600 hours of Norwegian
(Check out my previous updates here.)
Recap
- I've been learning Norwegian for a year and 2 months now, and have done a total of 600 hours!
- My goal is to be B2 by August, when I move to Norway. I think I'm actually there?!?
I'm actually B2????
- lmao I took a look at the cefr levels again and actually b2 is so easy??? I am WAY beyond b2 at listening, and easily there for reading.
- I think I'm probably around low B2 in speaking/writing. Speaking I can't say too much about as I don't do it regularly enough yet, but I'm definitely about there on a written basis. my weaknesses on the cefr scale are specifically 1. formal interactions and 2. i generally need to continue getting more specific vocab on a wider variety of subjects, but I think I'm actually in the b2 range(!?!)
- more concretely my goal was to be adv-low, currently I'm adv-mid in comprehension, probably int-high in conversation, and around adv-low in presentation!
- give me a few more months and i'll actually be better at norwegian than german. dang. i mean, we're already there in grammar lol
- the other day I was on the post office website in norwegian trying to understand how mail works, and I was suddenly hit with the realization that I really do just speak norwegian now. Like, it was not worse than being on the post website here in german. crazy.
What have I been working on?
Grammar
- My friend told me my vocab is good but my grammar is bad, so it was indeed time to start the grammar workbook!
- The one I'm working on (Cecilie Lønn's Norsk for deg: Grammatikkoppgaver) is a B2/C1 level workbook and it definitely is challenging! But doable and I'm learning a lot
- I'm currently 1/3 done with it, doing one exercise a day, I've done 43 now so making good progress
- It's definitely nice, now I am a lot more confident about writing, I am better at catching my mistakes. I also just did the conditionals unit so that'll be really nice, that's a verb tense that I find myself needing once in a while and I just didn't know until now
- I'm generally quite anti-textbook and anti-grammar but I guess I'm coming around to it. At least when it's at the right level, it's quite satisfying to work through a grammar workbook. Unlike most things in language learning, you can really see your progress!
Listening
Like always, lots of podcasts
- Stolthet og fordom: the norwegian book club pick was pride and prejudice. This is the 4th time in the last year and a half that I've experienced pride and prejudice, and luckily I am not sick of it and it was actually better on this reread. 5 stars, very good book. Please let me go a whole year without seeing this again, please
- Frøken Detektiv og tårnet med de vridde lys: Nancy Drew radio play, it's definitely challenging, but enjoyable. I can't always make out the exact details of what's happening, like there was a point where someone was stealing something but I wasn't sure what exactly they were stealing, and keeping track of the side characters and their motivations was also difficult. I can follow the overall arc of the story, but I miss some details. I also think it's much more noticeable in fiction when I don't understand something, because it tends to be plot important. In nonfiction, if I miss something, it doesn't really matter because either they'll explain it or the subject will move on soon enough. But in fiction, the one sentence you don't understand can be them entirely changing the setting, or a big plot twist, and then it's really obvious that I suddenly don't know what's going on anymore
- Hele historien: these are nonfiction documentaries based primarily on interviews, they're also quite challenging. I listened to a couple, one about the show Big Brother, one about a chimpanzee that was living with a human family. Those ones were pretty good, pretty understandable, though it varies a lot based on who they interview. It's harder because it's just people talking about their life, so it's not very predictable, and some people have strong dialects. I also tried one again that I tried to listen to ages ago and didn't succeed at (Alexander Kielland) and it was for sure better but still difficult. So those I think are more C1 challenges. Fiction and very specific nonfiction
- Kven er amerikanarane? is a series as part of Kompass about how american history shaped our values today. it's quite interesting to see an external perspective on america, like what do other countries think about us. some of it is stuff that I know a lot about already (like slavery and civil rights history) and some is stuff I hadn't thought about (like 1. american exceptionalism, like we were the most powerful country for a lot of the last century and thus make america great again is a response to losing our time in the spotlight. or 2. that the gold rush was one of the times that really cemented the american dream in our collective conscience. also, (3.) i didn't know there were so many mormons lol)
- I try to stay somewhat up to date on news so I usually listen to the norwegian world news when they put out anything. The news is pretty solid and easy
- I listened to the påskekrim podcast Ding-dong, du er død! which was very fun. very easy, probably because the format is inherently repetitive (reliving the same day 6 times from the perspective of the 6 different people involved)
- I love podcasts, I don't even like them that much in english or any other language. but the norwegian podcasts really hit different (plus NRK has so many and they're all such high quality!! it's amazing)
Journaling
Like always, my biggest weakness is output, and it's also obviously the most difficult to motivate myself to do. But I'm trying very hard to keep up consistent journaling, I've maybe journaled like 1/3 of the days this month? It's always very satisfying, and once I get started I can write a lot, it's just the getting started that's the issue. It's quite daunting looking at a blank page and not having any ideas on what to write about. But I found a ton of essay prompts, so between talking about my life and answering those questions when I am out of ideas, it works out.
