GRAMMAR

Unlike other platforms, we are not afraid of teaching you grammar.
A language student who refuses to know grammar is like a surgeon afraid of blood or an athlete annoyed by sweat. Knowing why certain things work in certain ways is not only necessary, but highly useful to fast-track your way to fluency.
Why would you want to guess when you can know for sure?

FREQUENCY OF USE

Frequency of use is one of the key principles behind our choice of content.
Research has shown that, for most European languages, knowing 1000 words allows you to understand about 90% of common text or speech. By knowing 3000, you’d cover 95% of common use language, which is considered the threshold from which you can start to learn autonomously, from context. These 1000 or 3000 words are of course the 1000 or 3000 most frequently used words in the language.
We have used numerous sources to determine how frequently words are used in everyday language but we have also kept an eye on the specific context of expatriates coming to live in a new place and meeting new people.
Therefore, whether you’ll choose to focus on adverbs, determiners, the vocabulary of work environments or the jargon of leisure time, we’ll always put what matters the most first.

FULL FORMS

Whenever a new word such as a verb, a noun or an adjective is shown to you, we’ll give you all of its main forms.
We don’t leave anything to chance or imagination and we will never hide from you some of the difficulties of the language. Yes, it’s too bad that it’s just “new” in English but it’s “ny, nytt, nye” in Norwegian (according to gender and number) and that you have to learn 3 words to say 1 thing.
But that’s how the language is and that’s how you should learn it. Anything other than this would equate to taking a shortcut that will sabotage your learning. Which is why we don’t do it.

PREPOSITIONS IN USE

Prepositions are a tricky part of learning a language such as Norwegian. It’s easy to learn their general meaning, but students will often fall in the trap of using the preposition of the equivalent expression in their native language.
So, together with the full paradigm “å vente, venter, ventet, har ventet”, we’ll teach you that the preposition to translate the most obvious “to wait for” is actually “på”, not “for”. And we’ll teach you that straight away, before you form a bad habit. Likewise, should we teach you the equivalent for “a lack”, we’ll actually teach you “en mangel på, mangelen, mangler, manglene”, before you even think of making a habit of saying “en mangel av”.
And if you need to be able to say that you are “allergic to” something, we’ll show you that it’s “allergisk mot, allergisk, allergiske”.
Whenever the most used preposition differs from its English counterpart, you can count on us to tell you.