300 hours of Norwegian

03 Nov, 2024

I've been learning Norwegian for 7 months now. I've hit 300 hours! I'm at B1/intermediate mid.

Main themes of the past 3 months

Intentionally practicing output
- Vocab flashcards
- Pronunciation practice
- Writing/journaling practice
- Talking and texting with friends
I've had plenty of input as usual (podcasts and audiobooks mostly)
Visited Trondheim!!

anki duolingo vocab (8/25-10/26): brute force memorize a bunch of words and verb conjugations in the production direction, hopefully it'll help for recalling some words!
1984 book club read along!! (10/6-10/17)
- this slaps i love books. 1984 is a good book and i'm fairly familiar with it already so i had barely any issues understanding it
shadowing (10/16-?): try to improve my pronunciation and try out shadowing as a technique
nanowrimo (national norsk writing month, 10/24-11/30?): i journal or write about whatever in norwegian every day, my goal is 250 words per day!
book club: heroin chic (10/23 - ?)
- kinda a weird one... harder to understand because it's a lot more stream of consciousness style, and because the narrator does not enunciate :,) sometimes i can totally follow, and sometimes it just completely loses me

I can understand lots of words but I can't always remember them when I want to say something. So I decided to try out some flashcards to practice recalling vocab
Anki Duolingo vocab deck in the eng > nor direction (I see the english word and have to remember the norwegian word)
- Duolingo deck was good for this because it was mostly things I was somewhat familiar with. I went through and deleted all the ones I already knew well, which was about 40% of em
- If I get stuck on smth (like if i keep remembering a synonym), either I write a hint on the card or I just delete it.
- I did 30 new words a day (sometimes more), finished the whole 2500 words in 2 months!
Since I still have a lot of time to kill on the train and am not tired of Anki yet, I've got another flashcard deck (top 6000 words in norwegian part 2, or smth like that)
- These are a fair amount of new things, so I've put both directions (nor > eng and eng > nor)
- Slowing down overall

I haven't ever tried shadowing before but apparently it helps with pronunciation so I'll give it a shot
After doing it a bit most days for about 2 weeks, it's a lot easier. I can repeat along to Lær Norsk Nå podcast episodes while walking to/from work. They're slow enough that I can follow!!
It's pretty fun. People can think what they want about me talking out loud to myself because they don't speak norwegian lol
My issue with norwegian is not so much the sounds themselves (I can pretty much make all the sounds if I'm repeating after an example), it's the knowing what sounds to use and then actually being able to do them in the split second of trying to say a word. For example with the r's, I can do them all when I listen to an example! But if I'm actually talking, I think that I tend to overthink and overexaggerate them and I can't remember the right sound. So idk, hopefully doing more shadowing will make it more automatic and muscle memory.....?

I definitely think I can say more things more confidently when texting. I can say more or less whatever I want if I try, I just sometimes still default to english to be faster or to express a particular nuance of sarcasm or smth. Compared to before, where I could say simple things and simple sentences but if I wanted to express a full thought or something more complex we were entirely in making up words territory
Writing practice: I started out on the website 65words, where as the name suggests you write at least 65 words a day. I thought it was too quick and easy, so I've changed to writing more in a journal app. My goal is 250 words/day, it's very doable on the train which is nice. It's a good challenge, and I can say more than I expected.
I'm not too worried about getting grammar corrections at the moment. At the moment I mostly just need to be able to talk at all, it doesn't need to be perfect yet.

went to norway and did the most norwegian thing of avoiding talking to anyone for the whole time lol
other norwegian ppl were very impressed that i could read and translate stuff so hey there's that
trondheim is really nice, but I need to not be getting any ideas about moving there bc I would have a terrible time in the winter haha

Daily plans

When I have extra time/motivation

Review ntnu norskkurs because I need the grammar practice
Read my norwegian books (need to finish my english book and my french book and my switzerland book first though........)
Just have a good time and enjoy myself lol