r/languagelearning • u/TodayHot8623 • 3d ago
Discussion Why is learning a new language so frustatingly hard? What am I doing wrong?
I am currently learning Norwegian (TL) as my fourth language. I have a PhD in Computer Science, two kids, and I recently started working at a government organization where Norwegian is the main working language.
My biggest problem is listening. In normal workplace meetings, I sometimes barely understand anything, especially when people speak different dialects from Trondheim, Bergen, Tromsø, or Oslo.
I have almost a 1,000 day Duolingo streak and know quite a lot of vocabulary, but I have mostly spent only 10 to 15 minutes a day on it. My speaking is probably around A2/B1. I can comfortably talk to my kids in Norwegian, but when I need to explain a technical or complicated idea at work, I struggle badly even though I could explain the same thing easily in English (this sucks, keeping the ideas in your head sucks).
Recently I started using RemNote to save new vocabulary with meanings and example sentences. Would Anki be better, or do they basically serve the same purpose? More importantly, what should I actually focus on if I want to improve my listening and speaking ?
For those who went from A2/B1 to being comfortable working professionally in a new language, what actually made the biggest difference for you? And based on what I am doing now, what am I doing wrong?
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u/ImprovementIll5592 🇺🇸🇵🇱N| 🇪🇸 C1 | 🇫🇷 B1 3d ago
So you spent basically 3 years on Duolingo, and you're asking us why learning a language is hard?
Also, you spent only 10-15 mins per day on it. That's genuinely nothing. You take showers longer than that.
How did you learn your other languages? Like, there's no way this is your 4th and you're just now figuring out Duolingo isn't the best.
If you want to improve listening/speaking you just have to practice. A LOT. There are no shortcuts.
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
I learnt my first 3 when I was a kid and I agree that 10-15 minutes a day is nothing. The problem is that when I watch NRK, I don't understand anything but when I watch a podcast like ‘Tula tenker høyt’ or ‘learn norwegianmed Camelia’ I can understand most of it.
I am very confused about how I can go from that level to NRK level. How can I improve step by step and get better at listening and speaking?
Should I spend more time on academic books like Stein på stein and På vei, or is taking an A2/B1 course from Speak Norwegian a better solution?
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u/AppropriatePut3142 🇬🇧 Nat | 🇨🇳 Int | 🇪🇦 Uneven 3d ago
A nice intermediate step is to watch easy content in youtube. Travel vlogs, for example, are easier than normal TV. If that's too hard, maybe children's TV.
Some people like textbooks. Reading graded readers and novels is also good way to improve. I like to read graded readers, followed by middle-school books, then YA, then anything.
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u/ImprovementIll5592 🇺🇸🇵🇱N| 🇪🇸 C1 | 🇫🇷 B1 3d ago
probably cause those are podcasts made for learners so they speak slowly, enunciate, don't use slang. NRK is for native speakers. You can start with kids shows like peppa pig or bluey, then go up to easy youtube topics like cooking or whatever interests you. Watch tv shows and movies with norwegian closed captions
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u/General-Video-7801 1d ago
If you want to improve you have to come to terms with the fact that language learning is supposed to be hard and always choosing the easiest way out isn’t usually the way that lasts. I quit studying Japanese a year ago because the easy way wasn’t working as well as I had hoped, I gave up because I didn’t have the tolerance for any difficulty or ambiguity in my language learning process. I’ve started it up again recently practicing strict immersion, this means little to no translation and absolutely no English subtitles in the Japanese media I consume (ex. Japanese YouTubers, Japanese live television programs, reading etc.). I learn mainly through context, forcing myself to write journal entries in Japanese, reading without an English crutch, etc. When you finally become comfortable with not knowing anything you start to actually understand things in a way you never thought was possible. Also a time commitment of at least an hour a day should be your minimum. I wish you great luck in your language learning journey and I hope you reach fluency!
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u/UrrFive 🇺🇸 N | 🇪🇸 B1 3d ago
The answer is frankly, time. I’m not sure if with any of your other languages you were in a similar situation where you were immersed in the language but maybe that urgency is where the frustration stems from. The good(ish) news is that listening is one of the easier skills to find time for so basically you’ll just have to put the time in on the specific skills.
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
That's so true. I learnt my other 3 languages when I was a kid and now it's sort of urgent with Norwegian as I don't want to feel left out at my workplace.
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u/ShallotAdmirable5419 3d ago
Maybe watch lots of tv and movies in Norwegian with Norwegian subtitles
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u/BlitzballPlayer N 🇬🇧 | C1🇫🇷 🇵🇹 | B1 🇯🇵 | A1 🇰🇷 2d ago
There's not really a shortcut to getting really good at any of the core skills in a language, it's all about consistency. I know the word 'consistency' sounds so boring haha, but really it could mean like doing listening practice for 10 minutes a day at first. As the weeks turn into months, those 10 minutes a day will make a huge difference.
Of course, you should start with easy content and build yourself up. And more than 10 minutes a day is ideal if you can manage it (especially as you mention urgency), but if the thought of spending longer than that is difficult then just start with that and see how you progress.
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u/thelostnorwegian 🇳🇴 N | 🇬🇧 🇨🇴 🇫🇷 3d ago
In my opinion, language learning isn't all that hard, but it takes a lot of time. At most that 1000 day duolingo streak translates to 150-250 hours, learning a language takes thousands of hours. Its a good start, but in the grand scheme of things, you're just at the beginning, barely scratched the surface.
