How I learnt Norwegian on my own

Summary

Highlights

• Starting from motivation - her journey began with a strong desire to learn Norwegian like a native. 🇳🇴
• Emphasizing listening over grammar initially to learn the language naturally. 🎧
• Using Google Translate smartly for checking sentence construction rather than just vocabulary. 🌐
• Incorporating daily habits such as listening to podcasts and reading along with audiobooks helped a lot. 📖
• Writing personal stories and using both written and audio sources to enhance learning. ✏️
• Reinforcing learning by talking to oneself and imagining scenarios to practice fluency. 🗣️

Key Takeaways

• Motivation is crucial when learning a language on your own. Set clear goals and stay driven! 💪
• Learning like a child by listening more and worrying less about grammar initially can be beneficial. 🧒
• Don't fear mistakes; they are part of the learning process. Embrace them boldly! 🌟
• Creating personal stories or texts in the new language enhances understanding and retention. 📚
• Consistency and practice, like speaking to oneself daily, are key to becoming fluent. 🔄

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction In the introduction, the speaker expresses the challenge of conveying a complex story or message. They mention their attempts to create a video numerous times, indicating the difficulty of organizing and articulating their thoughts effectively. The speaker suggests a sense of overwhelm but takes a moment to pause and then decides to start from the beginning, implying the beginning of a more structured narrative.
• 01:00 - 02:30: Motivation and Goal Setting The chapter focuses on the importance of motivation and goal setting. It emphasizes how having clear goals can provide direction and drive, while motivation helps maintain the momentum needed to achieve these goals. The content may include strategies for effectively setting and pursuing goals, the role of discipline and perseverance, and ways to overcome obstacles. Despite the inclusion of music in the transcript, the main theme is likely centered around enhancing productivity and personal development through targeted motivational techniques.
• 02:30 - 04:30: Learning by Listening The chapter discusses the author's decision to create content in English, considering it more accessible for the intended audience.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Learning Grammar Through Context The chapter titled 'Learning Grammar Through Context' focuses on language acquisition and learning strategies. It begins by acknowledging that the strategies discussed can be applied to learning languages other than Norwegian. The narrator shares an anecdote about the common reaction they receive when people learn they have been living in Norway for three years and have mastered the language. Many are surprised by this achievement, as it contrasts sharply with their own experiences of studying languages like Spanish or French for several years at school without reaching a conversational level.
• 05:30 - 07:00: Repetition and Note-Taking The chapter explores the impact of motivation on language learning, emphasizing that personal motivation plays a crucial role in mastering a language. The author compares learning a language in school, such as Spanish, where motivation might be lacking, with learning a language like Norwegian independently due to a personal goal, such as moving to Norway. The author notes that this difference in motivation has significantly influenced their own learning journey.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Reading and Listening Practice The chapter 'Reading and Listening Practice' focuses on the author's journey to master the Norwegian language. The author discusses their ultimate goal of becoming as fluent in Norwegian as a native speaker. They emphasize that mere understanding or being understood in conversation wasn't enough; their ambition was to make Norwegian feel like a second mother tongue. This goal was a significant motivational factor throughout their learning process.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Using Series and Movies In this chapter, the focus is on learning languages through the lens of how children acquire language skills, providing insights for adults. The narrator reflects on strategies for learning a new language by emulating how children learn their mother tongue. Inspired by observing children who adapt swiftly to a new cultural environment, the approach emphasizes immersion, imitation, and the natural absorption of language without overthinking, akin to children relocating to a foreign country, such as Norway, and rapidly picking up the language.
• 10:30 - 13:30: Writing and Translating Stories The chapter 'Writing and Translating Stories', delves into the initial stages of language learning from the perspective of a child. It highlights the importance of listening as a foundation for language acquisition. The narrator reflects on their experience trying to learn Norwegian by immersing themselves in the language through podcasts, emphasizing the process of absorbing the sounds and rhythms of the language before understanding the meanings. This method mirrors the natural way children learn to speak by listening extensively before actually speaking.
