biscuit's languages

800 hours of Norwegian

I’ve been learning Norwegian for 800 hrs over the course of 1.5 years. I’m currently somewhere around B2. I’ve also now lived in Norway for 4 months! I’m very happy with my progress, but my overall goal is to be able to fully participate in norwegian society, so we still have a ways to go.

See my previous updates here!

Table of contents

  1. What have I been doing?
  2. 2026 goals
  3. More immediate goals for December/January

What have I been doing?

Listening

Most days I listen to Kjapt oppdatert, it’s a daily news podcast that sums up the biggest news in 5-10 min. Sometimes I listen to other longer form news, when there is a topic that’s interesting. News is really easy to follow for the most part. The one thing that trips me up is norwegian politics because I don’t yet know the key characters and how the government system works.

I’m currently listening to the Leseklubben podcast reading Frankenstein. The audiobook is in nynorsk so that is an extra challenge. With the strong dialect I miss some details, but I can definitely follow the story. I gave up on the last one though (Markens grøde) because I really understood nothing at all there.

I restarted my knitting project and learned an entire new knitting technique1 and I also have a mini crochet project so lots of activities to do while listening to podcasts :)

Reading

I’ve started several books, none of which I have finished yet...

I get a bit of reading every day from campus announcements/emails and the campus news site. I’ve also read up some on Norwegian politics on the Stortinget Undervisning website. It’s great, they have a bunch of articles explaining politics for a high school audience which is exactly what I need.

Speaking

Lots of people talk to me in Norwegian which is really appreciated <3 I usually chicken out and reply in English, but I do get some Norwegian in here and there. I’ve tried going to two different språkkafes (language cafes) to force myself to speak Norwegian but I am not really sold on either. I should go again though because they both had promise and I definitely could use the practice! It would also be nice to meet more international folks. I guess I have the opposite problem than I had in Switzerland (swiss people are reclusive cryptids, but here everyone I know is norwegian. would like somewhere in between!)

What’s annoying about my speaking skills at the moment is it takes a lot of effort and I say a lot of complete nonsense all the time. I have to think about a lot of things simultaneously to be able to make a coherent sentence (verb tenses, specific vocab, what order does the verb go in, etc). I guess I don’t have enough practice for this to come instinctually yet.

It’s a bit of a snowball effect, like once I’m good at speaking I’ll be able to participate in things fully in Norwegian and then I can get even better at speaking, but how do I get there?!? Obviously the answer is I just need to practice more. But ugh. It’s so difficult to say everything in Norwegian, and it’s so easy to just speak in English. That's where language cafes and writing are nice; then I can actually force myself to fully write/speak in Norwegian.

Vocab

I had not done Anki since the last update because I was bored of it. Then I started doing a lot more writing and remembered that I like making anki cards of the vocab I look up while writing. I just need to adjust my Anki routines to avoid boredom:

  1. More new cards and less reviews: everything with an interval of over 1 month I move to my “retired” deck, which I don’t study. I also set it to mark a card as a leech after 3 failures, and I just delete all the leeches. This should make sure that I don’t get overwhelmed with old reviews, and I can spend more time on the actually interesting part (new words!)2
  2. More interesting and relevant vocab: I have a deck of all the vocab in the entire dictionary, and while that could supply me with words for the rest of time3, it’s also dead boring to learn random dictionary words. Same with the B2 level vocab lists that I was doing previously. It's just really boring to use premade vocab lists. It’s a lot more fun if I have vocab that’s specifically relevant to me and the things I've tried to say.

Writing

A big part of my strategy to improve my speaking skills is to write more frequently. I've actually been quite consistent for about 2 weeks now, doing a few different things.

I’ve been playing a solo ttrpg, Lineage. This is probably an incredibly niche nerd activity, so to explain: solo ttrpgs are games where the goal is to tell a story. Typically there is an element of randomness (eg. rolling dice to determine what happens next) and the possibility to journal (keep a record of events, write down your character’s thoughts and feelings, etc). Lineage is about keeping records of a royal family and the things that happen to them through the ages. It works by rolling dice to determine your ruler’s personality, who they marry and how many kids they have, the big events that happen during their lifetime, and how they die. Over the course of the story, you draw the family tree and write down all the things that happen, in as much or as little detail as you want. I like rolling dice and I like that the prompts give enough structure to have a starting point, while also being open-ended enough that I can take the story where I want. My kingdom has taken a turn into dark rituals (one queen made a deal with a mysterious stranger for arcane knowledge in exchange for the life of her first grandchild…) and I’m enjoying following the drama and connecting the dots to make an overarching story. I have infinitely many of these solo ttrpgs from the couple indie game bundles I’ve bought in the past, so they should keep me entertained for a while haha.

I’ve also found some other writing prompts that look fun (here and here). In particular I've done the "random noun + verb pair" one a few times now. I generate 2-3 random nouns and 2-3 random verbs and then pick whatever combo I like best, and write a one page long short story about it. It’s entirely random which means I end up writing about very different things every day. The novelty keeps it entertaining enough.

I’ve also written some Night Vale fanfiction, which is so fun haha. Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast of fictional radio broadcasts from a small town in the southwest US where supernatural occurrences and conspiracy theories are true, but they’re just a normal part of life. For example, the head of the school board is a glowing cloud that everyone is compelled to worship. There’s a dog park that no one is allowed to enter and sometimes mysterious figures are seen in there. You get the idea. It’s been years since I’ve listened to Night Vale but it’s one of my favorite podcasts and turns out it’s really fun to take a headline from a local news website and write how it would go down in Night Vale. It’s perfect because it’s 1. easy to come up with ideas (any random news headline), 2. fun and silly, and 3. surprisingly relevant everyday vocab. Practice talking about flash flood warnings or little league games, but with a supernatural twist to keep things exciting.

I’m not really into writing and I've put it off forever. So any writing that I get done is a big victory! I've really been pushing for more writing recently because it will help with my speaking troubles. Even if it's not the exact topics that I talk about in real life, it's still practice with grammar and vocab! Which is exactly what I need so I can recall them more easily in conversation!

2026 goals

I could be C1 by the end of 2026. The main areas I need to improve in are:

More specifically, what I will do to get there is:

More immediate goals for December/January

I am unfortunately(?) being overcome by the urge to do indo, so we’ll see how much actual Norwegian I get done. But it's good to take a break once in a while too.

Indonesian plans??

Background: I did 7 semesters worth of Indonesian classes in undergrad. I’m B1. I would like to eventually be B2. Indonesian is my favorite foreign language <3 and it’s been too long since I last did any, I am having withdrawal symptoms :)

What can I do in Indo:

At this rate my next update will be about indo :)

  1. eastern uncrossed! god it's so much better than any other types I have seen. Highly recommend to fellow crocheters learning to knit!! It uses the same yarn over motion as crochet does (like, everyone says to just do continental, but there you yarn under every time and I simply can't do it, I end up yarn over-ing half the time by accident)↩

  2. I have over 7000 cards at this point, and even if I reviewed each of them once every 6 months, that would still be 40 extra reviews a day! Plus, does it even really help to see a card that infrequently? At that point surely I’ll come across the word in real life, if it’s at all useful.↩

  3. actually, even if there are 10k words to go in the whole dictionary, I already know 2/3 of them. So at this rate there’ll only be ~3000 words to learn, which is really doable. Over the course of several years anyway. I am not like some people who can just memorize the top 15k frequency list (yall are insane <3)↩

#norwegian