Learn Norwegian Bokmål with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Norwegian Bokmål to English (Learn Norwegian Bokmål with Interlinear Stories for Beginners and Advanced Readers Book 1) by Kees Van den End

Learn Norwegian Bokmål with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Norwegian Bokmål to English (Learn Norwegian Bokmål with Interlinear Stories for Beginners and Advanced Readers Book 1) Reviews

• 
  DavidO

  Good technique to start
  
  There are translations below each word so you can learn faster. The stories are fairy tales but mostly not super common ones.
• 
  Ska Ⓥ

  I find the positive ratings for this little booklet (122 pages, approx. 10 lines of Norwegian text per page) somewhat baffling. The whole thing was machine translated and no one seems to have bothered to check the translation thoroughly.
  
  Example #1: (page 15)
  Norwegian: "men en gang så FØLLET den i osten..."
  Booklet translation: "but one time so FELL it in the cheese...."
  Google Translate: "but once it FELL into the cheese..."
  
  FØLLET means FOALED not FELL => "but once it FOALED into the cheese..." .
  (Yes, it's a strange sentence, but FOALED makes sense within the context of the story, whereas FELL does not.)
  
  Example #2: (page 15)
  Norwegian: "så RØK ryggen av på den..."
  Booklet translation: "so SMOKED (BURNED) the back off on it..."
  Google Translate: "so I SMOKED the back off it..."
  
  RØK in this context means BROKE not SMOKED/BURNED => "then BROKE its back". The booklet uses the most frequent translation for each word, e.g., RØK in most contexts means SMOKED, but it can also mean BROKE, SNAPPED, FELL, etc.
  Mistranslations can be more confusing/time-consuming than having no translation at all; often there is no way of knowing which one of the words is mistranslated in a sentence, so you will have to look up every word anyway. (Took me ages to figure out that the culprit in example #2 was actually RØK not RYGGEN.)
  
  On a side note, the stories are quite old, so the vocabulary tends to be a bit archaic (not ideal for beginners in my opinion). Should a beginner start with words like elgsblakk (pale-brownish like a moose), målestokk (yardstick), askeladden (ash lad) or grynsodd (barley soup)? Of course, old fairy tales are in the public domain, so they are cheap/free source material.
  
  Edit: Something I only just noticed is that most of these stories are by Asbjørnsen and Moe, yet, NO CREDIT is given to them ANYWHERE in this booklet...
  
  Alarm bells started ringing on the first page. [This booklet was] "created with specialized software that produces a three line interlinear format."
  What about quality control, though?
  "Please contact us if you would like a version with different font, font size, or font colors and/or LESS words per page!"
  A proofreader would have spotted and corrected "LESS".
  
  The interlinear format (the English translation below the Norwegian text) is neat, but the execution is atrocious. A simple interlinear gloss would have been much more helpful, but glossing takes time and effort... Many of the word-for-word translations happen to be correct but are unhelpful, because they are too literal.
  
  Example #3: (page 15)
  Norwegian: "MED EN GANG"
  Booklet translation: "WITH ONE TIME"
  
  I had to look it up. "MED EN GANG" means "AT ONCE"/ “IMMEDIATELY”.
  
  To me, the whole selling point of this booklet is that the learner doesn't have to keep looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, however, since the stories are riddled with inaccurate translations, there is no way around using a dictionary.