More strategies for learning Norwegian

The way you study a language can have a profound effect on how much you learn and how easily you are able to employ what you’ve learned. In the past few weeks I have presented several articles on language learning strategies to help you gain control of your Norwegian language abilities. Here are a few more strategies for learning Norwegian effectively.

Categorize
It's easier to recall terms if you have categorized them in a meaningful way - otherwise your list becomes unmanageable. Rather than memorize random items as you encounter them, try to be systematic in your acquisition of new words and grammars. This shouldn't be difficult if you have a good teacher or text-book to guide you. Take a "shopping list approach" to language acquisition by creating divisions between the dairy section, frozen foods, canned goods, and fruits. This way, even if you can't immediately recall an item, it's possible to quickly run through all possible options, a strategy many people adopt automatically. A common example of this is when a person finds he or she has to begin counting from one in order to find the word for five, "En, to , tre, fire..fem."

Context Effect
The context in which you learn something can serve as a highly relevant cue in the future. When people lose their house keys, they try to remember where they put them by thinking, "Where was I and what was I doing when I had them last?" The same general principle applies to language acquisition and helps to explain why immersion learning is so effective. Being able to mentally access a learning experience from the past can give us a much richer idea of what word, phrase, or grammatical structure is needed in a given situation.

This has been investigated experimentally by Godden and Baddely (1975), who gave scuba divers on land and scuba divers underwater a list of vocabulary words to remember. When tested later on their memory for these words, the scuba divers who studied the list underwater actually performed better when they were given the test underwater than those who had learned the list on land, but were tested underwater. Even if you aren't able to get yourself into an immersion situation, just simulating situations such as buying items at a store, taking a train, or visiting a family can be helpful.

State dependent learning
An interesting variation on context-learning is state-dependent learning. If, for example, your Norwegian class meets in a bar twice a week and you generally have a couple of alcoholic drinks each session, chances are that you won't be nearly as fluent when you're stone-cold sober. This isn't just because you think you sound better when you're drinking (although that might have something to do with it), but actually because your recall for information is poorer when you are in a chemically different state from the one you were in when you initially learned this information. Learning Norwegian under the influence could be handy if you're planning the great Aquavit Binge Tour of 2003, but you'd suffer a major language set-back if the high prices of alcohol monopoly were enough to shock you back into sobriety.

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