Amazon.com description and reviews: click here.
Reviewed by: Norris Weimer
Teach Yourself Norwegian - A Complete Course for Beginners
Margaretha Danbolt Simons
Hodder & Stoughton Educational
1997
ISBN 0-8442-3718-3
This info is what I got from the book cover. If you look on Amazon, you will see it with a different publisher and ISBN. As far as I can tell, it's just a distribution agreement that the US and Canadian markets are handled by NTC Publishing Group, and that seems to end up meaning McGraw Hill.
Since this isn't obvious, the web site for the UK publisher
is
The paperback alone: ISBN 0340679980
The cassette alone: ISBN 0340679999
the book and cassette: ISBN 0340680040
These are all listed as 1997.
Just to add to the confusion, Amazon.com lists
the book and cassette as June 1998 with
ISBN 084423818X
***AND***
it also lists a "revised edition Feb 1998"
with *different* authors!
Ingvald Marm, Alf Sommerfelt, and Margaretha Danbolt Simons
ISBN 0844237183 -- which you will note is the
same as the first one I've listed above and that one
I *know* only has one author, unless somehow they
just forgot to put the others on the title page!
I might be able to clear up a bit of the confusion here, since
I also looked at an earlier edition of this book:
Teach Yourself Norwegian - A Complete Course for Beginners
Ingvald Marm, Alf Sommerfelt
Hodder and Stoughton Educational
1967
ISBN 0 340 26285 9
So the way I understand it is this. Ingvald Marm wrote it in 1943,
and Alf Sommerfelt revised it in 1967, and Margaretha Danbolt Simons
rewrote it completely from scratch in 1997. Totally different book,
same title. The one I saw (1984 printing) was still written in a
classic old English textbook style. It's definitely very dense, and
it's probably unreadable for most people. Perhaps there's nothing
wrong with it other than its age, but you can definitely do better now,
so I will say no more about that one.
- - - - - - -
Now, after all that, I am going to tell you that I am not going to review
this book. I have not read it. Over the summer, I've used a number
of books in my quest to learn Norwegian, and I have shared my opinion
of them here. This one I never used. I saw it in the bookstore, but it
just didn't appeal to me. However, it does seem to be a popular book,
so I wanted to look at it a little bit closer, especially since it's just
about the only one I didn't look at. Perhaps others could add their
positive or negative reactions to this book. Why is it popular?
There are not very many textbooks for English speakers who want to
learn Norwegian, but there does seem to be a pattern, and this one
fits right in. It's one of a series (of 200!), it's a paperback,
it's about 200 pages long (in this case, a little longer). It's aimed
at the self-study market, it originates in the UK, and there are
optional cassettes (actually, make that 'optional cassette', as it
seems there is only one).
I haven't seen the cassette, but two isn't enough, so one is definitely
not enough. One review on Amazon criticized it for being in the
wrong dialect (Bergen) for foreigners to learn.
I haven't read the book, but I've gone through it quickly, looking for
things that stood out, things that appealed or turned me off, things
that would affect my decision whether to use this book.
My first impression of the "look and feel" is that it is cheap. My
first impression of the content was that it wasn't special. I didn't
see anything that was particular bad or particularly good. What do
others think?
If I had more time, I would take a closer look at the topics covered
in each chapter. I noticed that there was a section on prepositions
right at the end of the book. That's a typical place in a grammar
book, but odd for a textbook, in my opinion. You can't get that far
without using them anyway! And since they just might be the trickiest
part of Norwegian, the coverage seemed pretty superficial.
There are 16 units in this book. It doesn't say anywhere about how
long you should expect to take. Which is okay, but unusual!
It does say this in the introduction: "Remember that the best way
to learn a language is to listen and read a little and often and to
increase you confidence gradually -- this is far better than
spending long infrequent sessions poring over the books!"
Like other textbooks, each unit has a few dialogues and/or texts
to read, some vocabulary based on those, some grammar notes, and
a few exercises.
I looked most closely at the exercises: true/false questions,
fill-in-a-blank sentences, multiple choice questions. Pretty light, in my
opinion. Maybe that was done deliberately for the self-study market
to make it seem easier, but misguided (IMHO). In any case, there's
not much variety here. The final dialogue in each unit has one role
in English that the student is supposed to translate into Norwegian.
The aim of this textbook is "to speak and read everyday Norwegian
and to gain insight into the Norwegian culture and way of life."
That second part deserves some comment. That's a typical part
of textbooks meant for classroom usage, but the self-study books
tend to limit this to the dialogues. This book has more of it than
the others. I don't see it as being a particulary good thing, since
the cultural info is readily available elsewhere, and there's not
enough space to do it properly. In a textbook, it tends to be
shallow and politically correct, and too narrowly targeted to
the demographics of the students the publisher has in mind.
Lots of opinions for a book I haven't even read, ikke sant?
Please feel free to add your own opinions of why you would
or would not recommend this book!