s long sentence on loop for 5+ min, trying to speak along with it until I match the audio. I slowly decrease the volume over the course of the 5 min such that by the end I am talking almost by myself with only a quiet guide track.

My goal with chorusing is to sound more natural and not overenunciate. When natives speak, they go fast and don't pronounce every sound. I need to learn that so I sound less foreign. My second goal, which I discovered after I started the chorusing, is to learn filler words and common phrases.

Reflections (after what little chorusing I have done...):

Norwegian class

I started a Norwegian class in January (trinn 3, B2 level). It's pretty easy but we get a lot of conversation practice so it's fun enough. The grammar points are also usually new and interesting. The homework is super boring and the textbook readings are depressingly easy when I'm used to reading native stuff. (Once, notably, our entire homework assignment was to read a 4 page excerpt from a novel (terrifying) and it took me 5 min...) But the actual time in class is enjoyable enough, our teacher is great, and it's free so I am not complaining.

Listening

LyricsTraining

LyricsTraining is a game where you fill in the blanks in song lyrics. I've done a bunch of it in German but there's unfortunately no Norwegian website. Or that's what I thought (bless norwegian prof for showing me otherwise): it's really cursed but there are Norwegian songs, they're just hidden in the Swedish section... You have to search for "(norwegian)" and tick "pending review" to find them (this link goes directly there) (see also more info). I hadn't thought much about music until now but it's actually the ideal way to hear a ton of different dialects!

Podcasts and shows

I've still been listening to Leseklubben, though I'll talk more about that in the books section. I try to keep up with Kjapt oppdatert most days (with limited success). I tried listening to that Vassendgutane podcast again and it was almost fine: I could understand the narrator and sometimes even the interviewees. They are still old men mumbling in dialect so I mostly do not understand. But hey, that previously seemed completely impossible, so we're doing pretty well. I also watched a couple misc tv episodes from NRK when I was sick and they were really fine. I understood 4/5 comedy sketches in Humoretaten. Would watch again, it's like SNL. I also watched an episode of Nytt liv i gamle hus which was not what I was expecting and was not very fun, but it was understandable so I guess that's something. I saw Matilda the Musical which was a lot of fun. I need to go to more shows in person!!

Vocab

Goldlist

Goldlist is a method to review vocab using pen and paper. You start by writing a list of, say, 20 words. 2 weeks later, you review the list and write a new list keeping the 14 most difficult words. Repeat after another 2 weeks, keeping 10 words, and then repeat a last time after another 2 weeks with 7 words. The number of words you keep decreases each time by 30%. (Because of the space in the notebook I use, I do 3 lists instead of 4 and they are 15/11/7 words each.) It's a spaced repetition method, in that you intentionally wait a whole 2-3 weeks between reviewing the words. The other key thing is that you're writing the words by hand, and ideally also reading them to yourself a couple times, getting more senses involved so that the words will stick better. I like it a lot because I like writing things down. It's also great when I am bored of Anki. It takes a bit longer but not unreasonably so (15 new words a day is 15 min of goldlist and probably 10 min of anki).

The words I write down are still out of my anki deck of every word in the dictionary (from dict.cc). I am making good progress lol. I go through and delete the words I already know or can guess the meaning of (about 2/3 of them). That leaves currently ~800 more words to learn. It's been a few weeks since I last made any lists though, so maybe I'm taking a break from that for the moment. But I could actually finish the entire dictionary list?!?

Books

I did finally finish Følelsers forvirring. It was boring but easy to read. I also listened to Frankenstein, Stargate, and Handmaid's Tale with the Leseklubben podcast. I liked Frankenstein and Handmaid's Tale a lot and Stargate some. I haven't had issues understanding any of the audiobooks in a while. I started a spreadsheet of all the books I've read. I have read a total of 2190 pages in the last year and a half (mostly audiobooks).

I'm also constantly thinking about the 5 finger rule that they taught us in middle school. It goes like this: when you pick up a new book, you read one page and count all the words you don't know. If you count 0 or 1, the book will be easy; if it's 2-4, the book is at the right level for you; and if there are 5+ new words on a page, the book will be challenging. I'm curious how this compares to reading books in a foreign language. It's super hard to find something that is under 5 new words a page in Norwegian (maybe I'd have to look in the children's section). But between 5 and 10 is possible, and there are also a lot that are 10-15, and some that are 15+. I've also heard some language learning rule that the sweet spot for reading is if you know 98% of the words in a text (or something like that); 2% unknown in a 250-300 word page is 5-6 unknown words. In my experience thus far, 5-10 new words per page is very readable, and 15+ is too hard. So I guess that's a good quick measure of whether it's a good idea to start a book: hold off on things that have 15+ new words per page!

Language islands

The idea is to focus on one specific topic at a time and learn all the relevant vocab, and create like an "island" where you can safely have conversations. Then you can move on to a different topic and have another island of conversation, and eventually as you learn about an ever increasing amount of topics, you expand and connect the islands. Ages ago I spent a week reading about cheme/matsci, I also at one point found a website explaining the norwegian political system (Stortinget Undervisning), and I found another with a bunch of other articles meant as high school curriculum material. So I've made a list of the most interesting articles on both sites, and I want to spend a few days reading up on both topics, to start. I could do it with anything, really, but it's nice to have a set topic so I can actually see some progress over the course of reading about it for several consecutive days. Basically, I read an article and note down key vocab. When I get to the end, I spend a few minutes talking to myself about it in Norwegian: summarizing, giving my opinion, finding examples, etc. Practicing using the vocab I just learned. The challenge is in finding things that are actually interesting to read, and then having the motivation to sit down and read things. But when I can bother doing it, it is interesting and fun, and I have learned a bunch of political vocab, not to mention learning about how the Norwegian political system works (imagine having a country with a functioning government... haha...)

If anyone else speaks Norwegian I would wholeheartedly recommend these:

Next goals

Like I briefly mentioned, my goal is to be C1 by the end of 2026. I mean, it's not like I have a deadline or anything, I'm just curious and it seems kinda reasonable? My guess is that I'll be C1 around 1500 hours, which at this rate should be before the end of the year. We'll see!

That being said, these are the plans that I can actually act on:

See y'all in another couple months!