[Duolingo] Norsk Course Complete

I completed the Norwegian course on Duolingo today. Yay!

Earlier this year, there was an announcement that Version 4 of the Norwegian course would be slowly rolling out. Toward the end of the year, probably everyone will be switched over to the new course, which is even longer than Version 3. For now, the version 4 users are maybe 75% of existing users and all new users. I'm still on Version 3 - so, I decided to try to complete it before the course switches over.

Completing the course doesn't mean that you'll be competent in Norwegian; I can still confidently say that I suck at it. Like all of the courses on Duolingo, it's absolutely necessary to study in other ways outside of the course too. But I'm pretty sure that Duo has helped my reading, at the very least.

☆ What the Norwegian course on Duolingo can do:

+ It will expose you to a wide variety of vocabulary.
+ It'll force you to think about Norwegian for at least a few minutes every day.
+ It provides a lot of lessons to go through. Norwegian is one of the longest courses on Duolingo, and unlike some of the newer courses, you're unlikely to finish this course quickly unless you have enough knowledge to Test Out of some levels.
+ If you read the Tips and Notes sections, the grammar explanations are usually relatively easy to understand.
+ The Tips and Notes sometimes contain neat cultural tidbits, too.
+ The Course Volunteers are very dedicated to working on the course and helping people out in the Sentence Discussions.
+ If you look at Duome stats, it can help you decide on some kind of spaced repetition plan, which is pretty useful considering the course is so long. If you're unfamiliar with it, you can check your progress stats here: duome.eu/YOURUSERNAME/progress

☆ Things the Norwegian course is not great for:

+ It will not make you fluent (obviously).
+ Like most other Duo courses, there isn't much focus on "tourist language" (understanding directions, ordering in restaurants, etc). I'd tentatively suggest Pimsleur for this kind of thing.
+ I have heard that the audio comprehension lessons are rather bad/the robot voice audio provides incorrect pronunciations. Obviously any robot voice is not going to be a good substitute for a real person, but since I've heard more than one Norwegian user mention this, I figure it's worth noting.
+ This course is bokmål only and does not cover nynorsk. For most users this isn't an issue, but anyone who does want to learn nynorsk will have to look elsewhere. Discussion on the forums has indicated that the course volunteers had wanted to add a bonus nynorsk Skill, but weren't able to do it.
+ Like a lot of languages on the site, the Norwegian course does not have Duolingo Stories.
+ Duolingo has greatly reduced the number of lessons required to get up to Crown 5 on each skill, so less repetition is needed in order to complete every Skill and gild your tree. But obviously, this isn't limited to the Norwegian course.

And now I can look forward to going through all of the new information in Version 4 of the course when it rolls over for me. :) In the meantime, I'm going to work on bringing up all the Skills to Crown 3 at the very least. Probably won't be able to actually gild the whole tree before the switch.

I might also try a different site/application for Norwegian, but I haven't decided which one yet. I'm considering taking a look at Memrise, Drops, and Clozemaster. ...Maybe I'll just give all of them a go and see which works best.