I Made It a Little More Official

Today, at the beginning of week 5 of my attempt at Norwegian, I celebrated a little.

Since my knowledge of the language is probably hovering somewhere between A1 and A2 right now (closer to A1 than A2 but I will not allow this detail to deflate this balloon in which I'm currently traveling across the sky), I decided I deserve a little acknowledgment of the knowledge I acquired.

So instead of a little medal or a blue ribbon, I gave myself a virtual nod - I added Bokmål Norwegian to the languages I speak on my LinkedIn profile. Thank goodness LinkedIn allows for some indication of the proficiency level of the languages that people (claim to) speak. I wholeheartedly indicated that my proficiency level happens to be "Elementary proficiency".

On a moderately related note, I'm finding that the more advanced I become (advanced - doesn't feel right to use this word yet but since this is me patting myself on the back session, I'll let myself have it), the more distracted I become with different resources I find to learn Norwegian. I remember when at the beginning of this journey I was bemoaning the scarcity of the learning materials. Now I have more than enough. I almost feel I'm losing direction a little bit. The different resources are making learning more interesting but they're also making it harder for me to measure my progress. I may remain torn between quantifiable and organic knowledge - and I know most serious language learners are totally pro-organic (maybe with the exception of professor Alexander Arguelles who at any point in time knows exactly how many hours/pages of writing/pages of reading he invested into each language that he's studying) . And I so longed to know exactly where I stand!

But I guess that ship (or should it be balloon?) has sailed. I will learn to embrace all my knowledge then, no matter how it was acquired.

Klar Tale

I tried to read an online magazine in Norwegian today. A bit of a frustration it cost me but it didn't affect my attitude towards the language. The article I attempted is about the movie Despicable Me 2. I found it surprisingly difficult - my tiny yellow dictionary doesn't have most of the words I needed to look up, and I really dislike online dictionaries.

As I'm getting over that dislike and the self-disappointment I experienced, I'm exploring another online magazine that I discovered thanks to one of my former compatriots who some time ago attempted an experiment similar to mine - however different his methods.

The magazine I'm reading is called Klar Tale. It is written in simple language and as far as I know, it's meant for the learners of Norwegian. This is what I found on their website:

Klar Tale er Norges eneste lettleste nyhetsavis. Større skrift og enkelt språk gjør avisen lettere å lese enn andre aviser. Klar Tale kommer ut hver torsdag som papirutgave, som lydavis på CD og podcast, og som punktskriftutgave. På våre nett-sider klartale.no finner du alltid de viktigste nyhetene. De er alltid lette å lese. Fordi vi bryr oss om at alle skal få informasjon.

It speaks to me. And it speaks to me in a language I can understand, even if not completely without difficulties.

Relatively Undiscouraged - on to Chapter 5

I have come to the realization that chapter 4 in the Teach Yourself Norwegian book was meant to make me reassess my goals. The fact that I go stuck on it - so desperately that I abandoned the book itself for a few days - served some purpose. Now I can say with some confidence that if I didn't let that one awful chapter derail me in my resolution, my resolution is safe.

I still can't say that I defeated chapter 4. There's some massive vocabulary there that I haven't committed to even the short-term memory. Of course that means that I would probably be a horrible sightseer in Oslo - after all the chapter deals with sightseeing in Oslo - but I realize it may be years before this hole in my linguistic education will affect my life. So I decided to do something radical and GET OVER CHAPTER 4.

I may go back to it at some point - surely months from now. In the meantime, life is too short. So today I moved on to chapter 5, fully expecting it to be as difficult as chapter 4 was. So I made a plan to change the way I work through the book and instead of trying to do all 3 dialogues one after another in one sitting, I was going to do just one dialogue today. Then another one tomorrow. And so on. It would have slowed me down in my language acquisition but I was planning to add some other methods to fill the presumed holes. However, it turns out chapter 4 was much worse than chapter 5. I'm breezing through chapter 5 and I don't feel any worse for not having completely internalized the content of its predecessor.

What IS slowing me down is all the research I do these days about languages, learning and learning languages. Right now I really want to read Stephen Krashen and his theories of language acquisition. I keep telling myself if I spend time on theory I will have no time left for practice, so I'm trying to wait it out and if possible not purchase any huge volumes full of theory.