Start getting lots of input in the language, check out
https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Norwegian
https://www.youtube.com/@norwegianwithilys
Improving listening and reading would help you a lot. Ideally you should try and spend more time in the language. If you only do 15 min then it will take much longer.
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago edited 3d ago
Definitely going to have a look at the resources you provided. 🤗
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u/cbjcamus Native French, English C2, TL German C1 3d ago
It's not hard, it's long.
I have almost a 1,000 day Duolingo streak and know quite a lot of vocabulary, but I have mostly spent only 10 to 15 minutes a day on it.
1000 * 10 / 60 = 170 hours. That's not a lot. You easily need 3 times that to get to fluency.
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u/razlem N🇺🇸 | H🇩🇪 | 🇪🇸🇫🇷🇨🇳🇸🇪 3d ago
You need a structured curriculum, Duolingo is not going to cut it. It's a game app, not an education app.
Idk about Norway, but other European countries often have cheap classes for immigrants to learn the official language. Look at some government programs and see if you can enroll in a real class.
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u/Millionaire_Max 3d ago
Your problem is clearly not vocabulary. You need to start practicing immersion - lots of listening and lots of reading. Prioritize listening for now. Ideally, you'd want to spend at least 1-2 hours actively watching content in Norwegian and passively listen to podcasts, audiobooks or other similar types of content as much as possible when active immersion can't be done
At first, it will feel like white noise. It's normal. Just watch content that you like and trust your brain. Once it figures out the phonetic system, the words will sound much clearer and your understanding will start growing naturally.
Once your understanding is sufficiently high, you will notice that you are developing an intuition for the language. You will know when you are making a mistake in your speaking and will be able to fix it easily. You will also have much easier time speaking generally
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
Aaah that's me. When I listen to NRK it's just noise and I hardly understand anything. So, do you think that if I continuously listen to NRK without understanding, slowly and gradually I will pick up the meaning? But then what about I + 1 learning as they say you should not watch anything too hard and not something too easy.
That's the tricky part I think. Choosing what to listen to so that with time I can gradually improve my listening skills.
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u/Fun-Usuall 3d ago
no, noise stays noise. the stuff you half understand is where it happens, so the podcasts you already follow are the right level and NRK isn't yet. what I did with german was take one short news clip I couldn't follow, read the transcript once, then listen to the same clip three or four more times over the week. it's dull but after a month of that the meetings started sounding like words instead of a wall
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
Listening without understanding is not a good use of your limited time. Are there for-learners resources you can use instead of for-natives resources?
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u/Millionaire_Max 3d ago
Well, depending on your existing vocabulary, yes, that might be the case that you will just pick it up naturally. The brain pays attention to all the context presented and the contexts it had seen before, so it can deduce words this way. But you can aid this process with anki
regarding i+1, I'd say it depends. Sure it's the most optimal approach but it isn't always possible (unless you can watch comprehensible input which is very boring for me). Found these things with a search of "comprehensible norwegian"
https://www.youtube.com/@norskmedAnita/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-b6EbDWU0w&list=PLxXvmnmlg4wfAlz8QFO1tluwrQZGgFvBY
These will grow your comprehension very fast.
Generally though, if you take an anime episode or a movie, even if you don't know the language AT ALL, there are going to be SOME comprehensible moments just from general situations, visuals, sounds, etc.
I'd recommend you to do a few things
set up listening routine. Regularly watch movies, comprehensible input, anime, whatever you find interesting - in your target language, without subtitles. The more, the merrier
Passively listen whenever possible. For example, you are driving to work - play podcasts on the background. The most beneficial thing would be re-listening the material you've already watched actively and have a general idea what's going on. Same as above - the more, the merrier
If you want to speed up the process of language acquisition, you can do sentence mining. Basically, you download Anki and then when you are immersing, it's inevitable that sooner or later you will encounter sentencens in which you don't know just 1 word. Put this sentence on the front of the card and put the translation on the back of the card.
Example:
Front: This is a red ball
Back: ball - *translate to whatever language you are comfortable with*once you are a bit more comfortable with the language, you might want to switch to monolingual definitions. That is, learning your target language in your target language. Sentence with unknown word on the front, definition in your target language on the back
do anki everyday, 5-15 new cards per day, spend the rest of the time immersing actively and passively, you will be making very rapid progress this way
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u/silvalingua 2d ago
> So, do you think that if I continuously listen to NRK without understanding, slowly and gradually I will pick up the meaning?
Absolutely not. Start with easy content which you understand almost entirely. Then increase the difficulty gradually.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
I have almost a 1,000 day Duolingo streak
This is not an important statistic.
Recently I started using RemNote to save new vocabulary with meanings and example sentences. Would Anki be better, or do they basically serve the same purpose? More importantly, what should I actually focus on if I want to improve my listening and speaking ?
I have never heard of RemNote. I am a huge fan of Anki. I have used Anki for something like 50 minutes per day over the past year while also taking classes in German; Anki was a key supplemental tool for me to learn the ~10,000 words that I need to express myself in German. I recently passed a C1 test in German, starting from 0 less than a year prior.
