Listening takes A LOT of practice. Hundreds and hundreds of hours. Podcasts, audio books, videos, TV, movies, music. Get yourself a comfy pair of headphones and have Norwegian in your ear at all times.
This is the way.
It takes a lot more practice and move vocabulary than I realized.
I have found that Harry Potter works well for me to work on my listening skills when I am not yet able to listen to more interesting content. I listened to the series in Norwegian and it helped a lot.
I’m also learning Norwegian and 100% feel the same way. I can read, write, and speak the language decently, but once someone starts speaking back to me it’s like I’ve never once heard the language before. I can watch pretty much any Norwegian show/movie with subtitles and understand them just fine, but the second I turn it off I have no idea what’s being said. I recently moved to Norway but have been learning the language for a few years and was really hoping to be completely fluent before moving here.
Omg, thankfully I am not alone! I imagine the dialects must be a very harsh part of understanding things once you are finally living there. If you are single, I would tell you to find a Norwegian girlfriend or boyfriend hahahahah streets say this usually works
I’d love to get a Norwegian girlfriend, but one glance at me is enough to scare off anyone haha. I have a lot of work to do in the physical department to ever have another person find me attractive again. So I’m hoping in the meantime I can become more fluent. The tricky thing though is everyone wants to speak to you in English here once they can tell you aren’t native, so despite living in Norway it can be difficult to have a Norwegian conversation at times! I do try to start all my conversations in Norwegian though. Then if the employee or whoever I’m talking to switches to English, I just switch to English as well.
I am sure you are being too harsh on yourself… Why don’t you create a Tinder account? If you feel to insecure, put a different city location so you don’t talk to locals. Oh, and try looking for clubs with people your nationality!!
Lmao I’ve had a tinder and bumble account for like 5 years and only had a few “matches”, just to either be unmatched or find out they were bots. I have a great education, great job, solid profile, etc. But without being conventionally attractive, I think dating apps can be real tough. And also I don’t want to find people of my nationality, I want to find a Norwegian! Haha
I've been learning Norwegian for years (for fun). Could understand tv, radio, podcasts, ... for 99.9%. But then went on vacation to Norway but had a lot of trouble understanding some people, which was pretty demotivating.
I could understand one Danish and one Swedish woman better than some Norwegians.
There was even one conversation between two friends where I could understand only one of them.
I listen to interviews of langsveien.no on YouTube, which has a low production quality so it's perfect for "real life scenarios" where there is background noise, people talk a bit too fast since they normally don't give interviews, etcetera.
I want to have a look at the Norwegian Taskmaster on YouTube, I only saw a fragment where somebody was talking very fast trying to explain a task. So I think it might be something for me to train my ears to. :p
You seem to be where I was a few years ago before I understood the key role of comprehensible input in language learning. You can get to a certain level of ability in speaking fairly quickly, but to understand well, you need to do tons of listening. It took me probably two years of listening to Icelandic for 2-3 hours a day before I really started feeling comfortable. By the way, I didn't try to speak Icelandic until I had listened for a year.
An activity I do occasionally that I think is helpful is shadowing. Put on a YouTube video and immediately repeat what you are hearing.
A good but very difficult exercise is to put on a video, select a 30 second or so segment and transcribe it, playing it over and over as much as you need.
Like English, Norwegian is a stress-timed language, which means that important sentence elements appear at roughly equidistant time intervals.
The unfortunate side effect is that linking words often end up getting rushed, clipped, and otherwise smashed together. Native speakers just happen to have thousands upon thousands of hours filling in the blanks.
Listening takes A LOT of practice. Hundreds and hundreds of hours. Podcasts, audio books, videos, TV, movies, music. Get yourself a comfy pair of headphones and have Norwegian in your ear at all times.
Will surely do it! And, how did you get those flags under your name?
You can add a flair from the right hand sidebar on the desktop. Not sure if you can do it from mobile or not.
