# 32 My very personal language learning tips (hint: fall in love with the process) [tips]

We explore why motivation beats method when learning Norwegian and how joy, identity, and daily habits make progress stick. We share hard-won lessons from English, French, Greek, Arabic, and Mandarin, then turn them into practical steps you can use today.

• find personal motivation(s)
• choose resources that fit your goals
• read aloud
• write to lock in vocabulary
• learn a lot of vocabulary (maybe by using flashcards)
• don't be ashamed of your accent
• reframe errors as learning fuel
• make the process playful and enjoyable

Ha en fin dag! Vi snakkes!

Chapters

• 0:13 New Year, New Norwegian
• 0:54 Language Roots And Early English
• 2:51 French, Grammar Joy, And Motivation
• 4:24 Greek Experiments And Losing Steam
• 6:54 Arabic: Rules Vs Reality
• 8:04 Mandarin Struggles And Finding Purpose
• 12:09 Characters, Pinyin, And Rekindled Drive
• 12:50 What Keeps Students Motivated
• 15:10 Identity, Confidence, And Using Norwegian
• 19:21 Choose Materials That Fit Your Life
• 20:08 Speak Out Loud And Write Often
• 21:50 Vocabulary, Comprehension, And Inclusion
• 23:27 Mistakes As The Fastest Teacher
• 25:56 Embrace Difference And Keep Playing
• 28:14 Accents, Confidence, And What Matters