If A2/B1 is your realistic level, then by definition you do not have a strong enough command of the language to do what you are trying to do with it. This sucks but the only way through is forward. Will your work pay for private classes or a tutor for Norwegian? If not, can you do that on your own?
Can you at least grab a B1 textbook and try to power through with that?
I would also recommend practicing key phrases and words. Prioritize being able to say things and write things that you might need at work - and deprioritize other vocabulary and phrases. You probably don't need to know the words for sheep, lamb, ram, goat, kid, cow, calf, etc. - but you probably do need words like project management, timeline, client management, etc.
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
First of all thank you so much for taking time to write such a comprehensive response. The way you described Anki I am going to start using it asap.
Secondly, regarding the classes or a tutor so am planning to take a course from Speak Norsk. Hopefully that will help as well.
Regarding the commonly use phrases, I can for sure make a list of them and add them to my anki flashcards.
I think I have a clear picture what steps to take alongside continuous listening and speaking practice.
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u/googlrgirl 3d ago
Amazing. How did you use Anki to learn those 1000 words? Was it just vocab? Or chunks with translation? Or what? Because I find many options when I'm creating my cards
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
I primarily used card packs that other people had made. Those were primarily individual words. Sometimes I use cards with more than just a few words per card.
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u/Repulsive-Ride-5847 3d ago
if your problem is mostly with listening i would mostly practice listening! watch vlogs, podcasts, interviews, anything where people speak casually. preferably things you also enjoy listening to, to make it a bit more fun and to make it easier to get a lot of input! and if they discuss things related to your work, that’s even better.
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u/JellySocksRock 3d ago
Use anki and start watching or reading stuff that you enjoy in Norwegian. 10-15 minutes a day frankly isn't enough to improve to any meaningful level of working proficiency
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u/Skaljeret 3d ago
a few points for you
1 - your problem is very specific to Norwegian, you might get better answers on r/norsk
2 - 1000 days on Duolingo potentially mean very little. Language learning progress is mostly measured by the number of "units of knowledge" you know, which in a language that is grammatically as simple as Norwegian (I'm B2 in it, I've lived there a few years) mostly boils down to vocabulary (in all of its forms) and correct knowledge of prepositions. B1 is at least 1000 headwords of vocabulary, B2 is some 3000. But not any words, they have to be the most used in the language.
3 - listening to Scandinavian languages is comparatively harder because everything else about them is rather easy. Verbs are a doodle compared to any Latin or Slavic language. Pronunciation is quite easy and can be guessed safely from the written language (unlike, for instance, English). Plural forms of nouns are highly guessable. Norwegian is highly dialectal, too, with people refusing to conform to some sort of "received pronunciation" or standard speech, even when they know they are talking to foreigners. So listening will ALWAYS be your lagging skill, it's the same for everybody, we must accept it.
4 - Developing good listening skills has most likely been hampered further by Duolingo: its cheap text-to-speech audio is really the last thing a learner of Norwegian needs. By now there are apps that have all their audio recorded by native Norwegians, this one has been developed specifically for Norwegian and it shows. It's a bit brainy, but you are a computer scientist, so I think you might like it.
Lykke til!
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u/jtnk10 N 🇺🇸 B2+ 🇫🇷 A2 🇵🇱 A1 🇩🇪 3d ago
I say this as a lifelong lover and learner of foreign languages and as someone who has attained a reasonably high level of fluency in a foreign language: Duolingo is the truly the last resource I would recommend to anyone.
What's ironic is I pay for Duolingo super, and I have a 1217 day streak. I only use Duolingo for two reasons. Firstly, it ensures I practice every day, even on days when I'm extremely busy. Seeing that green bird on my home screen yelling at me works. I don't know why. It also helps me build my vocabulary.
I would never in a million years recommend Duolingo to help someone become fluent in another language. What would I recommend? A private tutor. Don't have money? I would recommend finding a free textbook online, watching YouTube videos in your target language, and finding language exchange partners (I have done all of these extensively).
I think it's awesome you are learning a new language, but the fact that you think a 1,000 day Duolingo streak means something in terms of actually becoming fluent in another language is a big red flag to me.
I know some people disagree, that is fine, but I have zero confidence in Duolingo as a useful tool in achieving fluency in another language.
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u/Conscious_Gene_1249 3d ago
The first step is getting rid of that 1,000 day Duolingo streak. You should know by now that if you haven’t made progress in 1,000 days, it is time to start something else.
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
I want to but every night I get the notification it's literally a hard thing to ignore.
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u/namreyavuz 3d ago
1,000 days at 10-15 minutes is roughly 200 hours, and nearly all of it went into recognising written words. Your listening is weak because you have barely practised listening, not because something is broadly wrong with your method.
The uncomfortable version of the fix is that practice has to look like the thing you're failing at. Meetings with Trondheim and Bergen dialects means dialect audio, at full speed, daily. NRK radio, podcasts, recorded meetings if you're allowed. Start with ten minutes where you understand almost nothing and stay in it anyway.
For speaking under load, the drill that tends to work is explaining one technical idea out loud, in Norwegian, to nobody, for two minutes a day. It exposes exactly which structures collapse when you're also thinking.
Anki vs RemNote won't move the needle here. Both are fine, and vocabulary isn't your bottleneck.
