An honest evaluation of my progress in Norwegian

It's now been about 18 months since I started learning Norwegian. Some periods of that time have been quite intensive, others have been much more passive and slow (read: lazy). After this weekend's trip to Norway, I wanted to think through my progress and evaluate honestly - and I summarise my thoughts in Norwegian below.

My main weakness has always been in conversation, and specifically listening comprehension, something I've found particularly difficult in Norwegian compared to other languages due to the range of dialects and accents present. But even though I know I've improved, and often I can understand what's being said by others, I'm still not jumping in and having those conversations in Norwegian.

I really do still have a lack of confidence, and many conversations will switch or drift into English - sometimes that's my doing, while other times the Norwegian will change to English to make things easier.

And that's the right thing to be doing. While I want to learn Norwegian, and take advantage of the opportunities presented to me in a visit to Norway, my trips there are not language-learning expeditions - they're a holiday. And I'm there to have fun with friends old and new. And the problem is that me speaking Norwegian often isn't conducive to that kind of fun - it's difficult to keep up fun, sponteneous conversation and it also risks me getting stressed, confused and frustrated.

Whether it's dancing in a club, chatting about boys or throwing ice cubes down each other's clothes, these are all things that are best done in the language that most people speak best - and that's in English. The split second of waiting for me to form a witty comeback in Norwegian can be enough to shatter the mood, and I don't want that. I'd love to be doing these things in Norwegian, with Norwegians, but at the moment I just can't do that well enough.

I really hope that the people I met at the weekend didn't think I was lazy for reverting back to English so often. I want to have a good time, and I want you to have a good time with me. And I know I certainly did.

If you're Norwegian and reading this, please comment and let me know what you think (in Norwegian!). And do please keep helping me. If the opportunity presents itself, speak to me in Norwegian. Be helpful and clear. Tolerate me a little and help me along, especially if I actually seem to be doing well, forming real sentences and not getting nervous and stuttery about it. I love speaking Norwegian with you, and I want to do it more. But I want us all to have a fun time too.


På norsk:
Før meg, vanskeligste på norsk er å høre og forstå bra, og det er spesielt vanskelig på norsk. Mer og mer kan jeg forstå hva nordmenn sier, men jeg fremdeles ikke snakker med og tilbake. Jeg mangler selvtillit, og ofte snakker vi på engelsk.

Men kanskje det er bedre. Jeg vil lære norsk, men jeg er i Norge til å ha det gøy med vennene mine - det er ferie! Og noen ganger når jeg snakker norsk er det ikke egnet å ha det gøy, fordi jeg snakker ikke nok bra, og jeg vil ikke bli frustrert!

Og nå vi er ute, og danser på en bar eller prater om gutter eller kaste is i bukser, er det bedre å snakke engelsk sammen, og ikke norsk, fordi for alle er engelsk mer naturlig i denne situasjonen. Det går bedre for alle om vi snakker engelsk. Folk vil ikke vente på meg å tenke om noe på norsk, fordi det kan ødelegge kvelden for alle. Jeg vil at jeg kunne gjøre det på norsk, men for nå kan jeg ikke, så sikkert det er bedre at vi snakker engelsk sammen.

Jeg veldig liker å snakke norsk, og vil bli bedre. Så, nordmenn, hjelp meg! Snakk med meg og vær klart! Vent litt på meg, støtte meg, spesielt om det virker at jeg snakker bra uten mange feil eller uten å bli nervøs! Men på samme tid jeg vil at vi kan alle ha det gøy - og denne helgen helt sikkert hadde jeg det veldig gøy med dere!

Weekend Norwegian challenge

Since I'm alone at home this weekend, I figured I'd use the time to set myself a little language-learning challenge.

So, by Sunday evening, my challenge is to know THREE Norwegian language songs by heart.

The rules:

• the lyrics must be available online. I'm not good enough yet to understand all the lyrics by listening only, and if I do it that way I'll only end up mimicking sounds.
• I must be able to understand what I'm singing. Understanding will make the memorisation much easier though, so this part shouldn't be an issue.
• by Sunday, I must be able to sing the three songs from beginning to end without listening to them at the same time.

I already did this a while back with the brilliant 'Oj oj oj så glad jeg skal bli', by Kirsti Sparboe, so that can't be one of the three on the list. However, I will be trying to choose relatively easy songs I think, and will probably select ones that I already know a bit.

So, keep an eye on this post - I'll be updating it with my progress throughout the weekend! And do post suggestions!

UPDATE!
I've chosen two of the three songs and have done a bit of work on them.

Adieu, from Eurovision 1982, is a song I already know quite well, in two different versions, the original and the cover by Kurt Nilsen. It's actually been very interesting for me to hear both, because of Kurt Nilsen's distinctive dialect differences, but I shall be trying to learn the original!