• 13:30 - 16:30: Speaking Practice This chapter focuses on the speaker's approach to learning Norwegian through immersive listening practices. The speaker mentions incorporating Norwegian language listening into daily activities such as cleaning, playing non-focus-intensive games, and before sleeping. The speaker acknowledges their nerdy approach and advises that while not all of their methods need to be followed, they serve as potential strategies for language learning. The speaker also remarks on the natural grammar-learning method observed in children.
• 16:30 - 19:30: Reflecting on Progress and Encouragement This chapter discusses the difference between learning methods as a child versus as an adult, using language learning as an example. It reflects on how children learn through repetition and familiarity, such as repeatedly listening to the same book and memorizing it. The process contrasts with traditional adult learning techniques, which often involve structured exercises like filling in grammar sentences. The narrative suggests that engaging with language more naturally, as one does when they are a child, might foster a more intrinsic and effective language acquisition.

How I learnt Norwegian on my own Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 way too much to explain you guys it's way too much to say I wrote like this video so many times I thought about it so many times but it's so much to say it's so difficult to like organize it I don't know if this is good [Music] okay let's calm down and start from the beginning foreign
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]
• 01:00 - 01:30 foreign I decided to make this video in English because I thought it would be easier for
• 01:30 - 02:00 the people that haven't started learning Norwegian yet and also I thought that you could use these tips even if you're learning another language I really hope that this video is going to help you [Music] so when people hear me speak Norwegian ask me how long I've been living here and I say that I've been living here for three years they just tell me what how is it possible and they tell me about their experience with languages and they say for example that they had Spanish or French at school for five years and that they can't even like introduce
• 02:00 - 02:30 themselves in that language and they're like I'm so bad you're just so good but I too had Spanish at school and I too can't like make a sentence in Spanish the reason why I've been able to get so good is because of the motivation I had the difference between learning Spanish at school and learning Norwegian on your own because you want to move to Norway is that you don't have the same motivation I know that it's a bit cliche but it's really important it's been really important in my journey as well because when I started learning
• 02:30 - 03:00 Norwegian my goal was to speak Norwegian like a native Norwegian so I knew that I wasn't going to be perfect like right now but in the long term I didn't want to just like be able to understand people I didn't want to just be able to make myself understood this wasn't my goal really keeping in mind what your goal is really helps with the motivation [Music] so my goal was to make Norwegian like another mother tongue for me and I
• 03:00 - 03:30 thought how do kids learn languages because I know that I'm an adult now but I could try to learn this language as if it was my mother tongue and then maybe it will help me understand this language better and also I saw kids that were moving to Norway and that learned really fast because they don't think they just learn they hear people they repeat they just try to like make it their own and I was really inspired by that [Music]
• 03:30 - 04:00 so I thought okay when you're a kid what you do first like for the two first years of your life is listen you listen all the time to people and you don't speak you're just like like this and you're listening all the time so what I thought was okay what I'm gonna do first is that I'm gonna listen to Norwegian as much as possible so what I did is that I found some podcasts I found some random things I didn't understand anything anyway so I was just like listening to things I didn't care what the theme was and I was just listening all the time or
• 04:00 - 04:30 not all the time but every time I could I was doing it so when I was for example like cleaning my room when I was playing a game on my computer that didn't require a lot of focus before going to bed I would listen to Norwegian I'm a really like I was and I still am a nerd okay so I'm gonna give a lot of advice but I'm just explaining how I learned and you don't have to do everything but it's to give you ideas [Music] and then I thought kids don't do grammar
• 04:30 - 05:00 exercises they just don't when I learn French I didn't do when I was two years old grammar exercises with like sentences to fill in no I didn't do that what I did was hearing for example the same book over and over again and sometimes my mom she tells me like when you were a kid you knew one book by heart you just like turned the pages you knew exactly when the pages had to be turned and you just turned it and I thought okay this is how we learn when we're a kid we read the same book over and over again and then we take the
• 05:00 - 05:30 expressions of the books and we make it our own so I thought okay what I'm gonna do is find some scenes for example in a movie or some messages that they send each other you know in scum I'll watch some like so much it's a TV series that's Norwegian and in scum they send each other a lot of messages and some of them are pretty long and I thought okay that's perfect I'm gonna take a message that I like and I'm gonna write it down and then I'm gonna just like try to