At this point I can write pretty well without needing to look up too much vocab. I can rephrase around a lot of my problems. But there is definitely a lot of vocab I don't know, and a good chunk more that I don't feel very confident about when I do use it. Now I try to write fully in norwegian and just talk around any words I don't know. I also keep a list on the side of the specific words/phrases in english that I want to use, and then I look those up later. If I write a couple pages, I usually look up 5-10 new words.
Shadowing/pronunciation
I've been thinking about shadowing again recently, because I'm reading a linguistics textbook on vowels and consonants, and there was a chapter about intonation and stress patterns. It's super interesting, and I definitely don't sound native at all in that regard. Thus, it would help if I did more shadowing. It'd be nice to do a little at a time, consistently, so I could slowly get better at pronunciation. But I have to find the time and motivation to do it.
The linguistics book also indirectly made me figure out the sound that's going on in the norwegian r's (like rn, rt, rl), it's actually the kind that's further back and tongue curled back a bit. I forget the right words. I think that's more or less what I was doing, but the confirmation/explanation of it helps. Also I still don't like the kj and skj sounds but from a conversation some ppl were having in the language discord the other day, either ppl are pronouncing them exactly the same or the kj is a skj but slightly tongue higher and further back sorta deal, so thus I finally understand that (if what I have understood is correct...)
Vocab
I'm still using anki to brute force the vocab. I do 5 new words a day from my deck of all the words in the dictionary (in the norwegian --> english direction). I'm also slowly working through the norwegianclass101 vocab lists because those are a pretty good B2 level, general concrete vocab on a variety of topics. Those I do 5 words a day in the english --> norwegian direction.
Finally, I add whatever words I look up during the journaling to the anki deck. That one is a little hazardous because I get the words from deepl, and it's not always the most accurate, I definitely sometimes get Questionable answers from there. (the other day I ran into one where i said some weird old timey synonym that no one uses anymore, and friend was like ???) but considering my overall skills at the moment, I don't think it's too big of a deal if I pick up a couple wrong words here and there. it's a small fraction of the total words, and as soon as I get doing more listening/reading/speaking with real people, I will quickly learn the more common words.
In total I have learned 5100 words in 6800 cards, of which 2400 cards have a longer than 6 month interval (those I've taken out of the main deck and stopped reviewing) and 4000 more cards are mature (over 1 month interval). Big numbers. I'm not tired of anki yet surprisingly so we'll keep going!
Next goals
- would ofc be good to continue doing more writing, and get back into the groove of calling friend and talking, it's been a while
- all these podcasts and I finished my crochet project!!! so idk what I will do now. I did get a bunch of yarn for cheap though so I guess at some point I'm knitting a scarf. we'll see when that happens
- this whole time i've been like i need to read my books before i move and i have absolutely not read my books and now i have a month and sooo many books it's a problem. if they were in english, it'd be easy, but they're mostly in french and french is slowwww. so i'll have to get busy. thus my biggest goal this month is to finish my current french book, the linguistics textbook, and one of my other books. so norwegian will go on the back burner for a bit