Saturday 23 June 2012

Progress Update 1

As I've been going through the third Harry Potter book, I've been experimenting with how I go about reading it as a parallel text. I've got a lot of free time over the next few weeks and intend to make good use it and am using a slightly different approach. I am now just reading through it sentence-by-sentence first looking at a Norwegian sentence to see if I understand it all and if not, I look to the English and then back to the Norwegian until I can understand it. I then simply continue this without going back over a page or chapter.

This is allowing me to cover more ground and allows me to get more engrossed with the story. I am sacrificing listening to audio at this stage but thankfully as I have visited Norway every year since I was a baby, I've heard enough Norwegian to be able to read Norwegian and get the right pronunciation the vast majority of the time. Once my reading comprehension becomes very good unaided, I can go back and shadow material along with the audiobook.

Today I covered 54 pages and, though I have not done this quantitatively my recognition of vocabulary has increased a lot today. I'm starting to notice a lot of words coming up again and again and I'm starting to get a lot of random Norwegian "noise" mentally when doing other things. People who have used the Listening-Reading method have also reported this and it is probably to be expected when doing this relatively intensively. I am understanding more and more sentences without needing to make much reference to the English translation.

Will see if I can put in a good number of hours tomorrow. I certainly find it more enjoyable by not repeating anything and considering I have five books worth of material that I enjoy and in the one idiolect, I don't think I'm missing much by not repeating pages and chapters.

2 comments:

  1. Found this blog via HTLAL while reading articles related to R-L and vocabulary studying.

    I've found the blog as very useful and along with the links you've posted it has helped me a lot to acquire some first-hand information and experience from the subject.

    Hope you will reach your goal with Norwegian! I'm interested to hear more about the project. (:

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  2. Hi,

    I recently found again your old posts on HTLAL. (Most people who used to be active there have moved to language-learners.org though ).

    I wondered how you were getting on? Are you still in Norway? If so, I assume you speak it like a native now!

    Cheers,
    M.

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