Customer Reviews

Colloquial Norwegian: A complete language course (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm in the military and began learning Norwegian for an upcoming exercise. I found this book rather informative, but too fast paced for the beginner. Luckily this was my third Norwegian instruction book.

I would reccommend that beginners start out with the book "Norwegian in 10 minutes a Day", as this will give you a basic understanding of the pronunciation by actually translating it phonetically next to the 'norsk ord'. As you go through the book, you will become used to the pronunciation of the words rather than having to flip to the pronunciation pages in other books. Once you have finished your "10 minutes a Day" book, I would recommend this book (with the tapes) or the Teach Yourself series.

I managed to study about 30 minutes a day for 6 weeks and scored fairly decent on the Defense Language Proficiency Test (1/1+). This language is fairly easy for English speakers, so good luck!

If you are going to begin to learn Norwegian from this book I would strongly recommend to buy it with the audio cassettes. The book is really good with the grammar and vocabulary but you must have an idea of the grammar terminology to get the most from this book.
This book helped me when I moved to Norway so I could have a "survival" vocabulary once in Norway and be very independent in my daily activities.

This book contains grammar, vocabulary, conversations, just everything. This book is designed for beginners who have never learned norwegian. But after studying this book, you will have no problem with simple conversations. I particularly liked the cassettes. The narator explains norwegian easy to understand. You can learn norwegian simply by hearing the cassettes. I recommend you to buy cassettes because the norwegian language has a weird accent.

The feature I appreciate the most is that you start speaking from the very first lesson. You don't spend hours learning grammar, though you do learn the most important fundamentals to speak correctly. The book starts with the basics of a conversation and then gradually moves on to more complex topics, while at the same time you learn a number of verbs and words that will allow you to construct sentences faster than you think. I strongly advise you to buy the whole set, i.e., book, CDs and cassettes.

For vocabulary and grammar, this is one of the best. My biggest complaint is that the authors throw entirely too much vocabulary at the reader without providing a glossary with the lesson. This leaves you spending a lot of time leafing through the glossary at the back of the book (a big waste of time). Moreover, there are many words introduced that not only aren't translated, but don't even appear in the back of the book. Authors should have been more careful on this point. A cardinal rule of language pedagogy is that you either introduce chapters heavy to new grammar or heavy to new vocabulary, but not both. And make it easy on the learner. This book, while good, is not great for these reasons.

This is a decent book, but not the best (IMHO). If you are going to use this one, do it in conjunction with Teach Yourself, Beginner's Norwegian, or Janus' Norwegian Verbs & Essentials of Grammar. Either that or plan on some irritating moments along the way.

I liked:

the dialogs on the CDs. They present some speakers with really pretty and/or varied dialects. There is a reasonable amount of practice (could have been more, though). The grammar, although presented in a rather bizarre fashion at times, is pretty comprehensive (more on this in a moment).

I did not like:

the vocabulary presented in each chapter is not well-documented. You have to continually flip back and forth to the glossary. New words are at times not documented anywhere at all. The grammar is presented haphazardly. It's not what is presented--that is explained really well, actually--but it is the order in which it's presented. There is no logical pattern or progression that I could see. It's as if the author woke up each morning when writing this book and picked concepts for the day out of a hat or something. I just like to see a bit more organization!

All in all, this isn't a bad book. But in my opinion it suffers from some bad presentation choices and skimpiness in vocabulary documentation. If these things were cleared up, it might well be the best out there for Norwegian, because I do think it covers a bit more ground than either Teach Yourself or Beginner's Norwegian--some editing revisions and this could be an excellent book. But, as it stands... 3.49 stars.

I bought the kindle version of the book and then I bought the Audio CD to complement the book. There are no match whatsoever between the book and the CD.

They are only very few lessons and exercises that do match. It is however a painful experience .This fact is not advertised anywhere. I consider this a big mistake and a misleading offer.That is why I

am not giving any star to this item (I am forced by the system to show a rating, so I am giving one star).I feel strongly about this and Amazon should proceed to correct the way these items are presented. If you want to have a good head start at Norwegian I do recommend the

Pimsleur Method. You can learn more about the product in [ ... ] (a Division of Amazon).I purchased/downloaded the complete course of 30 lessons.IT's GOOD STUFF

I found this book to be confusing, introducing new words and phrases without explanation and poorly demonstrating grammer/pronunciation. In addition, the Norwegian taught is old generation...in other words, you end up saying things that people laugh at when you're in Norway! Over and over again, I was told that people don't say things the way they were taught to me in the book...very disappointing for someone who is trying to pick up a difficult language like Norwegian. I definitely don't recommend.

I am not an expert on teaching languages but I have had ten years of language courses in high school and college, from latin to russian to french etc. I am American and my wife is Norwegian. This book is full of mistakes and anachronisms. If it was edited at all the publisher should fire the editors. The grammatical explanations are needlessly pedantic. Don't buy this book!

I am still working on it but can say that is a very good material. It has a book to follow and also audio to listen almost the same material. I am new to Norvegian and can not say how good I will become but could say that this material can give some structure to the learner.