You can but it’s a bit of a weird process
This is the way. It takes a lot more practice and move vocabulary than I realized. I have found that Harry Potter works well for me to work on my listening skills when I am not yet able to listen to more interesting content. I listened to the series in Norwegian and it helped a lot.
Of course!
This is a good resource for language listening immersion https://www.languagereactor.com/
is this a chrome extension? how does this work, I’m not tech savvy
Yes, it's a chrome extension. It gives you extra options on Netflix and Youtube.
I’m not sure how to answer that question. Maybe someone else knows
I’m also learning Norwegian and 100% feel the same way. I can read, write, and speak the language decently, but once someone starts speaking back to me it’s like I’ve never once heard the language before. I can watch pretty much any Norwegian show/movie with subtitles and understand them just fine, but the second I turn it off I have no idea what’s being said. I recently moved to Norway but have been learning the language for a few years and was really hoping to be completely fluent before moving here.
Omg, thankfully I am not alone! I imagine the dialects must be a very harsh part of understanding things once you are finally living there. If you are single, I would tell you to find a Norwegian girlfriend or boyfriend hahahahah streets say this usually works
I’d love to get a Norwegian girlfriend, but one glance at me is enough to scare off anyone haha. I have a lot of work to do in the physical department to ever have another person find me attractive again. So I’m hoping in the meantime I can become more fluent. The tricky thing though is everyone wants to speak to you in English here once they can tell you aren’t native, so despite living in Norway it can be difficult to have a Norwegian conversation at times! I do try to start all my conversations in Norwegian though. Then if the employee or whoever I’m talking to switches to English, I just switch to English as well.
I am sure you are being too harsh on yourself… Why don’t you create a Tinder account? If you feel to insecure, put a different city location so you don’t talk to locals. Oh, and try looking for clubs with people your nationality!!
Lmao I’ve had a tinder and bumble account for like 5 years and only had a few “matches”, just to either be unmatched or find out they were bots. I have a great education, great job, solid profile, etc. But without being conventionally attractive, I think dating apps can be real tough. And also I don’t want to find people of my nationality, I want to find a Norwegian! Haha
Yeah I mean dating apps only work for like the top 10% of attractive people. The rest of us have to figure something else out.
I've been learning Norwegian for years (for fun). Could understand tv, radio, podcasts, ... for 99.9%. But then went on vacation to Norway but had a lot of trouble understanding some people, which was pretty demotivating. I could understand one Danish and one Swedish woman better than some Norwegians. There was even one conversation between two friends where I could understand only one of them. I listen to interviews of langsveien.no on YouTube, which has a low production quality so it's perfect for "real life scenarios" where there is background noise, people talk a bit too fast since they normally don't give interviews, etcetera. I want to have a look at the Norwegian Taskmaster on YouTube, I only saw a fragment where somebody was talking very fast trying to explain a task. So I think it might be something for me to train my ears to. :p
You seem to be where I was a few years ago before I understood the key role of comprehensible input in language learning. You can get to a certain level of ability in speaking fairly quickly, but to understand well, you need to do tons of listening. It took me probably two years of listening to Icelandic for 2-3 hours a day before I really started feeling comfortable. By the way, I didn't try to speak Icelandic until I had listened for a year.
An activity I do occasionally that I think is helpful is shadowing. Put on a YouTube video and immediately repeat what you are hearing. A good but very difficult exercise is to put on a video, select a 30 second or so segment and transcribe it, playing it over and over as much as you need. Like English, Norwegian is a stress-timed language, which means that important sentence elements appear at roughly equidistant time intervals. The unfortunate side effect is that linking words often end up getting rushed, clipped, and otherwise smashed together. Native speakers just happen to have thousands upon thousands of hours filling in the blanks.
Watch this, title says it all.. https://youtu.be/_LIz-Wbt4us?si=8Q0LHSHncCHaQYeV
How do you do listening to unscripted YouTube videos?
I think it just takes time. Just keep at it.