At the end of May I did an initial 5-day level-up project for Norwegian, with this result on a 17-minute-languages placement test:
I had moved from approximately 600 words to approximately 1,000, as well as moving from the last quarter of A1 to the first quarter of A2.
Given that the project had gone well and I had seen a significant improvement, I decided to test a second phase. This would involve a shorter daily period of study, over a slightly longer period.
Baseline
I had taken a break from significant study for the week following my last project, so had just done 1 Duolingo Norwegian lesson per day.
From my previous studies, I had a grammar cheat sheet covering definite and indefinite articles, pronouns, simple past and past participles for the 4 Norwegian regular verb groups and the most common irregular verbs. I had also completed Lessons 1-6 of an online Norwegian course from NTNU University in Trondheim.
Project Plan
My new project plan was to:
- Spend at least 20 minutes per day on Norwegian.
- Complete Lessons 7-10 in the Norwegian course each day.
- Play Norwegian YouTube content in the background while doing other activities on my laptop.
- Do one session per day on Memrise on the course 2000 Norwegian words by frequency.
Day 1
I did the first dialogue (family) and related exercises in Lesson 7, which took around 15 minutes. I then did 2 Memrise sessions, for just over 5 minutes. After that, I played 20 Minutes of Norwegian Listening Comprehension for Absolute Beginner on YouTube while doing other activities. Total time spent was around 20 minutes active learning and 20 minutes passive listening.
Day 2
I did the second dialogue (free time) and related exercises in Lesson 7, and another 2 Memrise sessions. Then I wrote a few sentences of basic introductory text about myself, and posted it to Lang-8 and Twitter. Earlier in the day I listened to a bit of Day 1’s listening comprehension, followed by some Peppa Gris. Total time spent: 25 minutes active learning and 30 minutes passive listening.
Day 3
I did 3 Memrise sessions early in the morning (the first 2 sessions were shorter than average), then the first 2 sessions of listening exercises in Lesson 7. I played a Norwegian film on YouTube in the background while doing some other activities. I wrote a second basic text about myself on Lang-8 and Twitter, which led to having a short conversation in Norwegian with another learner. Total time spent 30 minutes active learning and 25 minutes passive listening.
Day 4
As usual, 2 Memrise sessions, followed by some grammar exercises from Lesson 7. I didn’t do any passive listening today, but I did spend around 60 minutes in the evening copying all the nouns from the NTNU course and sorting them by gender. The idea is that formatting them differently will help the genders to stick more in my memory – if I think back to the noun sheet and can picture a word in the left-hand column in blue, I’ll know it’s masculine. Total time spent 20 minutes active learning and 60 minutes passive learning.
Day 5
I spent 50 minutes finishing the noun sheet and noting some patterns in the data that will help me to remember gender:
- Nouns ending double vowel + e = feminine e.g. gruppe, ribbe
- Norwegian-origin nouns ending double vowel = neuter e.g. slott, vanlegg
- Foreign nouns ending double vowel = masculine e.g. billett, bagett, penn
- Greek and Latin-origin nouns = neuter e.g. termometer, museum
- Nouns ending in -ing = masculine
- Nouns ending in -sjon = masculine (contrasts with IT -zione and ES -cion, which are feminine)
Total time spent: 10 minutes active learning and 40 minutes passive learning.
Day 6 – Day 8
I slacked off on these days and only did one lesson on Duolingo.
Day 9
I did 5 minutes on Memrise (speed review and new words), and worked through the 1st dialogue in NTNU Lesson 8 (travel vocabulary). Total time spent: 20 minutes active learning.
Day 10
I did 5 minutes on Memrise (speed review and new words), and worked through the 2nd dialogue in NTNU Lesson 8 (illness vocabulary). Total time spent: 20 minutes active learning.
Day 11
I worked through the 2 dialogues in NTNU Lesson 9 (work and conferences vocabulary), then did 5 minutes on Memrise.
Day 12
I worked through the 2 dialogues in NTNU Lesson 10 (travel and sickness vocabulary), then did 5 minutes on Memrise.
Day 13 – Day 14
Another lazy weekend – just one lesson of Duolingo on each day.
Results
Over 14 days, I studied for a total of 2h 40 minutes active study and 2h 55 passive learning. When I retook the placement test, I got exactly the same result as before! So it looks like this wasn’t enough to see a measurable improvement.
The placement test relies on recognition of vocabulary rather than any kind of grammar testing, so I’ll need to focus on learning new words in order to move up.