• 05:30 - 06:00 understand the words which word mean what and then I'm gonna read it a lot of time so what I did is that I used Google translate you can like make Google translate read you things of course it's a bit robotic it's really like a robot but it does pronounce the words in the right way and of course what did help me is that I knew some people in Norway so I could
• 06:00 - 06:30 ask to record for example a message for me and to send me a vocal so that I could hear the melody of the language and try to like reproduce it when I was reading it so this helped me a lot but I think that you can find this on internet as well on Instagram I gave you a tip of a podcast and then you get like an email with a text and you have a podcast so the person that wrote the text reads it for you as well so you could use this method with this podcast for example okay okay it is nobody understood
• 06:30 - 07:00 anything of this explanation but just go check this video on my Instagram I explain it way better I swear what I found doing this is that I was learning everything I need to learn about the language in one text so if I was reading a lot of times for example like five sentences and I was learning grammar vocabulary conjugation pronunciation I was learning all of this in one exercise in a way [Music]
• 07:00 - 07:30 at the same time he's doing this I thought I also want to learn like some easy words to start a sentence or to like build a sentence so I made a list of all the words that I thought were useful I couldn't find now the list that I had made but I remember that I had some words like Alone Together some basic verbs and a lot of these words that you use all the time and then every time I would see a sentence with these words in it I would be like oh yes that's my word I would take the sentence
• 07:30 - 08:00 and write it on another piece of paper and then I had like all these sentences with all the words that I wanted to learn in it and then it helps me remember vocabulary and be able to use the vocabulary that I learned I got a lot of questions on Instagram about how to remember vocabulary how to learn new words how to like know how to use the vocabulary that you learned and this is my answer try to see it in context and when you want to learn a word try to
• 08:00 - 08:30 find a sentence in a movie or in a book or something like this with your word then write the sentence on another piece of paper and then try to read the sentence like for example once a day once a day like 10 minutes before you go to bed for example instead of being on your phone you take the list of all the sentences that you think are interesting to learn and you read them out loud and you try to remember how the accent goes I had a lot of videos on Instagram about
• 08:30 - 09:00 pronunciation in Norwegian you can try to like remember all of this and read it out loud I'd like to show you how I took notes for me to remember the pronunciation of words so for example I would write on top of the real word like how I would have written it since it was pronounced that way and also I could write like some arrows or some waves under the words to remember where the emphasis was put on the word the more you read one sentence again and again the more it's going to become like automatic for your brain to build a
• 09:00 - 09:30 sentence that way and then when you're gonna have to build a similar sentence in another context your brain will think automatically oh this structure I know it because I've read it so much that I it's a bit like automatic for me so maybe you will be able to replace the words in the original sentence by other words in the context that you're in now and make a sentence without having to think like oh yeah this grammar rule I remember it was like this and like this and then you just get stuck with all
• 09:30 - 10:00 your grammar rules and you don't really know which one to use instead of being stuck with grammar you can learn grammar without knowing that you learn it and that's what I did I wanted to learn for Norwegian to become a language that was automatic for me that was going to be a part of me really so I'm not saying that it is wrong to do grammar exercises I'm just saying like in this video I'm explaining how I learned it based on my goals and for me doing grammar exercises wasn't interesting my goal was for
• 10:00 - 10:30 Norwegian to become a part of me and I wanted to understand Norwegian I wanted to learn Norwegian like I would as a kid about this anti-grammar rules speech I just want to say that I did need some rules to learn Norwegian the thing is that I learned the rules later in my learning process and I think honestly that it could have saved me time to learn them before because it takes a long time to know things because it's become automatic for you and to figure things out on your own which is what I
• 10:30 - 11:00 did and I liked to do that but I don't think that it's necessarily the best way to do it and I did need some rules and when I started teaching Norwegian I did buy some books some grammar books with rose in it and honestly it helped me take my Norwegian to the next level so I'm not against grammar at all I personally don't like to do grammar exercises but I'm not saying that knowing the rules is a bad thing it is actually a really good thing [Music] what I also did to help me do that learn