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

We are in January, and some of you might have as a New Year's resolution to finally start learning Norwegian for real. Been there, done that, not with Norwegian, but with Mandarin, which I'm learning or trying to learn right now. This episode I've been thinking about making it for a very long time, and I felt that yesterday it landed in my mind. I got tons of ideas, so I wanted to make this when it's still fresh in my mind. Before I start giving you learning tips, I want to tell you a little bit about where I come from and my story with languages. So I'm not gonna pretend that I'm a polyglot, I definitely am not. But I am interested in languages and learning them, and I have tried to learn multiple languages, and most of it didn't work very well. The first foreign language that I learned was English. And the way that I learned it, well, that that wasn't something that I chose to do, but I was a kid. So when you're a kid, you learn very easily without having to think too much about rules and uh and you pick up things very easily and you're not too afraid of making mistakes. You find it fun to learn. And the way we learned was in a very with a very intuitive approach. We didn't talk a lot about grammar, so I can understand how English grammar works, but I'm not necessarily able to explain it immediately. I know I make mistakes in English, but since it's a language that everybody speaks more or less well, I'm I don't really care too much, which might be a bad thing, I don't know. Uh, but um, but that's my that's my feeling to feelings towards uh English. I can I feel comfortable speaking English even though I don't speak it perfectly well, just because I've done it since I was a kid, and I guess it's more or less common not to speak it correctly. So yeah, I feel that it's acceptable not to have a perfect accent or perfect grammar or perfect vocabulary. As long as I can get around with it, I'm happy. Now the second language that I learned was French. So still at school, starting it in umdom scholan, which is when you're between I think it's 13 and 60, 16 years. So I learned it for three years there, and then I started learning uh continued in Vidergona. So that was an option. I think in Vidergona you still have to do it the first year, and then the two last years it's an option. Whereas English was, I think, from first grade or second grade. Very, very slowly, just with songs and yeah, nothing very um serious. So learning French was a little bit different because I was older. Uh, there was more focus on grammar, but I found it really fun. I loved the language, I was so fascinated by it. Listening to it, uh I found it so beautiful that I didn't really need any motivation to learn it. And I'm a person who likes math. I don't know if that that has anything to do with how I learn languages, but I've I really love to discover the grammar, the mysterious rules behind language and seeing patterns. So that is a motivation in itself for me. Being able to write it, it's super, super important to me. And later on in life, I uh well, not very much later, I don't know exactly when, but uh, we went to Greece with my family, and I fell in love with the Greek language. I found it so beautiful that I wanted to learn it. I went back home, uh, bought um, I don't know if you've seen one of these uh these uh courses that you can take on your own. One of them is called Teach Yourself. You have a book with small texts and a little bit of grammar and tips on culture, etc. And you have these CDs that you can listen to. By the way, if you have access to one of these courses, they I find them super great. I still love them. Might be a little bit old-fashioned, but uh yeah, I think they're really, really cool. And perfect if you are learning not to live in the country, but just to go there on vacation. And I could spend hours on my own learning how to pronounce the different sounds, uh, how to write the letters, uh, I would write small sentences with a vocabulary I'd learned, and just the process of learning was fun. And this is important, and I want to emphasize this that if you find learning the language fun, then you will have no problems learning the language. You will learn it eventually, no matter how much time it takes, it will you will learn it. But then in some cases, you learn a language not because you want to, but because you feel that you have to, and that makes the progress much, much, much more difficult. Now, I'm not gonna lie to you, uh, I I stopped learning Greek because I didn't have anyone to speak with. I didn't go to Greece for a very, very long time after that. So eventually the motivation disappeared. So that's another thing to do. If you, of course, if you are motivated to learn and you love the process, but then you never get to actually speak it, then I guess the motivation can disappear. So it's important to keep that motivation going and find a way you can actually practice the language so that you see that it's useful as well. Not only fun to learn, but also useful in the long run. Um, and then later in life, for uh practical reasons, I wanted to learn Moroccan Arabic. My ex was from Morocco. And learning Moroccan, well, first I tried to learn uh classical Arabic, and that I found quite fun because there you have rules you can follow, you can have a dictionary, it's easy to use, you it's easy to learn by yourself as well when you don't have a teacher uh around you all the time. But learning the Moroccan Arabic, which is not an official language, uh was super discouraging for me since I was uh truly dependent on people trying to give me the rules and the vocabulary since there isn't any dictionary or any uh grammar or well there are grammar rules, but not any official grammar rules that you can that are easily available. So I lost the motivation for that since for me writing, being able to write and learn independently um is super important. And then now I'm trying to learn Mandarin because my partner is is originally from Beijing in China, and I have found it super, super discouraging, even though I really feel that I need it, because my in-laws are Chinese, even though they speak Norwegian. I find it uh important to understand when they speak to each other. My son learns Mandarin, so I want to be able to understand when he speaks with his father and with his grandparents, and when we go to China, I want to understand. I mostly want to understand. That's the most important reason why I learn Mandarin. But still, even though I have many reasons to learn it, I have struggled to fall in love with this language, unfortunately. For me, it's not, I don't find it beautiful, uh, which is sad. I wish I found it beautiful, but that's the fact. I don't think it's a pretty language because it's very I'm used to languages where you use the tonality to show how you feel, whereas I don't have the impression that that is done as much in Chinese. Uh the different tones show what a certain word means, but not necessarily how you feel about it. And not being able to express emotions in a language the same way as I'm used to, I find it hard and I find it difficult to it's like you know, with the language you're learning, you're it's like having a relationship with it. You want to understand it, you want to feel it, you want to you want to want to discover it, which is not the case for me in Chinese, but so a little bit of