I’d like to know what people think of the course so if you have any suggestions, spot any errors or have advice, please leave a comment below.
Word format
Verbs usually presented as infinite unless irregular or part of a certain skill (e.g. simple past 2).
Adjectives typically presented in masculine form
Nouns typically presented in indefinite singular form unless irregular or part of a certain skill (e.g. plurals)
Audio
Part of this course has audio which I uploaded from Google Translate via soundoftext.com . I will continue adding audio once I’ve reached 50 learners.
Bonus Skills
There are bonus skills at the end of this course which I took from the Duolingo education website using a Norwegian classroom. They are not available through the official Duolingo Norwegian course even though they were created by the contributors and I just thought it would be fun to add them.
Feminine Gender
I’m currently making the feminine gender the default for m/f nouns, although I’ll allow the masculine form as an alternative. If I’ve left any words out or If you have any suggestions please comment below.
Contributing
Right now I’m the only person working on this course and there is still quite a lot of work to do. If anyone is interested in becoming a contributor, please leave a comment below.
I’ve been using soundoftext.com for my course as well, so many of the words may have added audio because of me. Do you know if Memrise has functionality to adding this user-submitted audio without deleting the word and resubmitting?
I’ve noticed that sometimes you need to be careful every now and then when there’s more than one word in a definition. The pronunciation can be very weird when it’s said too fast. However, when this happens, just adding some punctuation to break it up seems to help out a lot. So, for example, instead of “å være,” use “å. være.” It doesn’t sound quite as natural since there’s a pause, but at least pronunciation seems more on point.
As for feminine gender, I think best to at least know what the gender is, even if in practice it’s never used quite as much. In my course, I always present it with the feminine and have the masculine as an alternate.
Thanks for the feedback. I’m not quite sure what you’re asking in the first paragraph when you talk about the word being deleted. Could you explain? I’ve tried making the audio more accurate by adding double vowels but I never thought to add punctuation. I’ll try this and see if it helps with the words that sound a bit weird. I’m still not sure about the feminine gender. I made it the default for words like bygd and jente but I’m not sure if it’s necessary for every word. As long as I make it an alternative, I think it should be fine.
When you add a word, if there is already audio for the word uploaded, it will be added to the word. However, if some additional audio was uploaded by another user, I don’t think it automatically adds that audio to every course that used that entry from the database. I’m just wondering if there’s any easy way Memrise would add that audio that was added to the entry after the fact.
I know that readding the word would definitely add the audio, but at the moment, it’s really hard to tell what entries have audio and which don’t (and then there’s the added pain of reordering the words).
There are times when I was first starting that I would add all of the entries from the database and just delete the ones that didn’t have audio, but that’s not really good if your course is like mine and has 3,500+ entries. I eventually just gave that up (partially because half of my course lacks english).
I really think that the masculine/feminine nouns should not be presented as masculine, as it’s important to know what gender words are and if you decide to present all gendered nouns as masculine then you can do that while knowing the genders, whereas the opposite isn’t true.
I agree with that. I’ll start making the feminine the default while still allowing the masculine as an alternative. It may take a while since I’m the only one working on this course though.
Luckily, there really aren’t that many feminine words to deal with, so it shouldn’t take you too long when you go back into them. When I had decided to put masculine alternatives in my course, I was rather surprised at how little work I had to do to catch up – I could’ve sworn there were a ton more feminine words through the A1-B2 levels!
as there is already a Duolingo from Shane95 course on Memrise with a big user base and such: What is different / what is new about your course compared to the other one? I try to see the point about making the same course twice on Memrise instead of contributing together to one course, which I personally think would benefit more people.
I think one of the biggest differences is that it does contain the vocabulary from the bonus skills that aren’t really part of the current course. The three bonus skills do exist, as I bought them before they were quickly removed, but when they return is the big question. The inclusion of the bonus skills in this one at least gives a preview of what we can expect when it eventually returns.
Since you don’t have to complete the full course, if you want to just know what’s in the bonus skills, you can always just skip to that section.
I understand what you mean. The main difference is that I’m adding audio from SoundofTheText and I’ve got the bonus skills. The main reason I made the course was so that I could use it for myself, since the auto-learn feature is only available on courses you create. I was also annoyed that the only complete course for the Norwegian Tree on Memrise wasn’t up to date. It didn’t take a lot of time to make the course because I had all the vocab on quizlets, which I just exported to Memrise. When all that was done, I thought I might share the link with people since my version of the course was more up to date.
It’s really up to course creators to decide what to include in a course. There’s no audio by default in the database unless some audio was previously uploaded for the word. It’s a lot of work to add audio, so a lot of courses just opt to do whatever is already in the system instead of adding new audio.
As for the auto-learn feature, its main purpose is for course creators to quickly go through testing of the course without having to go through the complete repetition of every word.
I’m really impressed with this course so far. You’ve built it from the ground up to match Tree 2.0 and that’s fantastic. I switched from the other course which was only partially edited after finding your course. I’m finding a couple of small inconsistencies. I’ve seen a few duplicated words (å lære and å begynne in Verbs Present 2 currently) and a few cases where a verb with its adverb are presented before the head verb (I personally ignore verb + adverb if the verb alone exists, I’ll learn the adverb usages on Duolingo, but I understand that others might like it). Are these duplications intentional or for some particular reason?
I’d be willing to contribute to the course and deal with any inconsistencies I find, as you mention you’re looking for contributors. My username on Memrise is the same as the forum, feanarosurion.
Thanks for pointing out those duplicates. I’ll fix them soon. I’m slightly confused what you mean by the verb-adverb combinations. Can you provide an example?
I’d be happy to add you as a contributor. If there’s anything besides duplicates that you’d like to change, please check with me in advance.
What I mean by verb + adverb are things like å tro / å tro på. I think the first instance of that where I haven’t seen the base form is “å undre seg”. I haven’t seen “å undre” on its own and as far as I understand it the meaning doesn’t change without the “seg”. That’s what I mean in particular. If there are any duplicates I’ll aim to keep the most detailed definition, and I’ll leave the word in its first occurrence.
I agree with you when it comes to the verb-preposition combinations like tro på or handle om. The basic form of the verb should be presented first. I think reflexive verbs are a little different because the meaning does often change, so I think it’s better to keep them the way they are. Also, lots of those verbs are only presented as reflexive in the Duolingo course, so I wouldn’t want to stray from the tree and potentially confuse users.
Thanks for the help, and I approve of your method for deleting duplicates
Found a couple more duplicates, I’ve taken care of them. I’ve been seeing a few cases where there are very similar definitions for some words and they’re not accepted as each others’ answers. Hvis and Om for example. Om is an alternate for Hvis, but Hvis is not an alternate for Om. Would you be OK if I added hidden accepted definitions for words with exactly the same English word in the answer?
Another suggestion is that the etymologically equivalent answer be used first in a definition. For example, å virke, “to work” would be the etymological definition. So I would suggest changing its answer to “to work (function), seem” instead of “to seem, work”. It gives a cognate hint to the user.
Hvis and om aren’t exactly synonyms. Anytime you see hvis, it can always be replaced with om. However, om also means whether in addition to if, and that’s why they aren’t alternatives to each other. What were the other non-duplicates you would like to change?