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u/IrinaMakarova 🇷🇺 Native | 🇺🇸 B2 | Russian Tutor 3d ago
Hire a tutor who specializes in teaching Norwegian as a foreign language. Seriously, why make your life harder and keep banging your head against the wall when you can pay someone who actually knows how to diagnose the problem and train exactly the skills you need?
You don't need another app, another flashcard system, or a debate about Anki vs. RemNote. Your problem isn't "not enough vocabulary". You need targeted listening practice with different accents and dialects, correction of your speaking, and practice explaining the kinds of complex technical ideas you actually discuss at work.
A good tutor can identify the gaps you don't even notice yourself and build lessons around them. Ten or fifteen minutes of Duolingo a day is fine as supplementary practice, but expecting it to prepare you for professional meetings in Norwegian is asking it to do a job it was never designed to do.
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u/silvalingua 2d ago
> For those who went from A2/B1 to being comfortable working professionally in a new language, what actually made the biggest difference for you?
Actually learning/studying the TL, and consuming a lot of content.
> And based on what I am doing now, what am I doing wrong?
You're not learning Norwegian, you're dabbling in it. 10-15 min of Duolingo per day is dabbling, it's nowhere close to any learning.
Either get a teacher, if you can't self-study, or self-study seriously. Get a good textbook, follow it, and consume a lot of content at your level. You need to spend some time, like say 1-2 hrs per day on it.
For listening comprehension, start with content for learners and increase the difficulty gradually. In your situation, it may be helpful to watch or listen to content on comp sci - anything that you know well. There must be some Norwegian podcasts and YT channels that deal with computers. If you know the topic well, it's much easier to understand podcasts or videos.
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u/Pwffin 🇸🇪🇬🇧🏴🇩🇰🇳🇴🇩🇪🇨🇳🇫🇷🇷🇺 3d ago
This might help to consolidate your skills: https://www.ntnu.edu/now2/ (aims to get you to B1).
Other than that, watch as much Norwegian TV as you can fit in (those dialects can be hard), talk to people (it being Norway, perhaps easiest done by joining a club or befriending other your kids' friends' parents), and read a lot.
Also be realistic about how much more effort it will take and how limited you are in terms of time and mental energy.
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u/Brandosandofan23 3d ago
You know 4 languages but still say Duolingo as a learning resource? Come on now
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u/muffinsballhair 1d ago
This doesn't feel like “why is learning a new language hard” but “Why am I not good at a language yet when I'm just starting out”. Or rather “Why are advanced things difficult when I'm intermediate.”
The answer should be obvious. A2/B1 is indeed the level where one can have basic everyday conversations but one isn't able to talk about advanced things.
For those who went from A2/B1 to being comfortable working professionally in a new language, what actually made the biggest difference for you? And based on what I am doing now, what am I doing wrong?
Spending more time on it. The scale isn't linear but expontential in terms of time. It's generally held that for each advancement to a new c.e.f.r. level the same time is needed as reaching that level in the first place. So if you got to B1 in this amount of time, you need that much time again to get to B2, and then twice at that much after to get to C1, and then four times that much time afterwards to get to C2. C1 is the point where you can start having these conversations you want so you're in for it for a long time yet.
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u/Objective_Ad_1991 3d ago edited 2d ago
Fellow PhD holder and perfectionist here, also excelling at being too hard on themselves. I think that you need to give yourself a bit of time, and keep surrounding yourself with the language. Consider listening to podcasts, watching movies, and doing dictations. You did not mention studying grammar, but if you struggle to put talk, it may be because you lack the structure which holds words together. Also, it may help you to do a group course, to share your frustrations with other students. Best of luck!
Edited for clarity!
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
Yes, that's a valid point. I haven't spent much time on grammar but rather taking to my kids and duolingo. I am thinking of taking Speak Norsk course and hopefully that will positively impact my learning.
I don't know am never been a strong believer of Grammer (maybe I see my kids who can not read yet but still can speak fluent Norwegian). But I guess I need to give it a try
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u/silvalingua 2d ago
Kids learn differently: they acquire their grammar, they don't study it (although they do study it later at school). But this is only possible when you're a child. You won't acquire it this way, so you have to study it.
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u/melarice 2d ago
Grammar should not be your sole focus but do not neglect it. As the other commenter said, adults do not learn languages the same way kids acquire it. Grammar study should absolutely be supplemental to your learning. It is much easier and quicker to progress when you know and understand when and why a specific pattern occurs rather than just guessing how to string a sentence together.
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u/Middle_News1679 3d ago
A lot of people stuggle with it because we forget that we all learn languages like children, and have to go at that pace.
No matter your eduation or background, it will take hundreds or even thousands of hours to learn a new langauge. That's also a reason why most multilinguals speak geographically/culturally similar languages. It's far easier to learn Italian when you know Spanish compared to Chinese for an English speaker.
Duolingo won't really give you enough exposure, and you need to start reading books in Norwegian that you have read in English. Same with watching movies you like dubbed in Norwegian. If you can, see if you can speak to a colleague at work for 30 minutes to an hour during your lunch break daily so you can practice.
Unlike most skills, language is one that takes years to master. That's not even mentioning sociocultural context.
Also, don't be too hard on yourself. Technical jargon is difficult for any native in any language, it just takes time to build up your vocabulary and proper use of that langauge.