The second song is Intet er nytt under solen from Eurovision 1966. A bit of a cheat, as it's pretty short, but it has great lyrics, which I really want to learn.


UPDATE 2!
I've done it! Learned those two songs! I can sing them both without looking at the lyrics - and I recorded it to prove it! Listen below. You'll have to take my word that I'm not reading the lyrics though!





UPDATE 3!
And finally, the third song is done:



This one was much harder in a way - I know it less, but also Britt sings with quite a strong dialect. I didn't want to just copy her pronunciation, and would rather fit it with the way I speak Norwegian, which is much closer to the bokmål standard. I've tried that here, but it's much harder without a model to copy, so there may be more pronunciation slips this time.

Let me know what you think!

Learning Norwegian: reconsidering my goals

When I began learning Norwegian, I knew that it would be tough. From prior experience, I've experienced how tough learning a foreign language can be, both mentally and emotionally.

I thought I was prepared for this. I'd read a lot, and shared wry stories with fellow learners about the difficulties of motivation and the likelihood of looking and feeling very stupid. And for the most part I am ready for this - I can usually take it on the chin and treat it as part of the learning process. But sometimes it hits very hard.

Recently, while on a trip to Norway, I indirectly received some comments about my progress in learning the languages (I won't go into specifics here). It really knocked my confidence, especially as these words came from friends - they weren't meant to be personal and hurtful, I know... but the result was the same - I was hurt.

The comments were negative enough about my skills to make me question why I was even bothering to try, whether I was actually accomplishing anything and brought me very close to completely throwing in the towel. It affected me enough that, the next day, I refused point-blank an opportunity to have a conversation in Norwegian, something I'd been anticipating and looking forward to for weeks.

I'm still unsure what to think. I know full well that my main weakness is in my aural comprehension, struggling to understand what people are saying when they talk at normal speed, especially considering the multitude of accents, variations and dialects Norwegian has. The comments made me wonder if I'm ever going to 'get it', and whether it's even worth trying.

I could take it as advice, as a challenge - use this experience to drive me to improve my listening comprehension. I know that I can't get compliments all the time, and that anyone who tells me that my Norwegian is great and that I have nothing to worry about is lying to me and not doing me any favours. I need to learn from mistakes, and from failures, and try and make sure that, next time, these friends don't feel the need to make such comments.

On the other hand, my self-confidence and self-esteem have really been knocked by these comments. It's hard when you think you're doing well at something to be told pretty much outright that actually, no, you're not.

Am I ever going to get better? Am I ever going to be good enough at the language to make it worth continuing to put in all this effort? Should I switch my focus to another language, the speakers of which aren't all fluent in English anyway, rendering the learning more worthwhile? Or is it time to re-consider whether I really have those language-learning skills I've always thought I had since school?

Constructive thoughts much appreciated in the comments.

Rolling my 'r' - an update

As you may have read in my last blog entry, I decided to dedicate some time this weekend to training myself to roll my 'r' better, to improve my language skills, specifically for Norwegian and Serbian.

I promised to record a video, and you can watch me stumble through my attempts below (the words with 'r' are at the end, from 3:27). I introduce the video in Norwegian (with subtitles, don't worry!), and then continue in English, explaining some of the methods I used and problems I had. It was pretty difficult; I had some skills before, and I don't know if I particularly improved how I sound, but I do feel a little more confident than I did before, and, as much as anything, I know what I'm doing wrong! Now I just need to keep practising!

Comments and constructive criticism are particularly welcome.



The following sites and videos helped me this weekend, so thank you to them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKRQMCHlONU - this girl explains things well, and is fun to watch too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9mMvuRGKY8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gOZTXqgKcY - a really great video, an accompaniment to the previous link, that shows how to make your tongue less stiff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4lI6LkAeLw - for Spanish learners, but the concepts are the same, and I feel I got closest to getting the vibrations right with this one.
http://www.wikihow.com/Roll-Your-%22R%22s
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1406

Herrrrrrrrrrregud

Sorry, I'm not going to be writing about Eurovision for once! Instead, this post is about my goal for this long bank holiday weekend.

I'm going to spend some time with some internet resources I've found, and I am going to learn to properly roll my r's. Just like this man:

With the languages I'm learning, it's very important for me to be able to master this vital skill. It's one thing that's really held me back all my life when speaking foreign languages, from French to Serbian and now Norwegian.

Of course, all these languages have their own different sounds represented by the letter 'r', which are described in more technical terms that I don't really understand here. But when speaking another language, the fact is that using the English sounding 'r', where the top teeth meet the bottom lip, is a sure way to mark the speaker as a non-native, and is invariably recognisable as English.

