Lawyer&Mom wrote:I took one semester of Norwegian when I was in law school. As a former German major it was fun, but in the end I found the language too similar to German to maintain in the long run, with German materials being so much easier to get your hands on.
What was special about the course for me was the audio. When I had studied German I only had snippets of the textbook on the audio cassettes. (I’m old.) This course includes audio for the entire lesson, similar to FIA. It made me focus on pronuncation from the start before I could fossilize mistakes. Also, the entire course is in Norwegian and uses pictures to convey meaning, so no use of L1.
It also covers a fair amount of Norwegian cultural content, as it is aimed at immigrants to Norway. So Assimil would probably give you the same amount of accessible audio, but not the same amount of cultural content.
Do you need it? Well access to comprehensible audio is a whole different ballgame now that we have online media. It’s just not as valuable as it used to be. You could watch kids shows on NRK instead. But it is a really well done course.
Okay, so it sounds good, and it sounds unique when compared to my other NO courses but not perfect, although no course is. I was really hoping you'd confirm it was full of IPA transcriptions and tone markings. You've almost sold it to me but I'm not 100% convinced, so I'll think on it. Mind you, I prefer honest feedback and not a sales pitch, which is what you have provided, so thank you Lawyer&Mom for your reply to my query. Oh, and online media, you are right that it's abundant nowadays, but in the beginning I still prefer course audio as opposed to easy TV for working and developing good pronunciation (although easy TV would factor at some point), so the course sounds like it contains a good deal of audio and could be a good resource for pronunciation from that perspective. Thank you again!