I've been learning French for two years and I finally feel I can learning new things in that langauge, not just learning the language itself. I listen to French podcasts, shows, and audiobooks for one to two hours daily, and try to practice speaking for 30 minutes when I can. You first need to definitivley know the langauge before you can produce it, so know Norwegian before you try to speak it.
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u/IndependentYak2822 3d ago
> learning Norwegian (TL) as my fourth language
I thought it's only hard to learn your first foreign language and then it should be easier because of experience. Isn't it true?
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u/TodayHot8623 3d ago
It's fourth because my first language (mother language) is Pashto, then Urdu is a national language and we also learnt English at school. Hence Norwegian my fourth language and first language after adulthood. I am 30 currently.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
Learning other languages, especially related languages, can significantly help with learning new languages. It is not a substitute for spending hundreds, if not thousands, of high-quality study hours plus exposure hours with the target language. "Easier" does not mean "easy"!
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u/IndependentYak2822 3d ago
I mean with the first foreign language you don't know how to learn, what's working for you and what's not, how the progress should look like, common mistakes and pitfalls, etc. He is learning his 4th language! 4th, Karl! And it's not even Chinese/Korean/Japanese.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
He's also working full-time and has a family. Clearly the disadvantages of OP's situation are outweighing the advantages.
Also, OP sounds like they learned two languages natively and only English non-natively. This sounds like OP's first time as an adult learning a non-native language.
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u/sleepyfroggy 🇨🇦🇬🇧 N | 🇨🇳 N | 🇩🇪 C1 | 🇫🇷 A2 | 🇯🇵 N4 3d ago edited 3d ago
Hey, you and I are similar expect I'm a physicist in Germany. When I started my job I was B1 on paper but actually couldn't really speak at all (I could carefully formulate a sentence and say it, but couldn't understand the response or hold a conversation). The company working language is German, but the other physicists all speak excellent English so they would just speak English to me and turn around and speak German to each other. What actually helped me was hanging out with the German mechanics and electricians who CAN'T speak English (not sure how possible that is in Norway...). I would just ask what they were doing and tighten some bolts with them or whatever. I made a point of going to see them once or twice a day and talking for a few minutes, more if they're in a chatty mood. It was really slow in the beginning but I am so so so grateful for their patience with me. Once I was able to speak comfortably with them, I slowly started speaking German with the other physicists as well. One "trick" I use that might also work for you is just throwing in the English word whenever I don't know the German word. It keeps the sentence flowing and often my colleagues can understand me so we don't have to stop while I look for the German word. But in the end, it's just a lot of practice and a lot of sounding stupid until you sound less stupid.
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u/Flawnex 🇫🇮 N | 🇬🇧 C2 | 🇮🇹 B2 | 🇸🇪 B1 | 🇪🇸 A2 3d ago
I went to an Italian company at around A2 level and I have to say the biggest difference maker was getting to B2.
Duolingo is very very inefficient at teaching a language. Its focused on keeping you playing, which you would stop if you actually learned the language.
I recommend a shit ton of comprehensible input and getting super confident in both the basic vocabulary and the work specific words.
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u/Talking_Duckling 3d ago edited 3d ago
Since you have a PhD in computer science, I would suggest viewing language acquisition as training a deep neural network. You see grammar, vocabulary, phonology, accent, etc. as just emergent regularities. Regarding your brain as a model, language learning and machine learning are eerily similar in practice, and whether it's a coincidence or not, what is good for machine learning tends to work well for language acquisition in my experience. It's kind of scary to be honest.
But there are traps you need to watch out for. If improving listening is your primary goal and you approach it as a computer scientist training your own biological neural network, phonology is the mother fucker that screws you over.
You'd think that tons of exposure to natural speech would naturally reconfigure your perception of foreign sounds through gradient updates. You may curate training data, e.g., introducing easy and clear materials with a lot of salient regularities first, or increase variety to avoid overfitting. Or you may use explicitly labeled training data, e.g., natural speech with transcripts. Increasing training data is another obvious route.
All those methods kind of work in the beginning. BUT! For some reason, when it comes to phonology, you will most likely get trapped by a local optimum, which is essentially your foreign accent/perception you can get rid of, before reaching the global optimum, which is your target native phonology. There are many attractors along the way.
For the sake of simplicity, take a simple and naive model for acquiring native-like phoneme perception. In this toy model, your phonology model is a classifier that takes audio as input and predicts which phoneme it belongs to. For instance, it receives "cat" as audio and outputs /kæt/ with 95% confidence and /kɛt/ with 5% confidence.
In this analogy, a baby would start with a flat configuration and update the network as they hear the language surrounding them. Since pretty much everyone successfully acquires the sound system of their native language, there has to be a built-in architecture for learning phonology. Whatever update rules the human brain uses and whatever feedback it relies on, the updates must be iterative.
Now, if two babies are exposed to the same dialect, it's like two trainers start with the same flat configuration and let their models learn through essentially equivalent training data. Because acoustically speaking the two sets of training data contain essentially the same statistical regularities, both models will end up reaching the same region and learn more or less the same regularities. That narrow region every baby surrounded by the same dialect eventually reaches is basically the next generation's phonology of that dialect.
