Reviewed by: Norris Weimer
KlikkNorsk CD-ROM
by Nancy Aarsvold, Louis Janus & Margaret Hayford O'Leary
published by Skandisk Inc.
ISBN 1-57534-039-9
Available from www.skandisk.com
"KlikkNorsk : Learn Norwegian with the Click of a Mouse"
"KlikkNorsk is an interactive CD-ROM for Mac and Windows, consisting of a Norwegian phrase-a-day calendar and a grammar overview with exercises. This CD-ROM is aimed at students who are at the beginning and intermediate levels of Norwegian. The instructions and explanations are in English, so KlikkNorsk can be used by students in Norwegian language courses as well as by those who are learning Norwegian on their own. All phrases are pronounced by a native speaker."
You will recognize Louis's name in the list of authors, since he is a frequent contributor to Norskklassen. Nancy is also a member of this list. I met both of them when they were visiting my university this past fall, and I saw a preliminary version of this CD-ROM at that time. They were busy trying to get it finished and sent off to the publisher, after several years of work on it. It is the successor to the popular NorWord series of lessons which have been used by many Norskklassen members. NorWord featured a lesson a day for about six months. KlikkNorsk expands that idea to a whole year.
Now I have a copy of the final version, and I have gone through the whole thing. I have looked at every page, listened to every sound recording, and either looked at or done every exercise. For the record, I don't teach Norwegian. I did this as a student, although it was more of a review for me, however I have spent enough time with this program to get a good feel for it, both where it is outstanding and where it has flaws.
Let's start with expectations, who this program is for, and what's there and what is not.
Most of the self-study materials you can get for Norwegian make extravagant claims about how easily or how fast you will be able to learn Norwegian with their course. The claims for this CD-ROM are more honest -- if you read the above blurb carefully, you will notice that it does not actually claim to be a course in Norwegian. They do say that it "is designed to help you learn or improve Norwegian language skills", and it will certainly do that.
By the way, it will take a lot more than one click of the mouse, but it's true that mostly all you have to do to use this program is click, although there are some exercises where you have to enter some text.
Obviously, it's not a traditional book and cassette tape course, since it's on a CD-ROM. There is no book. There is 16 page booklet, mostly about how to use the program's features, but which also has a good list of recommended reference books and an excellent six-point list of hints that all language learners should have as a poster on their wall, if not memorized. This section is entitled "Getting the most out of KikkNorsk", but it's really much more general than that. There needs to be another, longer, section with that title which explains how the student should best use KlikkNorsk. It's not obvious. There is plenty of material here to use this CD-ROM as a self-study course for beginner and intermediate Norwegian, but without some direction for the student it's more of a reference work and supplemental material for some other course. It should be excellent for that; it should complementing other courses very well.
The main menu shows three main things : the Grammar Reference, the Phrase-a-day Calendar, and the Glossary. The Grammar Reference has 196 pages of grammar explanations and 171 sets of exercises, most "interactive", meaning that the computer corrects your answers. The Phrase-a-day Calendar contains 366 pages of short Norwegian text passages with the corresponding sound files and the translation. The Glossary contains all the words, names, and abbreviations used in the course, 1481 of them.
The Grammar Reference is excellent. Each page is carefully formatted as a table, giving a feeling of simplicity and order. I could practically feel the years of classroom experience teaching Norwegian which went into making these tables, finding the best way to present each topic. There is very little extraneous text. The explanations are concise but clear. The use of examples is very good. The examples are integral to the exposition, not secondary to it. The pages are quite readable, not dry or abstract. The pages are arranged in reference book order, but they would be good enough to be used as primary learning material rather than as reference material, if only there was a way -- another set of forward/back buttons for example -- to proceed through the material. If only there was a way that each day you were given a new grammar page to read and the exercises for that page.
The Grammar Reference section also contains all the interactive exercises. Unfortunately, they only show up as little clickable icons at the bottom of the page, in the screen's background colour, along with some other icons. They are too easy to miss or to ignore. You have to make an effort to look for them and do them. They should be more prominent, since this is the interactive part of the CD-ROM. This is where the computer can do something for you which a book can't. There are programming flaws in these exercises, but there are workarounds so that they are not show-stoppers.