It may be hard.

So today I think I will try to do some more of chapter 5 of Teach Yourself Norwegian, work through unit 24 of Pimsleur and read some more of Anne of Green Gables and its Norwegian translation. Lofty goals but it is a sunny afternoon perfect for a walk in the park with some foreign sounds in the headphones.

I'm really liking this language!

Trond Viggo Torgersen - Tenke Sjæl - Makes me Smile on Day 21 of my Norwegian Experiment

Fiction Interlude

I'm feeling a little better about the state of my Norwegian today. This may have to do with the fact that so far I've read one third of the Norwegian translation of Anne fra Bjørkely - still side-by-side with the English version but from time to time I would read the Norwegian version before I comforted myself with the familiarity of the original. And I understood more than I expected after not even 3 weeks of learning the language.

Tomorrow the plan is to do Pimsleur in the morning during my commute and then some Teach Yourself Norwegian stuff in the evening. I may even dare to move to chapter 5.

I already know Norwegian will not be as easy as I hoped it would be. But I'm accepting the challenge, however more difficult it becomes every day.

Adjectives and the Gender-Confus-ed/-ing Nouns

I'm finding myself stuck on chapter 4 of Teach Yourself Norwegian. Stuck completely - between a ton of vocabulary for which I have no mental hooks (so I feel like I'm learning it anew every time I go over the lists) and the suddenly and inexplicably difficult forms of the adjectives. Also, gender is strangely proving quite the challenge - especially that some of my learning resources do and some don't include the feminine gender. It's nice that there's some leeway in Norwegian on whether to use it or not, as I'm reading. However, I'd rather deal with absolute rules than this supposed freedom that forces me to mentally correct between my Pimsleur audio material and the Norwegian on the Web, which use "ei", and my Teach Yourself resources, which happily announce that "en" is just as accepted for all the traditionally feminine nouns. I'm afraid that giving a beginning learner any kind of freedom may create more confusion than progress.

Another thing I'm still getting over is the definite article that gets attached to the end of the noun instead of going in front, like the indefinite one does. And I can't somehow get used to what happens to the whole article situation when the noun is modified by an adjective. I know it theoretically and I could write it out but there is no way I can think fast enough to say it.

In many ways I feel much less advanced in my studies than I felt a few days ago when I just hit my 2 weeks with Norwegian. Is it that the more one knows of the language, the more ways one has to get things wrong?

Now I'm torn between wanting to move on to chapter 5 - since technically I completed chapter 4, however inadequately in my mind - and reviewing chapters 1-4 until I completely know every single sentence in them. I think I will postpone the decision until I've listened to a few units of Speak Norwegian with Confidence. I have a feeling the early conversations dealing with introducing oneself and other simple matters may give me the confidence I need to continue in good spirits.

Anne fra Bjørkely - Reading Fiction in Norwegian on Day 15

I read two full chapters of Anne of Green Gables in Norwegian today, or what I should call Anne fra Bjørkely. Several discoveries:

• As much as it is awesome to read fiction in a foreign language, the knowledge of the past tense - any past tense - really helps in understanding. Need I say in my norsk travels I have not yet come across any past tense? Should I give it another week before I continue? Somehow I don't think I will...
• It seems to me that the translator (Mimi Sverdrup Lunden) was taking some serious liberties with the material! I was reading my freshly borrowed from the library version side by side with the English version that I have on my Kindle. As far as I could tell, some parts were missing and some parts were rearranged. I've been reading much about theories of translation and I know that some leeway is there to make changes in the material. I can also imagine that it may have been impossible to translate some of Anne Shirley's frantic monologue in chapter 2, or even some of the descriptions of the brooks and hills around Green Gables. But somehow I feel cheated out of some of my Norwegian text!
• Even though I probably would have much more trouble if I didn't have the English text available to compare my imaginings of what the text says with reality, when I analyze single pages, I realize that I know a lot of words. More than I thought. They are of course single words, and the context would still escape me if I didn't have the crutch of the English text. But I have some solid foundations already. It's satisfying. 

The book I have has 3 volumes of the Anne novels. I've never read them in English but now I may read them in Norwegian. And by volume 3 I may even need no English crutch!