Norskkurs

As mentioned in the previous entry, I came to Norway to learn Norwegian. So in the middle of September I signed up for a Norwegian course at Folkeuniversitetet expecting interactive lessons full of communicative exercises as promised on their websites. Looking at the price of the course also made me believe that I was about to experience as good Norwegian lessons as were Spanish ones some years ago.

  

I’ve gone through 3 Norwegian courses so far, all at Folkeuniversitetet. If there was a possibility to change the language school, I would definitely do it, but unfortunately, the language market is kind of small in Bergen area.

Norwegian 3+4: Course which didn’t follow any 1+2 course, meaning that the class were made up from people with different level of language knowledge. The good thing about it was that our group was little, only 6 pople did attend regularly, so there was space for us to talk. But our teacher, Polish immigrant who came to Norway 18 years ago, took most of the talking time for herself. She really liked to listen to herself, I think. On the other hand, she was quite good at explaining and pointing out grammar points  when we were covering them. In fact, we didn’t do it much because Folkeuniversitetet’s policy is not to cover grammar, students should find out the rules on their own – they call this a communicative approach :-/ I was sometimes really bored there. If one didn’t want to be involved in the lesson, he just didn’t have to.

Norwegian 5+6: A huge class of 16 people! Fortunately, some of the stopped coming. Our teacher was a total opposite to the previous one: his talking time consisted only from telling us the instructions and answering our questions and he probably didn’t have any experience in teaching. We mostly worked in pairs, so we got a chance to get to know each other and also it encouraged us not to be afraid to talk (we didn’t do almost anything else during the lessons). No grammar was included in his teaching. In his defense, I’ve got to say that he had a great potential to become a great teacher.

Norwegian 7+8: The same teacher as in 3+4 course. I had to take this course because of Spanish lessons on Tuesdays (btw. really good ones), so I didn’t have much expectations. The group grew bigger but almost nobody remained from the old class, except for the Islandic couple working for Salvation Army. Now I do appreciate that our teacher is explaining some things, pointing out tricky parts of Norwegian and tries to extend our vocabulary. I hope I’ll get another teacher for the Bergenstesten preparatory course, I really do.