Introduction to Norwegian

This was a nice course, well structured and engagingly presented. Built around the activities of a group of foreign students at Oslo university, each section started with a couple of videos with dialogue presenting new vocabulary and grammar, followed by explanations of the grammar introduced, language exercises, a video demonstrating pronunciation of particular letters, and finally a "chatbot" where learners could chat - supposedly with one or other of the students featured in the course, but in fact with a program which generated more or less relevant replies to what you said to it. In other words, there was a good variety of approaches used throughout the course, which kept it interesting. I particularly liked the way that any new grammar introduced was explained immediately, so that I wasn't left wondering "why are they saying that?" through several lessons. I think the course provides a good basis for anyone wanting to learn Norwegian: if you don't take it all in at once, you can go back and consult it later. My sole caveat is that it may be a bit daunting for absolute beginners: I'd already started learning Norwegian with another course, which helped, and clearly quite a lot of the other learners were either foreigners living in Norway or at least people with some knowledge of the language.

I found this course really enjoyable and more importantly clearly laid out, which is I guess helped by the platform, FutureLearn. It was very clear what we were supposed to do and in which order, with a neat little checkbox at the end of each section. The course itself had a good amount of exposure to dialogue and new terms and structures, with some phonetics lessons completely in Norwegian. English was still used however for all the critical grammar and vocabulary explanations. I actually completed the course in just over a week, allocating just over an hour per "day" because I was using it more as a refresher than from-scratch, and the only thing I would want more is that they extend the scope and length of the course. As an introduction, you really can't go past this.