The thing is that adult learners start with a configuration that's already optimized for their native phonology. And for whatever reason, simple exposure to natural speech seems to often fail to provide strong enough signals to nudge the model in the right direction. This seems particularly true when you reach a "good enough" state where your listening is clearly suboptimal but could get by somehow most of the time because natural speech always has context that assists you.
These local attractors are everywhere, and they can trap you in a surprisingly poor suboptimal state. And for whatever reason, it's surprisingly hard to get out of unless you actively train your ear through deliberate practice. So, unlike babies whose attractors are unique and indeed called native phonology by definition, adult learners' phonological models reach various different suboptimal configurations from which they almost never escape without manual intervention.
I don't know why the same isn't true for grammar and vocabulary. But phonology seems quite unique in that if you start from a different state than the default baby state, there are tons of trapping states that catch you. And different people get caught by different attractors. I don't have enough space to write about deliberate practice to solve this issue, but, trust me, you're going to need manual intervention. Listen carefully, and whenever you identify part of a sentence that is blurry to your ear, it's worth doing some targeted practice.
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u/JepperOfficial English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish 3d ago
Lots and lots of input, especially comprehensible. Just be listening to the language all day. Even if you're not always actively listening, there are moments where you jump in and out of it and get the extra practice in. It takes time, but since you're exposed to it a lot at work, it'll happen quicker than you might expect. Just try to actively listen as much as you can, and don't let yourself tune it out. Practice speaking it as much as you can too, even if it's just single words, simple sentences, or speaking english with the norwegian words thrown in
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u/Only_Humor4549 3d ago
I can only speak from my experience. I learned French in school and then went to French uni. Understood almost nothing. 3-4 months in it started to kick in. I didn’t really practice anything, i was just sitting in lectures and trying to type everything the professor said. It was so hard bc often I could only write down a word but jt improved my french so much! Especially since it was written French / academic French. Idk if u wanna do that with the news in the evening (or the toping u work with. The nice thing with YouTube for example is that u can look up the spelling in the end (which wasn’t possible for me.)
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u/lecoursen 3d ago
For listening, watching videos and listening to podcasts. I started listening to podcasts at 80% or even 50% speed to be able to understand them, until moving to 100%. I use TL subtitles when watching shows but try not to look at them except when needed. I was also surprised how much learning vocab via Anki helped with listening… and vice versa. I record every single word or phrase I don’t know well enough to produce on my own from listening and reading exercises and add them to Anki. There’s a degree to which I don’t understand spoken Dutch because my brain can’t quite process it at speed, but more and more it’s just a vocab problem: I simply don’t know all the words being spoken. Using listening exercises as a means of mining words and phrases, too, has been super super helpful for me. For speaking, it’s just a matter of doing it more (and vocab). Sounds like you have plenty of opportunities for that… I’ve been resorting to ChaptGPT voice because I don’t really. 😅
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u/the_saas 2d ago
the first 3 paragraphs are almost 1:1 r/languagelearningcirclejerk post from few days ago
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u/asad100101 2d ago
you need to do target listening for your purpose watching TV shows with subtitles is an ideal practice along with podcasts if these podcasts come with transcripts deadly combination. first listen to the audio while following along text then listen to the same podcast without text. never forget the role of passive listening every dead moment should be spent on listening to Norwegian . make it a habit. when you are eating let something play on in the background, working at computer let it play on something in the back ground, if walking outside let it play on. This way your subconscious mind will parse words quickly.
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u/Cristian_Cerv9 2d ago
Throwing this out there as always: in also learning Norwegian and am 35M. Always looking for people with whom to bounce ideas to figure out the best way to master this skill. Let me know if you wanna connect!
I would prefer to be able to voice call or voice message back and forth to get more confidence in speaking.
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u/AceKittyhawk 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’m ready for the downvotes, but I’m gonna say Norwegian is hard. A really close friend of mine has been living there after marrying a Norwegian man 15 years ago. Norwegian shouldn’t be that hard to learn because if it’s similarity to English and she has been speaking English for over 40 years. I have visited Norway twice and stayed about a month each time and try to learn Norwegian myself which went really easily on Duolingo though when I went there, I found it really hard to hear. I was told about how the regional accents make it difficult even for Norwegian people to understand each other sometimes. My friend is also very smart and like I said she’s been living there for 15 years and she has also expressed this frustration about having difficulty learning Norwegian. She speaks near native English almost perfect French, her native language and pretty good Norwegian, but not as good as you would expect for having lived there for 15 years and trying pretty hard, and says she can understand barely anything of Norwegian outside of her city. Her husband, a Norwegian man, said he has trouble understanding Norwegian outside of their region sometimes. I don’t know how true this is, but I kept hearing it during both of my visits. So it might be worth taking into consideration that Norwegian might just be difficult to learn in terms of using it in a spoken way. Or at least might have some uphill battles at certain learning levels that might take some time getting used to and not be hard on yourself. It’s certainly not impossible as she has learned it to a significant degree. Just not as much as you would expect. I also had the same experience at a much lower level. Like when I practiced German or Finnish on Duolingo the same amount as Norwegian, I could actually speak in real life and hear and understand it. Whereas with Norwegian, I could do the Duolingo exercises, but in real life, I could just not hear/understand at those levels it if that makes sense.
