I’ve been writing about my language learning app project and my language learning cartoons project, but I haven’t said much about my actual language journey. Well that changes today, in the form of this new project category, all about my practices and progress with Norwegianizing myself.
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The adventure began 11 months ago, while I was sitting in my hotel room in Trondheim. My wife was on her way to a work conference in Bodø, and I was tagging along. We’d arrived a few days early so we could spend some time learning about our host country, and were thoroughly delighted by what we were seeing. The pace of life seemed so much more in tune with our own outlook - quite a change from the frenetic norm of urban North America - and the more attention I paid, the more I realized just how long Norway had been hiding in the background of my life.
I’ve had lifelong fascinations with Norse religion, mythology, its Viking history, and the Old Norse roots of English etymology. I’ve also watched and enjoyed a number of Norwegian TV shows over the years, but beyond all that, I was finding myself weirdly nostalgic for this new country that I was only just discovering. Probably because it offered echoes of my own family’s experiences and background in rural Newfoundland. And still, even with all those data points, it had never once occurred to me to connect the dots and see the shape they were forming.
Sitting there on that bed, though, the pieces finally did fall into place, and I realized that a large part of my soul has always spoken Norwegian - I just hadn’t recognized it as such.
This then, is the journey of how, after a lifetime of deafness, I’m finally learning to hear the language that my inner voice has been speaking all along.
Every language course I’ve ever taken began with how to have a simple conversation, but I don’t think I’ve ever been taught what to do when those conversations break down. And they do break down. All the time. Especially for beginners.
This post recaps a conversation I had with ChatGPT about what I think is a crucial - yet often missing - first lesson in language learning: How to keep conversations moving when the bottom falls out.
I call it The Rip-Cord Protocol.
As I focus more specifically on ear-training, I’m noticing stages of progress in my ability to unpack the noise into recognizable chunks, but how many stages should I expect on this journey? And what do they look like?
My wife and I were recently comparing our experience of dreaming and I was trying to explain the non-stop chaos of my sleeping life, but I couldn’t quite capture it. So recently I wrote down what I remembered immediately after waking up, and that worked. (She no longer tries to compete for weird. :-)
But the more interesting result was that I then tried to write it out again. In Norwegian.
Without looking anything up…