A Month with LingQ and Norwegian, a report

Purpose/Background:
See old thread (First Two Weeks With Both Lingq And Norwegian, A Report. ...)

Goal:
B2 level Norwegian through reading Harry Potter. Initially I will be reading only then I will start listening to the audio after a sufficient base of vocab has been established. I plan on starting my speaking around 5k+ words. I dont have a timeframe I want to accomplish this in, I just want to enjoy the journey.

The second two weeks (one month):
I finished Harry Potter og de vises stein (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) this morning. My current stats are:

Words Memorized: 2770 (+1546, +126%)
Lingqs: 7678 (+4654, +153%)
Words Read: 87615 (+57,169, +187%)

Ratios (rounded)-
Known/Lingqs- 1:3
Known/Read- 1:31
Linqs/Read: 1:11

A summary of the last two weeks:
On my last post I stated that I am still “Toddling” or that I am between crawling and walking. I don’t know if I can truly say that I am walking full time right now, but there are times that I’ll flip the page on my phone app and I’ll only see a few yellow and a few blue words on the page. At those times, I feel like I’m walking for sure. Other times, I’ll turn the page and see lots of yellow and/or blue. The blue words are getting more specific, though. When I see lots of blue words it’s because there’s a lot of specific description, a banquet scene talking about the way the food looks and smells could be an example, or walking through a dark forest and hearing all the sounds around you.

I don’t know how I will continue to progress in my ratios (which are no standard, just something that I think is neat to track) as I go throughout the books but I’ve read some people saying that your rate of vocabulary aquisition increases with the amount of vocab you know and some say it decreases, I’ll find out over the next month what that looks like for me.

I did start listening while driving in the car over the last two weeks to the audiobook. It’s helpful that I am familiar with the story, and I’ve already read the passages from the audiobook to learn the vocabulary. I have found that some of those pesky words that seem to be important and appear a lot but you can’t get them to stick just work their way into your head and most of the time they click when listening and I don’t have the ability to check the dictionary meaning in lingq. This surprised me. I am also at the point where I can hear about 75% of the words even if I don’t know what they all mean, only about 25% of the time does it just sound like noise. I’ve also learned that the times that I don’t understand are partially because I don’t have the vocabulary yet, which emphasizes the importance of both listening and reading. For my 2700 words that I have down, there’s a chance my brain will make the connection, but for the words I don’t know, my brain doesn’t have the ability to access the internet and pull meaning out of thin air.

Here are some observations I’ve made:

  1. Just keep going, your brain will get it through enough exposure. You almost don’t even have to try, just keep reading and listening.

  2. The times that you do have to try are the words that won’t stick, just review them after the page that you are on and only try to notice, I wouldn’t even reccomend rote memorization of the words, let the definitions come.

  3. Track your progress like you’re supposed to track your weight, weekly not daily. Look at your improvement week to week or in larger chunks and don’t get bogged down on the little ups and downs of day to day language learning.

  4. Learn to be okay with some ambiguity. There are passages that I didn’t understand entirely, but I got the gist of them. When I encounter some of the same sentances and structures days or weeks later, they make sense and I haven’t even picked up a grammar book.

Conclusion:
I will report back in a month. I am starting the second Harry Potter book today. I plan on finishing the entire series before moving on to content that I haven’t been exposed to yet. There’s a YA book called Odinsbarn that’s part of a series that I want to read pretty badly, but I want to see where the Harry Potter books alone take me. I can’t wait to see where I am in July. If you have any questions please ask and I’ll answer them. If you have any suggestions I’m open to those as well.

Tusen takk, LingQ!

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Nice job! I remember distinctly my first page in Norwegian that had no yellow or blue words was sometime towards the end of the second Harry Potter book. It sounds like you’re on the right path. Just keep at it!

It took me about 6 months to work through all 7 books, but by the end I was up from reading maybe 6.000 words per hour to over 12.000, and the ambiguity just kind of goes away. It did help me that I was generally familiar with the story so when I didn’t understand things I knew the beats of what was happening at least. If you’ve read them before I think you’ll have a similar experience.

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Hey this is great to read about your progress! Keep updating us!