details about uh Mandarin, which is one kind of Chinese, is that you have two written languages. You have the the the original one where one character represents one word, or more characters together will represent one word. And you if you don't know it, you have no idea how to pronounce it. You can know what it means, but you will not know how it's pronounced. So it's not an alphabetical system. It's filled uh I don't yeah, we can't really call it an alphabet, I guess. The written characters in Chinese are not do not represent sounds, only meaning or mostly meaning. There has been created um an alphabetical version of this, so to learn both foreigners and and Chinese people to pronounce, to know how to pronounce the different words. But it's not enough, it's you will never find uh well, maybe books for kids you will find with this system, pinyin it's called, but for adults you never find anything written in pinyin. And for me, not being able to write a language is a big sorrow. I feel that I don't have really I don't really have access to the language and that I'm not really learning it. In the beginning I felt that oh it's fine, I can just learn the pinyin, that will be much easier to me than learning money thousands of characters that I might never use. But and this part point is important, the reason why I'm telling you this is that what is useful and practical is not always the way to follow. Because if that makes you lose the motivation, then you're not getting anywhere anyway. So when I started to learn the characters, that actually got back my motivation to learn, or it not I didn't it didn't get it back. It I found my motivation when I decided to learn the characters. So now I am learning them and at the same time continuing to learn with pinyin and learning to speak. But I needed to start learning those characters in order to find my motivation to learn that language, and this is something that I have noticed with my students. Uh, most of my students live in Norway, but I also have some that do not. Some of them have Norwegian family, some of them are just fascinated by the language, some of them have plans to move to Norway because they think Norwegian culture is uh great and they love the country, etc. And they already have a motivation to learn the language. I don't need to motivate them. They they they learn really well. Of course, you don't they don't have access to as much material in Norwegian as those who live in Norway, who will hear the language, they will see it everywhere, they might watch Norwegian TV, but still they learn really well. Most of them learn really well because they have this motivation. They just find their language uh fascinating, it makes them discover their uh family roots. So so they don't they don't need that aspect. But most of the students that I have that live in Norway are not motivated. They need to learn the language, but they're not motivated. They and with many of them, that's what we work on that again and again, finding the motivation to learn. In my classes, we spend a lot of time just talking in Norwegian, making a lot of mistakes. And that in itself, for many of them, is a motivation, being able to use the language, being able to feel, to feel that they're actually learning something, and to yeah, to to discover how it is to speak a different language and how that feels. Maybe uh you'll feel different than you normally do. I for sure feel that when I speak French, which I yeah, I forgot to mention, I lived in France for 10 years, which is also a great motivation, being able to use the language. Uh and speaking a different language can make you feel like a different person in a good or a bad way. And the goal is for it to be a positive experience. Because if you are just if you feel that you're not being taken seriously, for instance, a lot of um foreigners come to Norway to work, they don't necessarily need the language because everything at work happens in English, and then switching to Norwegian might make them feel like they're a child, like they can't express themselves correctly, that they're not being taken seriously, which is a bad experience. So finding a motivation in the learning process itself. For me, that is learning alphabets, learning uh the grammar, learn like discovering the mystery behind language. That's my motivation for learning languages. But for some people, it might be uh being able to listen to music in that language. Maybe they you love uh Norwegian uh metal. I know there are many Italians learning Norwegians because they love Norwegian metal and they find Norwegian a great language for metal music, which I find a little bit sad, but okay. Maybe your motivation is being able to send text messages to people you know in Norway. Uh maybe you like poetry, maybe you have uh a passion for something and then learning vocabulary to express that passion in a region, that can be a motivation as well. It doesn't really matter what it is. If you are artistic, maybe writing voc in region vocabulary in a beautiful way, um I don't know. It doesn't really matter what your what your motivation is, as long as you find it, uh, so that you can enjoy the process of learning a language. Because even though, yes, you're motivated to know the language, the process is so long. And you will probably always be learning, you will always be learning new stuff in region, in any language, even in your own mother tongue. So if you don't enjoy the process, I can have fun learning it, then you will, first of all, you will not learn very well, because without motivation, it's very hard to learn. Um, your brain will fight you. Um and maybe you will eventually quit. Uh, or you'll just not have fun. So it's better to be able to enjoy the process because to be honest, it's gonna be a long, long, long process. And the hardest part is when you feel completely stuck in the beginning and you're not able to express yourself. The moment you start being able to express yourself, you see your progress, uh, you you are able to learn more independently, um, on the go, whenever you need uh Norwegian in your everyday life, you can check up words on your own and increase your vocabulary on your own. That is not the hard part. The hardest part is getting there. And um yeah, so find your motivation. So my point here is that nothing is right or wrong. Whatever works for you, whatever you find motivating, do that. If you want to learn how you want to read Harry Potter that you've read a million times in English and you want to be able to learn it in Norwegian, maybe you will be able to learn just by reading Harry Potter. It might not be the most useful way, but useful is not necessarily the best way, anyways. As long as you're learning and as long as you're having fun, then it will take you somewhere. But for others, the motivation might be found in the fact that it's useful for you. So choose then your learning material well. If you have a book for tourist Norwegian and you want to live in Norway, then maybe that is not the best book to learn from. Or if you want to be a tourist and you have a book for people having Norwegian as a second language, which means living in Norway, then maybe that's not a good option either. Choose a book that gives you useful vocabulary, useful sentences. Uh, that can also be a motivation in itself. Have good language material, learn how to use it, not just to understand it without having to think 10 million times before you say something. And yeah, if you want to be able to use the language, you have to use it, even before you are using it for real. So read out loud. If you don't have a teacher, if you don't have a class where you can actually practice, read out loud. