tu m'niaises-tu?

Trying to get myself to a B2 level by 2027 and I thought I'd ask around about it

whoah I didn’t see this until now, sorry for the delay!! Idk what level you’re at currently, but I’m going to aim my advice at the B1-B2 learning curve, cause I feel like that’s where people start growing out of duolingo and the like and needing a greater variety of resources!

My first advice is to get a Norwegian tutor, on italki or otherwise, and just do lessons however frequently you can afford just to get some speaking and listening practice with a real live Norwegian! I did plentyyy of reading and writing practice before moving here, and spoke well enough to pass the B2, but on my first day of classes with Norwegian students and professors I was completely overwhelmed!

Likewise I also wish I had listened to a wider variety of podcasts or even just watched NRK news without subtitles so I could get better at understanding spoken Norwegian in different dialects. It was a rough learning curve getting used to all the dialects after moving here!

My pro listening tip is to look for Studentradioen i [city] if you have a certain dialect you want to focus on, and you can find tons of podcasts by students in that city across a wide variety of topics. These were super helpful to me because they speak like normal, casual people at a not-slowed-down pace, and you get to learn a lot of conversational things that way!

For prepping for the B2 test specifically I watched a lot of Debatten on NRK, because at the B2 level they want you to defend opinions and such. So both topics and opinion vocabulary from Debatten were very helpful!

I also saved up and paid for a month of a B2 course on Note.no where they had a ton of example Norskprøven essay questions and I could submit as many essays as I wanted and a teacher would read it and give me feedback on how to reach B2 level. Idk if they still let you do as many as you want but you should look into it!

ikke en/det døyt; ikke døyten

ikke det grann, ikke den minste

nothing/not at all

Thus, a baby not only has to learn words and their meanings but also learn to segment lots of sounds INTO words. Doyouwantalittlemoresoupyesyoudoyoucutie. Damn.

When she talked about HOW babies learn to segment words our professor said, and I love it, "babies are little statisticians" because when listening to all the sounds, they start understanding what sound is likely to come after another vs which is not.

After discussing lots of experiments done with babies, our professor added something that I already knew somewhere in my brain but didn't know I know: All this knowledge is helpful when learning an L2 as well:

Listen to natives speaking their language. Original speed. Whatever speaker. Whatever topic.

It is NOT about understanding meaning. It is about learning the rhythm of the language, getting a feeling for its sound, the combination of sounds, the melody and the pronunciation.

Just how babies have to learn to identify single words within waves of sounds, so do adults learning a language. It will help immensely with later (more intentional) listening because you're already used to the sound, can already get into the groove of the languge.

Be as brave as a baby.