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Congrats keep going. Just imagine what you’ll know in 6 months or even a year if you keep the current pace up.

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I am impressed by your progress!

Where did you find the audiobook for Harry Potter og de Vises Stein? I bought it on ebok.no, but got refunded because they can’t sell that to people in the US.

Wow, I really enjoyed to read your progress. We need such topics more.

I have bought many books on ebok.no so I’m not certain what the issue there would be?

But on Pottermore you can get the Audiobooks and ePubs:
https://usd.shop.pottermore.com/collections/ebooks/norwegian

The audiobooks are also on Audible.

I gravitated to them because native Norwegian content is a little hard to find when you’re not already pretty comfortable in Norwegian.

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It’s on audible and you can use your credits for it!

That’s weird. I’ve bought quite a few ebooks and audiobooks from ebok.no. I live in the US and have never had a problem.

Here’s a few other similar sites you could try if you can’t get it to work.
ark.no
norli.no
tanum.no

I guess I could see it being a specific “Harry Potter” issue. International licensing and publishing is a mess in general, and Pottermore probably has a special agreement with Audible to even have the books for the markets where Audible/Amazon are in already.

Nice man. You’re making great progress. It took me about a year to reach advanced 2 which feels about like a B2 level to me. You’re moving at a pretty good pace so it might not even take you that long.

Besides ebooks, the best resource I’ve found for Norwegian is nrk tv. Check it out if you want a break from the books. You can access the whole catalog with a vpn. Since most audiobooks use the Oslo dialect I’ve found tv series to be really good for getting more exposure to the other dialects. I tend to switch back and forth between books and tv every so often.

I don’t think the lingq extension works for nrk tv right now but you can use a command line tool called youtube-dl to get the subtitles and audio and then manually upload them to lingq. Or if you bug the lingq team about it I bet they could make it work on the extension.

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After buying it, there was no download option from my bookshelf, just a message that said “Vi har dessverre ikke tillatelse til å selge boken til deg i landet du befinner deg i nå.” followed by (after inquiring) “Harry Potter bøken har en salgsrestriksjon utenfor Norge”

The help team is still in contact with me so maybe it will yet get resolved. Whatever the outcome, Audible will be much less of a hassle. Thanks for the link–I didn’t even think to look there.

Thanks for the site suggestions everyone.

Yeah, that could be. None of the audiobooks I bought were Harry Potter.

How many learned words did you have at the end of all seven books?

I don’t remember exactly, maybe 24 - 25.000? That was also reading news articles, a few other books to break things up as well e.g. Flaggermusmannen. I also ignore names, most things Gygrid says, names of things specifically Harry Potter like “Smygard”, etc.

Gygrid is my worst enemy right now. I ignore names, too. Seemed fair.

Hei Jeddimasterlenni,
Det er veldig gøy å se at noen faktisk også prøver å lære Norsk ved å lese Harry Potter!
I am Norwegian and last august I figured I should take advantage of this Covid situation to step up my Spanish learning pace. I decided on reading the Harry Potter series in Spanish as it was easy to find and it contains about 1000000 words, which I understand should be sufficient to achieve a decent conversational level. I have now finished about 3/4 of book number 4, so I am probably a bit slower than you.
Known words 6.000, lingQs 20.000 (so abt the same ratio as you). It was interesting to read your observations as they coincides very well with my experiences.
Since this is HP, I often wish I had the original English text to compare with as the lingQ translation can sometimes lead me astray :slight_smile: I have no HP audiobooks as I find it more interesting to spend that time watching youtube videos of various topics. Have you tried that? Is it possible/easy to find good content in a small language like Norwegian? “Dreaming Spanish” is a gem for Spanish content!
Hvis du står helt fast i noe på Norsk, så er det bare å spørre :slight_smile:

Any interest in recording the norwegian simple stories from Lingq? See the thread here: https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/content-forum/new-languages-at-lingq-a-publi?post_id=293047

Wow it took you a year to reach Advanced 2! That is really quick, nice job!

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Hey jack, I just checked your stats and you have a ton of hours of listening. Can you share some Youtube channels with us?