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, read out loud as much as you can. Because if you never do that, and then the moment you are supposed to speak, you will not be able to. Because it will feel so weird to put those words in your mouth. You've never done it before. It will sound awkward and you will feel awkward, and it will be a bad experience, which will make the language learning challenging. So read out loud, repeat. Uh, if you listen to an audio, repeat, repeat, repeat. Uh, taste the language. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. You will make mistakes, and that's the that's part of the process. Write as well. Writing is good for learning vocabulary. For some people, speaking is uh more useful than writing, or maybe more motivating than writing. But if you want to be able to write, you have to write. So it can just be writing down vocabulary that you know, check if you remember how to write it, uh making silly sentences with the vocabulary that you learned, you've learned. It might be not completely right, but doing that will still help you. It will make speaking the language feel more natural, feel more comfortable, feel more fun, and it will train your muscle memory so you will also learn better by reading out loud and by writing. Learn a lot of vocabulary, a lot of vocabulary, as much as you can. If you have if you like to have uh flashcards, use that. Uh, in other cases, just read many, read a lot of texts, learn where however it helps you. For me, I didn't need that when I was younger, but now having flashcards or having flashcards, uh, flashcard apps is a great tool. It makes me understand much more, and being able to understand what people say around me makes it motivating to in the future engage as well, because there's no point being able to speak if you don't understand what people are talking about. And being able to pick up words here and there, even though you don't necessarily understand a full sentence, will make you feel more included because you can understand what people are talking about more or less, and since you understand, you can also engage, right? So even though you will not in the beginning be able to make very complicated sentences, you can still engage in some way or another. And for me, the fact that I now can understand quite a lot of what my partner, my son, and my in-laws are talking about when they speak Mandarin together, that's a great motivation to me. Uh so I'm trying to try to listen in and try to pick up words here and there and and then guess and double check with them if I understood. So that's also a motivation for me. And the last, my last tip for you is don't be afraid of making mistakes. This is really, really important because it's inevitable. You will make mistakes. You will make so many mistakes. So you just deal with it right now, you will make mistakes, and actually those mistakes are not because you're stupid, but because you speak a different language which follows different patterns, different grammar, uh different ways of pronunciation. Uh so how do you think it is possible for anyone, especially adults, to learn a language without making mistakes? You are not a genius. I don't think you are. Okay, maybe you're a genius, but I don't even geniuses would make mistakes here. So when you learn a language, you learn it through the filter of the langu language or languages that you already know. If you already know more than one language, that will actually help you learn Norwegian. You might be able to use some of the languages you speak to help you in the cases where English doesn't work, for instance. So use the languages that you know as a help and don't get frustrated when they don't help. It's just just look at it as something fascinating. Okay, here Norwegian is different. Huh. That's also possible. That's how languages work. Languages are, there are so many different languages, and languages try to reflect reality, try to be tools for us to communicate in a good way, but they do it in very different ways. By using vocabulary that cover different things, they overlap each other. Sometimes words can be used in one context but not in another context, whereas in your language you could use the equivalent word in both contexts, or the structure of the words will be different, the tonality will be different. There are so many things that can be different. And instead of looking at that as a hinder to learn, look at it as a discovery. Look at it as something mystical that you're supposed to discover little by little, step by step. And the more you learn, the easier it will be to learn more. So hang in there. Think at learning Norwegian, right? No matter which language you're learning, think at it as a game. And have fun. Why do you play games to have fun? Right? Make mistakes. The more you make, the better, because then you learn more. Think as a child. Play around with the language, try, make sentences, see how it goes. Do people understand? Okay, they didn't, then you've tried, and then maybe you'll figure out how to say things in a different way and why why they didn't understand. You try and you allow yourself to fail. As long as you're confident about it, because I know a lot of you, I almost all of the students that I have and have had that live in our way, they have this fear of making mistakes and feeling stupid. But what is more important than having a a flawless sentence, which you might never have. You might always, you probably always will have a small accent, and that's fine. I don't understand why people find it so like why do you want not to have an accent? You if you learn a language as a as an adult, you will most likely have an accent. Most people, unless you have a specific have a genius for learning languages, most adults will have at least a tiny accent. And isn't it better to show people that you're not Norwegian instead of being afraid that they will discover that you're not Norwegian or making people believe you're Norwegian when actually you're not. Um well, you're not born in Norway, so the where you come from is per is part of your history. Why do you want to leave that behind? It's uh it's interesting. It's it's not something bad, it's something that it's uh it's something extra that you have that Norwegians that have only lived in in Norway don't have. So it's a plus. Your cultural and linguistic luggage is a plus. As long as you speak with confidence, as long as you're relaxed about it, it doesn't matter that you have an accent or that you make some mistakes. Uh people don't care about that. People care about what you're saying and who you are. They don't care about grammar mistakes or pronunciation mistakes as long as they understand what you say. That's all you need. Just focus on having fun and making people understand what you want to say. And then you will get better and better and better and better and better and better at it along the way. But enjoy the process. Find a way to enjoy the process and not be too stressed out about it. I wish you all the best on your journey learning Norwegian. It's gonna be a great ride if you allow it to be great. Ha in fine dog, visnakes.