The Phrase-a-day Calendar section has a dilemma. If everyone started at day one and proceeded day by day, they could start with the basics, and build up their knowledge each day until at the end of the year the students know everything. The level of the lessons would increase over the year. But if the course had to allow the student to start at any day of the year, as this one does, then the level has to be the same, more or less, throughout the year. Perhaps that is why these daily lessons tend to emphasize vocabulary and not grammar. The native speaker speaks clearly and has a nice voice, speaking at a reasonable rate. She is remarkably consistent throughout the "year". This should be a good start on learning to understand spoken Norwegian.
This course is designed for the student to use a few minutes every day. Getting in the habit of doing something every day would be very good. Learn a little every day. Also, refresh what you already know so you don't forget it. (In fact, although I think this CD-ROM is meant for beginning students, I think it would also be very good for students who wish to do some review.)
If you do the Phrase-a-day page and a grammar page and its exercises every day, you will make a steady progression in your learning of Norwegian. If you complete this course you will have learned basically all of Norwegian grammar and you will have a minimal vocabulary. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, you should start reading as much as you can in Norwegian from other sources in order to build up your vocabulary. This is true no matter which course you take. Similarly, this course is just the starting point for teaching you how to write and speak. There is a big step between "knowing" the grammar and remembering to use it when you write and speak, and that step takes a lot of practice to get over. For speaking, you will probably need more help to get the pronunciation right.
Here are my suggestions for how to use this CD-ROM.
Copy it on to your hard disk and use it from there, so that it is faster and you don't have the noise of the CD spinning.
Do a Phrase-a-day lesson every day. Do it multiple times, and keep raising the bar. First, understand what the sentences mean. Then listen while reading along. Then listen without looking at the text. Speak it yourself, matching the way she speaks as exactly as you can. But speak in real sentences, using only one option at a time, not the whole list like the text and recording often do. Speak these sentences to yourself all day.
Do a grammar page and its exercises every day. Pick one which seems appropriate to your needs. Don't go through them in order unless it's just review for you. Go back and review ones you've already done. Look up any words which you don't know. The exercises tend to be easier than grammar in real life because they focus on one topic, sparing you the confusion that students get when the topics are mixed together. Therefore your goal should be to get all of the exercises 100% right. Keep trying until you can. Keep reviewing.
Bugs
I don't think there are any mistakes in the Norwegian content, but the HTML pages and the interactive exercises have a few bugs. Some of these are cosmetic, and some you should know how to work around.
Browsers are notorious for not displaying pages the way the designer meant them to look and for not displaying pages even according to how the standards specify they should be displayed. And the same thing applies to how browsers implement ECMAscript (formerly called JavaScript). Therefore, some of the bugs mentioned here may not exist in some browsers. I went through this program using MS IE (which KlikkNorsk recommends) on a Mac, but when I spot-checked some things again on the Mac and browser I normally use (Mozilla), it worked much better.
The Glossary window is growable and it should not be. The Exercises windows are not growable and they should be. (The Grammar windows are also growable, but to no avail, since the content is in the form of JPEG images. I can understand why this was done -- getting HTML to display nicely and predictably in different browsers is hard -- but the tradeoff is that you can't display the text in a larger fort.)
In the exercises, there is usually a "Show Answers" button, and it usually doesn't work. But if you press the "Clear Answers" button first, then the "Show Answers" button does work.
In the exercises where the student types in an answer, the student's correct answer will be shown surrounded by asterisks. For example, *noen*. Many of the fields provided for the answer are big enough for the answer, but not for the answer with two asterisks, resulting in the program not showing the complete answer. This type of exercise is the most likely to cause frustration. For example, typing an extra space between words will cause the rest of the sentence to be shown as wrong, even though it looks like you typed the right answer.
Many exercises have a sentence containing several pop-up menus. Be sure to do these in left to right order to avoid trouble. And if you get a red X, fix that answer before you go on to the next pop-up item.
In the types of questions where you click on all the items of a certain kind in a paragraph, it will give feedback if you click on the right or wrong items, but it will not give you feedback if you do not click on some items which you should have clicked on. You can check this by clicking on "Show Answers", but you have to look very carefully to see if anything changed.
There are some bugs which are specific to individual exercises and questions. I'll list them in a separate message later.
Despite these problems with the exercises, the exercises are a very important and valuable part of this CD-ROM. This is what sets this course apart from a book. Active learning is much better than passive learning. Doing is better than reading about it. Here you have a chance to try what you've just learned and get immediate feedback, with no worries about making mistakes.
This CD-ROM isn't the one and only thing you will need to learn Norwegian, but it will definitely help you learn it.
Page updated October 26, 2004.