The book I started with

I've started the official learning process yesterday, with the help of a comprehensive Norwegian coursebook, which I would like to talk about in today's post.

The book's title is Teach yourself - Complete norwegian. It is a full course of Norwegian for English-speakers with audio accessible online. I really liked that the audio files are on their website and not on a separate CD (which is really common here in Hungary). 

I started with the pronunciation, which does not seem too difficult for me. I've already learned languages which seem harder to pronounce, so I think this will not be difficult. Although the pronunciation rules are sometimes a bit hard to follow, but I guess this requires some time to practice.

The first chapter is about some basic expressions and vocabulary, which I found easy. Most of the words can be recognized if you speak English or German (if both, then it's even better).

Let's see how I feel about this book after a day.

Vocabulary: Adequate. Not too difficult, but enough to form a couple of basic sentences, therefore feeling some kind of success. I like it.

Grammar: Very nice and long explanations, especially in those cases where it differs a lot from English. It is easy to understand, but sometimes there is some grammar in the dialogues which is not explained in the grammar section. I understand that sometimes it is difficult to create dialogues based only on the grammar the reader already knows, but it is a bit frustrating. You see that it's a grammatical phenomenon you don't know, but you will only get an explanation about it later.

Audio: It's very nice. There are some listening comprehension exercises, which are really nice, and there is a lot of audio material. It is crucial, especially at the beginning, to listen to a lot of audio to practice pronunciation, so I like it.

Overall: It seems to be a nice book, I will definitely keep it. It's not cheap though, but it seems to be ideal for self-learners, so compared to the price of a course, it is nice.

The book is available here.