11. Klar for Norge - tekstbok modul 4

Michal Ryszard Wojcik (2001 October 26):

I finished reading a Norwegian textbook for advanced learners. The book is composed of texts about life in Norway and about Norwegian history. I read about the Norwegian political system and about religion in Norway. The textbook focuses on knowledge about Norway rather than on the language itself.

I was reading the book very slowly and carefully. I was focusing on every sentence. I read almost every sentence more than once. I was reading with concentrated attention in order to absorb maximum information from every sentence.

I cannot measure my progress so I think it is useless to speculate how much I learned from this book.

But now I am personally even more convinced that I can learn Norwegian without a dictionary. I do not claim that it would be worse to use a dictionary while reading this book. The fact is that I do not have a dictionary and that I can learn without it.

I often think that a Norwegian-Norwegian dictionary would be valuable. But I still haven't decided to buy one. In my opinion, the Norwegian dictionaries are not as good as English dictionaries. I have seen extracts from Norwegian dictionaries and they contain few example sentences.

It may seem strange that I recommend English-English dictionaries to English learners and that at the same time I personally don't use a Norwegian-Norwegian dictionary. There are several reasons for this.

• The English dictionaries that I recommend are much better, in my opinion, than the Norwegian dictionaries that I don't use.
• The Norwegian dictionaries are very expensive for me.
• I find that I can learn without a dictionary.

But I still recommend dictionaries to English learners. I recommend dictionaries which have many example sentences. The Norwegian dictionaries don't have this property.