• 11:00 - 11:30 new words and new conjugation in a context is writing my own stories writing my own text because sometimes I didn't really find a text that I really liked and also sometimes I just wanted to learn something that was a bit more personal so what I did is that I would describe what I did during the day for example or what I wanted to do tomorrow and in the very beginning you don't know you you don't know how to make a sentence so you're like I want to say this and this and this but I don't know how to say it I don't have anyone that can help me use Google Translate I know
• 11:30 - 12:00 that like at least for me at school we saw Google translate like the devil it was always like no don't use Google Translate but Google Translate is actually good if you give it context so if you just write a word maybe Google Translate is going to give you like a word that has nothing to do with the word you're looking for but if you write a whole sentence with a good context and a sentence that's correct in the language that you're writing it in Google Translate will most of the time translate it right what I did was write
• 12:00 - 12:30 five sentences about my day for example and then put it in Google Translate see what it was giving me writing the Norwegian version of my day and then do exactly the same try to read it out loud A lot of times make Google translate read it for me I'm a little foreign so I did that more and more and as I was
• 12:30 - 13:00 doing it I realized that it was easier and easier for me to make my own sentences so of course I was making a lot of mistakes when I was writing a sentence but I felt like okay now I know a bit how to make a sentence in Norwegian now I have an idea of what it should sound like so what I was doing for example is instead of writing my day in English in Google Translate I would write it first in Norwegian then I was writing in English and Google translate and comparing my version and the right
• 13:00 - 13:30 version [Music] I was lucky enough to be able to come to Norway sometimes and then I would buy books so my relationship to books and to reading in Norwegian is a bit weird I have never wanted to read Children books which is weird if you think about the fact that I wanted to learn like a kid but I still was an adult and I wanted to learn as a kid with adult books so what I was doing is buying books that were way too difficult for me I didn't
• 13:30 - 14:00 understand anything honestly when I started reading these books but I liked it I was like I need to do as if I had no choice as if there was no one to teach me and I had to figure it out on my own so what I did was taking a book with me everywhere so I would just open the book like for example this book I read this book I read a bit later when I understood Norwegian but I would open the book like in the middle of the book and then I would try to see if there were some words that I knew if there were some like sentences that I could
• 14:00 - 14:30 understand and I loved doing this I was just just going through the pages Norwegian was a bit Chinese still for me but I wanted to be lost in the language try to just take the language as it was and not try to control everything and I thought like this book is my goal my goal is to be able to read this book let's start now and when there was a sentence that I could understand or when there were like many words that I understood I was so happy and like I
• 14:30 - 15:00 felt so proud and I got so much motivation because I was like this is a book that normal Norwegian people read and I can already understand a bit of that book and this was like the best feeling for me [Music] another thing that I did really often was to read a book and at the same time listen to the audio book because when you read even if you read in your head your brain still needs to know how to
• 15:00 - 15:30 pronounce the words to go like further and that's why it takes so long to read in a new language so I feel like having the audio book and a person that just reads the book to you at the same time as you follow is really good sometimes I would just listen to one chapter first just listen and then I could work on like my listening skills I would try to understand as much as possible and then I would take the book and follow the text in the book at the same time as I was listening to the podcast [Music]
• 15:30 - 16:00 and of course I was also using series and movies to learn and really I was doing exactly the same as everything I explained to you in this video I was watching for example an episode of a series and then I would watch it again and copy some sentences that I thought were useful I would change the subtitles sometimes like the first time I would watch it without subtitles to see what I understood then the second time I would watch it with Norwegian subtitles to see
• 16:00 - 16:30 if I understood a bit more then the third time I would watch it with English subtitles and then I would re-watch it again for example with norwegian's titles now I'm speaking of like a scene not a whole episode or a whole movie obviously but like a short scene that lasts two to five minutes you just watch it a couple of times with different subtitles but I did that a lot and of course when there was a sentence that I thought was useful that I just copied it in my notebook and if I just wanted to like have something to read something a
• 16:30 - 17:00 bit easier than the book I could just go through all the sentences that I had written and then I knew already what they meant it was a bit more motivating and I could still read them out loud and I could still learn a lot of vocabulary from them [Music] then I had like vocabulary lists like this and what I did was write stories with them again I was lucky to know someone that was Norwegian but what I did was write my stories in English and then I would send my stories to people
