To begin

In this post I will try to explain why I am doing this, and I will give a basic insight of my plans with this blog.

I have always been a language enthusiast. Since primary school I have been learning English, then I studied French in high school, then at the university I studied Spanish and Portuguese. All these four I still speak fluently.

At my fist workplace I went to a German course and I studied it for three entire years, in the meanwhile I participated in an Italian course as well, and right now I am learning Russian too.

It was way easier before. During my university studies, I had a lot of free time which I could use for learning languages, and of course I was younger. Then I started working, which reduced the amount of free time by a lot. Now I am in a relationship as well, which of course is not helping much in learning (although I don't really mind it).

The problem is that I give up really easily. When I'm at home learning something, I don't actually have enough motivation to do it. When I just learn something and don't have a clear goal, I lose my motivation in a couple of weeks. 

I decided to make a challenge. I will try to learn as much Norwegian as I can in a year's time. The motivation will be this blog - you will be able to follow my progress over this time. My expectation is that I can help other people to develop language learning strategies, and that I can learn new techniques as well. What I really want to create is a community of self-language-learners who help each other and who share their ways of learning languages in a clever way.

I'm sure that it won't be easy.

Why Norwegian?

It is a good question. Actually I have always been interested in Scandinavian languages, as well as their culture and lifestyle. As I heard from people who speak these languages, Norwegian and Danish are quite similar, but they can understand a lot of Swedish as well. One of my Danish friends recommended me not to learn Danish because of the pronunciation, so then I decided to start with Norwegian. I have an intermediate German knowledge, which I expect to help me, but apart from that, I will only use books, audio files and online materials to develop my skills, and won't go to any course or hire any teacher.

Well, time to start. Today I will buy my first books, and tomorrow I will start the learning process. 

Feel free to comment if you have any questions, recommendations, tips or thoughts! :)

Stay tuned!

David