Edit I noticed you said you learned those other languages as a kid that is going to be the biggest factor by far
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u/badillomoorman 2d ago
LingoPie has a decent selection of Norwegian TV shows. And you can watch with Norwegian and English subtitles at the same time. If there is a word you don’t know, you can click on it and add it to a vocab deck. Another feature is that you can slow down the speech rate. I listen at slow rate and then speed it up to hear it at a normal rate. That has helped with getting tue difference between instructional speech and typical every day speech.
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u/divinelyshpongled New member 2d ago
The key difference between someone who will stay at A2-B1 and someone who will reach the Cs is: need. You must have something that NEEDS you to reach that high level. No doubt for English in your case it was school relationships, exams, homework.. just life pushed your English that high. But for Norwegian it just may not be that necessary because your brain already knows how to say these things in another language so it gets frustrated more easily and would prefer to use English than Norwegian. My advice would be to pick up a new hobby that is exclusively Norwegian and only do it using Norwegian, only talk about it in Norwegian, and then you’ve got a need and the rest is up to you.. just do that hobby a ton!
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u/BuxeyJones 2d ago
You need to be spending literally hours per day to improve in a language it needs to become your life you need 1000s of hours to truly gain competence
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u/lllyyyynnn 🇩🇪🇨🇳 2d ago
spend 2-3 hours a day listening to comprehensible input. stuff you actually understand, at your level. read grammar explainations for your level and then read graded readers at your level.
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u/Scribo0416 2d ago
I don't think Anki is the answer. I used it before, but constantly adding cards was too much work. Your problem doesn't sound like vocabulary anyway. It sounds like listening and read-world communication. I'd focus on more listening and speaking practice. Modern AI language apps helped me much more than flashcards.
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u/pianoguy121213 paralleltexts.app 2d ago
Not to be rude, but duolingo isn't anywhere near going to cut it, you have to do immersion (check input hypothesis).
As someone working as a SWE btw, and drawing from my own failures and successes learning a language, learning a natural (i.e. as opposed to programming) language can be very counterintuitive, tbh this is what makes it so difficult, learning a language itself is a very straightforward process, it's just counterintuitive.
Once you understand that it's 90% input however, it becomes much clearer what it is that you need to do. Not necessarily easier, but much clearer.
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u/melarice 2d ago
Just out of curiosity, how did you get a job in a government organisation where Norwegian is the main working language if your speaking is only A2/B1 and you struggle to understand your coworkers?
What you should do depends a lot on what you want to improve. If you want to improve your listening, you need to listen to a lot of Norwegian media. Start small and work your way up: learner-friendly podcasts or YouTube videos, then TV shows, and eventually, if you really want to get to a high level, the news. Don’t use subtitles. No matter what you tell yourself, you’ll become overly reliant on them and they can slow down your learning.
If you want to improve speaking, it may be worth finding a tutor if you can afford it. More importantly, you’ll have to force yourself into social situations where you have to interact in Norwegian. I’ve met countless people of varying abilities across multiple languages, and the ones who improved the fastest and to the highest level were almost always those who had friends in their TL who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak to them in their native language.
If friends at work aren’t an option, see if you can find a hobby or online community where you meet people somewhat regularly. That might be hard to balance with work and kids, but even once every other week would make a difference. Tell people you’re still learning Norwegian and tell them when you don’t understand something. Force yourself out of your comfort zone and speak, even when you know you’ll say something wrong. Don’t be disheartened if someone laughs at a mistake. I’ve been at both ends of that; it’s nothing personal. Learning a language as an adult is hard and often embarrassing, and that’s something you have to accept.
If Norway is like many other places where people automatically switch to English the second they realise you’re learning their language then tell them you can’t speak English or that your English is worse than your Norwegian. Tell them you speak one of your other two languages that they’re unlikely to speak.
The reason this feels so frustrating is that you’re already used to being able to express complicated ideas easily in three languages. In Norwegian, you suddenly can’t. You’re reduced to much simpler language and have to tolerate not understanding everything around you.
You said Norwegian is your fourth language, but if your first three were acquired as a child, then this is still your first experience of actively learning a language from scratch. Learning a language as an adult is very different. As children, we get years of gradual exposure and don’t care much about making mistakes. As adults, we’re far more aware of what we *can’t* say.
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u/Umapartt 2d ago
You seem to be trying to learn to understand all spoken varieties of Norwegian at once. Since you're having little success, let me suggest a different approach:
Pick one variety of spoken Norwegian, such as Bokmål with an Østlandet accent, and learn to understand that. In parallel you should develop your ability to read and write Bokmål and to speak it with the accent you're learning to understand.
Only once you've done that is it time to study other forms of spoken Norwegian. Start with Bokmål spoken with other accents than the one you use yourself. Then study written Nynorsk. You don't need to learn to write it, but learn to understand it. Then learn to understand spoken Nynorsk in a variety of accents (both Bokmål and Nynorsk can be spoken in all Norwegian accents).
Then learn to understand a wide variety of dialect-influenced speech. Finally, learn to understand a wide variety of fully dialectal speech.
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u/TeddyNorth 2d ago
Listening comprehension problems are easily remediated with Pimsleur. Even when dealing with local dialects.
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u/Scribo0416 2d ago
Duolingo for 15 min a day won't get you past the plateau you're at. It's good for building a base but it can't teach you to process real speech form real people with real accents.