• 17:00 - 17:30 that I knew they would translate it in Norwegian and then send it back to me when I got my story back now you know what I did I read it a lot of times and I also got like a vocal then I would listen to the vocal like a lot of times then I would like read it until I knew it by heart I would spend one to two weeks on it let me know if you want me to share them with you actually it could be nice for you because I wrote a lot of really long Stories full of vocabulary
• 17:30 - 18:00 of expressions of conjugation that I wanted to learn I could make videos about that let me know if you want me to make videos about that and what I did as well to work on the writing is listen to the vocal without reading it and try to write all the words that I heard then I could work on my comprehension and I could also work on the writing and on the spelling of words [Music] I think that we think of learning things by heart as like a bad thing but honestly these stories learning them by
• 18:00 - 18:30 heart and reading them a lot of times what it helped me with was remembering vocabulary understanding grammar learning conjugation working on my accent and when I could say a whole story like this by heart I could speak without taking breaks my brain knew how to make a sentence knew how to pronounce words without taking breaks in between and this is why I think that it's so
• 18:30 - 19:00 nice to learn sentences by heart is because when you like try for example to speak to yourself or when you try to speak to someone else it's really good you have to do it but problem with it is that you're always looking for your words you're never like saying a whole sentence without taking a break or this will take a long time for you to do and then you never to learn you never teach your brain to pronounce words to work on the accent in a long sentence because
• 19:00 - 19:30 you don't know how to make a long sentence and I think that or I don't think I'm sure that this the fact that I did all this it helps me for two things that like impress people a lot when I speak Norwegian is that I speak really fast without needing to take breaks and I have a really good accent and pronunciation and this is because of my stories like a hundred percent because of my stories [Music] I totally forgot to mention it earlier but of course speaking to yourself is
• 19:30 - 20:00 really important because all of this that I just said now there wasn't any speaking part where you can just say what you want to say out loud and I did that since like the beginning or maybe like a month after having started I started talking to myself I did that a lot anyway I I really like love to speak and when I'm alone I also like to speak now come there foreign
• 20:00 - 20:30 foreign and what I was doing when I was talking myself was trying to imagine that I was the best at speaking Norwegian and this helped me a lot with my confidence at least when I was alone it helped me a lot to DARE working on my accent without feeling like I was stupid if you know what I mean like when you learn a new language and you try to like force a bit
• 20:30 - 21:00 on the accent in the beginning because you don't really understand how to balance the pronunciation then you feel a bit stupid when you're alone and you just speak betray to like think in your head okay I'm the best I'm the one that speaks Norwegian the best it's not like for you to think this but it's for you like just in the moment so they're doing the accent as you think it should be and for it to be a bit easier to speak to yourself speaking to yourself can be so much you can like tell yourself about your day you can try to speak about a movie that you saw about a book that you
• 21:00 - 21:30 want to read you can try to speak about so many things actually and if you don't have inspiration you can just take a picture and try to describe the picture try to imagine what the people are doing I try to do this a lot with my students I just take a picture or drawing with a lot happening and then I just ask them to pick one character to describe them physically first learn vocabulary about like how they're dressed and their hair and all of this and then we try to imagine why this person is here I'm sure to be like okay maybe this person is
• 21:30 - 22:00 running because he's light to go catch a train because he actually is leaving with his lover that he hasn't seen in two months and like all of a sudden you have a lot of things to say and you can learn a lot of new words by describing a picture and putting a bit of imagination in there [Music] with languages as long as you work you will get better and even if you don't see the progress right now even if
• 22:00 - 22:30 you've been working for two weeks and you feel like you're exactly at the same point as two weeks ago first it's not true you're improving even if you don't see the result right now and second maybe in a week you will see like suddenly oh now I can feel it that I've become better so knowing that you can't always see the results right now this is completely normal but if you keep doing what you do if you keep working if you keep trying to find out what is the best
• 22:30 - 23:00 method for you you will get better it's a promise that I make to you I hope that this video was helpful I hope that you learned some things and that you can pick out some ideas to make your own method that yeah that you have been able to get a bit inspired from the way I learned Norwegian to learn whatever language you're learning and I'll talk to you really soon because I'm coming back on YouTube and I want to make a lot more videos I have so many ideas and yeah I hope that all of this
• 23:00 - 23:30 will help you in your language Journey