That's why my goal now is to learn how to properly roll my r. I do have some approximation of it, which was taught to me by a friend in Serbia, and involves putting my tongue behind my top teeth and pulling it back. This isn't really enough though, as I can't maintain the sound, and I'm still not fully confident with it. Hopefully by putting my mind to the task this weekend, and really making an effort, I'll improve my speaking abilities and make myself more likely to be understood when using my languages abroad.

So, on Tuesday night, I'm going to record a video of myself speaking, and you'll be able to judge for yourself whether I've succeeded. It's a daunting prospect actually, showing my potential weakness to the world, but hopefully that'll help me to focus and overcome this barrier.

Learning Norwegian - visiting Norway

As mentioned in my last entry, I've recently started learning Norwegian. My first test of my progress came a couple of weeks ago, when, after less than two weeks' learning, I paid a visit to Bergen, Norway's second city.

I've been following the Pimsleur method with my learning, which involves a 30-minute audio lesson each day. I'll go into this in more details in a later entry when I review the course, but for now I'll just mention that it's a pure audio course, at least for the early stages, which involves learning from two native speakers on the recording, and strongly encourages a focus on pronunciation and recall.

When I went to Norway, I'd just completed lesson eleven. I was determined to try out what I'd learned on my friends, and hadn't told them anything about it before going. My intention was to surprise my friend Harald by talking to him in Norwegian when I got off the bus in Bergen city centre. I was very nervous about it all the way there, but, as I disembarked, I ignored his English greeting and spoke Norwegian. We had a simple conversation, during which I asked him how he was, said that I wanted a glass of wine and asked directions to Stortingsgata.

My vocabulary was very limited, as was my breadth of topics to discuss, but that wasn't an issue for me at that stage. I just wanted to try my pronunciation and comprehension in a natural environment, but one with inbuilt support. I was extremely worried that my accent would be very strong, and that in particular I wouldn't be able to pronounce my 'r's correctly, a strong indicator of a native English speaker. I'm pleased to report that my fears were ungrounded, as I was complimented on my accent, especially my 'r's - I even realised that I was over-rolling my 'r's, an easily-rectified problem that I would have been overjoyed to have had during my years of Serbian.

I continued my experiences by speaking Norwegian to Harald occasionally during the weekend, but the real test came when we went to a party of a friend of his on Saturday night, full of Norwegians. Of course, most Norwegians, particularly young people, speak excellent English, but I was determined to at least try out my Norwegian, and hope they wouldn't automatically switch to English to accommodate me. Happily, most of them didn't, and most of them understood what I was saying and were happy to enter into a very simple conversation with me. They were rarely more than a couple of minutes before disintegrating into a 'Jeg forstår ikke' and switching to English, but the effort was made, some success was had and my confidence boosted.

I was very worried before going that I would be laughed at for my poor accent, or lack of comprehension, or that people would just want to speak English with me. The latter only happened once, and I persevered in Norwegian with her. I was also only laughed at once, but I suspect that was more because the phrase I used, while correct, was overly formal for the situation. And my accent was genuinely praised my several people - and since it's early days, I'm taking "you sound a bit Swedish" as a compliment too.

I think much of this success is due to following an audio course. It allows me to really focus on my pronunciation without continually thinking about how words are written and distracting myself by thinking about their written form. Indeed, I have no idea how to spell most of the words I've been speaking.

Opening myself up and speaking Norwegian to strangers was a massive step for me to get over, particularly after the pummeling my confidence took in Serbia. But now I feel much better about myself, am really buoyed up, keen on my learning, and look forward to going back to Norway - this time with a much wider range of topic areas and increased vocabulary.

Learning Norwegian - an introduction

Language learning is something that's always been dear to me. I started learning French and Latin at school at the age of 11, picked up German and Spanish when they were available in the curriculum, and always generally doing well at languages. They were my best subject at school, and I moved on to take Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at university.

But since my university days, when I struggled somewhat with my learning, I've let my languages slip a little. I've made half-hearted attempts to renew my BCS, as well as occasional forays into my other languages, in particular on holiday, but with little long-term success.

Recently, however, I decided I wanted to be a little more dedicated. I wanted to learn a language and stick with it. I wanted to work hard at it and improve. And I realised that the only way I would do this was to actually use the language. I could try to brush up my BCS, and go and spend some time in ex-Yugoslavia, but realistically, that probably isn't going to happen.

So, I turned to a country where I've spent a lot of time recently, and where I have friends with whom I can practise my language - Norway. It may not be the most necessary language to learn, with many Norwegians speaking excellent English, but it's a good challenge for me, and one that's potentially achievable given my own circumstances.

I'm looking forward to it. And I'll be using this blog to keep you updated on my progress too, as a way of keeping myself honest and motivating myself. I've been learning for a couple of weeks now, so I'll be posting my first update pretty soon.