There are many sites on the Internet that call themselves
"language tutorials". Some of them are good, but the majority
are not good at all. The problem with many of these is the way they try
to teach the language. They often contain only a lot of lists with words
and phrases. That's fine, for sure they are useful in many
occasions, but what happens if you want to say a sentence that doesn't
appear in the tutorial? What happens is: You realize
that you haven't learnt the language at all. You have just memorized a
list with sentences.
That's why this
tutorial is meant to be a different
tutorial. In this one you
learn mainly the grammar and how to make well-formed sentences. It also
includes vocabularies, which are used as a toolbox in order to make your own
sentences. The idea behind this tutorial is to teach you Norwegian in a
fast and entertaining way.
The tutorial is in English
simply because the majority of people
surfing the Internet understands English, so this is the best
way to reach as many people as possible. In addition, English is
similar to Norwegian in many ways, and this makes the learning easier.
In Norway, as in most European
countries, there are lots of quite different dialects, and when Norway became
an independent country there were many
discussions about what the written Norwegian language should look like.
As a result of this debate, there are two different official written languages,
Bokmål and Nynorsk. In
this tutorial you learn to write Bokmål, which is the variant
with the most users. More than 80 percent of all Norwegians use Bokmål. In the south-east of
Norway, for example in the capital Oslo, people speak dialects that are
pretty similar to standard Bokmål.
But why a Norwegian tutorial? Because there is nothing in the
world that is as exciting as learning new languages, if you haven't
tried it, here's your chance! It's also important to keep up the
interest around languages with relatively few speakers, and Norwegian is
one of them. If this tutorial makes just a few more people getting interested in this language, then it's worth all the work.
And please, nothing is better than receiving
your comments and
thoughts about the tutorial. That's the only way it can improve. Go to the contact page and
post your opinions.
The tutorial is always under
construction, like all other websites,
and more lessons will be added as the time passes by. Since they aren't
added yet, you even have the chance to tell what you want them to
contain, if you send us an e-mail.