Monday, July 8, 2013

Slowly, Very Slowly Speaking Norwegian

I can say that I'm beginning to get the grammatical structures but I also manage to remember how to say certain things even if I don't yet know how the parts fit together or how to spell some of the words. This of course comes from Pimsleur being my main source right now. Norwegian on the Web is going faster than my audio material is and I'm experiencing some anxiety when I look at the dialogues which I don't understand at all until I study the vocabulary in each lesson. Pimsleur doesn't do that - the program introduces new words and phrases very slowly, and they're always surrounded by very familiar by now words and phrases, so even if I don't remember the new one right away, it doesn't affect  my accuracy (= my linguistic confidence) very much.

I'm still pondering what kind of Norwegian I want to have learned by day 14 of this experiment. Do I want to be able to speak or do I want to be able to do it all, at least a little? Since I'm doing this one differently, I'm tempted to abandon any attempts to do grammatical exercises, learn vocabulary, study tenses and memorize things altogether. This is after all my usual path, and I know by now how long it takes me to learn languages this way. Speaking always gets left for last, and somehow never manages to catch up with the other skills. And then it gets abandoned altogether and I am left with a solid B2-level passive knowledge of the language but very little ability to produce too many coherent sentences in speech.

I would not like it to be this way this time around.

I wonder how much of my motivation is bragging rights. After all, it would be so much fun to announce - when it finally happens - how I spent last two weeks. And it's hard to brag if one can't prove that acquiring of a new language actually did happen...