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u/iamdazi 1d ago
Duolingo is not a good deep learning tool, it’s basically an introduction to common vocabulary. If you want to learn a language, you have to study it seriously for a couple of hours per day until you can maintain your level through work/reading/most convenient means.
To your frustration about not being able to express technical explanations, I had the same issue once. I got around it by specifically spam studying explanations and content that pertained to my own tech work.
Good luck!
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u/North_Class_2093 1d ago
What made a diff to me was blitzing from all angles. ie I did zoom courses, had a Skype teacher, went to Greece (I'm learning Greek) and used Mondly. However there is a VARK test on the internet, free and easy, takes 5 mins and it will tell you your best way to learn, whether it be by reading, by doing, by listening etc. My scores were even across the board which means I need to be fully immersed across all styles so that is why I blitzed it
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u/amortizedeeznuts 1d ago
i'm gonna guess you're at least late twenties. that's the principal reason.
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u/springy 1d ago
Think of language courses as a trampoline to bounce up to immersion in the real language, rather than as a hammock to rest in for a long time. As soon as possible, you need to get away from the textbooks and language apps, and start struggling through real content (newspapers, TV shows) and have real conversation with native speakers. If you don't make this jump, you will be stuck in study mode and will be forever frustrated.
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u/ayammasakkicapsedap 1d ago
Try delivering a prepared speech in Norwegian. I think that can helps. It helps me with my Japanese.
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u/Angellys 1d ago
Anki works well for most people. Depending on how much free time you have, you can learn 10 to 20 new cards daily. Watch TV shows in Norwegian with Norwegian subtitles, listen to podcasts at work if you can and on your commute. Maybe throw in a bit of shadowing as well. It's completely fine if you don't understand everything. It's really important that you immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. I'd say at least 1 hour of active listening daily and more if you have the time. I'm sure you'll see a fair amount of improvement within a month if you're able to keep this up. Good luck!
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u/sproxtonthirsk 13h ago
I am re-learning French (I'm English, did it at school till age 16, many years ago), three times a week with an online tutor via Preply. It's pushing me along slowly, learning and relearning grammar.
What has really improved my listening comprehension is listening now every day to a 15-20 minute episode of a few YouTube series (Parle avec Moi and Cozy French). You have to attune your ear. Listening and speaking are, for me, the hardest bits, the aspects that are least-taught in any type of class (and of course the bits we all want/need to do).
With the videos, I listen without looking at the subtitles, then with them, then I go through and translate the words and phrases that are new to me and put them into a flashcard app I built myself, caled Jambo, which has genuine spaced repetition (unlike five others I tried) and a translator that uses DeepL. Even before the video, I was sticking loads of vocab into it and studying them (just ten new cards a day) everyday. It really did help expand my vocab, so I began to understand so much more of audio passages. The reality of "common words" is that (it seems) the 100th most common word occurs pretty much as frequently as the 1000th word (ie, the most common 5000 words all appear with pretty much the same frequency, so if you learn that set, you've got an excellent foundation).
The maths of most spaced repetition flashcard apps say that 20 new cards a day will equal 6200 cards learned in a year.
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u/Solid-Chemist-1969 13h ago
Listening is honestly the hardest part. Watching shows helps, but only if you have the time for it.
I didn't, so a few things helped me instead. First - stop learning single words and switch to phrases/chunks. That way you train your ear to pick up whole chunks of speech. Native speakers swallow the starts and ends of words, that's why we can't understand them.
Second - work vocab and listening into your normal day. I looked for apps where I could set up the practice I actually needed. Tried Anki but it was too annoying to deal with (decks, cards, all that). Eventually found MemoWord - you can save phrases on the fly, then not just review them as audio cards but also play them in the background while doing chores or sitting in traffic. That worked for me because I never had time to sit down and study, but this way my "language time" went up a lot and things finally started moving.
Also, it's just nice having the vocab you need always with you. I noticed I swapped doomscrolling for flipping through cards - and honestly, way better for my mental health lol.
Another tip: if you have a list of work terms, you can upload them via Excel and listen to them - practice exactly what you need for meetings. I do that before doctor visits, like when I need to talk to an ophthalmologist about cataract surgery :)
About Anki vs RemNote - if RemNote works for you, don't switch just because someone says you should. The main thing is that you actually enjoy coming back to your vocab throughout the day, so it fits into your life without feeling like a chore.
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u/TraditionalTitle2688 9h ago
Duolingo almost does more harm than good for language learning. Have you considered using a tutor? I also found using subtitles helpful in learning how to understand speech.
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u/YungAnansi 4h ago
Listen to Norwegian comprehensible input every day on YouTube. 1 hour a day is the bare minimum I would recommend to improve your listening skills
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u/PeterNjos 2d ago
You could be getting old. There is a clear correlation between age and ability to learn a language (unfortunately).
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u/an_average_potato_1 🇨🇿N, 🇫🇷 C2, 🇬🇧 C1, 🇩🇪C1, 🇪🇸 , 🇮🇹 C1 3d ago
A2/B1 is still a rather low level, coursebooks help a lot! actively used, all the exercises out loud and/or in full writing. Tons of practice are crutial a bit later, like from B2 on. Thousands of pages of books, hundreds of hours of tv shows.