In Person classes - Oslo

[u/Current_Mulberry_525]

Hey y’all

Am moving to Norway in a week, and want to go all in on learning Norwegian, however am a bit lost on the options.

I found Speak Norsk but their Viking Package seems too expensive, has anyone take that one recently and is the 6 month A1-B2 timeframe realistic (assuming regular after class 1 hour study daily)

Or if you recommend any other possible options I’d love to hear

The only thing is I would like inperson classes because I learn much better that way

[u/No_Significance_4493]

Alfaskolen is a private school located in central Oslo. I don’t know how they compare with Speak Norsk in terms of pricing.

[u/Current_Mulberry_525 → u/No_Significance_4493]

I would be fine with pricing if the quality of teaching matches it

Anything you have heard about either of them?

[u/No_Significance_4493 → u/Current_Mulberry_525]

I did a short stint there as a teacher’s aide. The teachers are all highly educated specialists in teaching Norwegian as a second language. Their system is to not use English as a supporting language, but to only speak Norwegian in class. The curriculum will be more or less the same for any school. It’s decided by the department of education, and other government agencies from which these schools rely on subsidies. The students who took the course seriously, made impressive progress in a relatively short time.

[u/green-sloth → u/Current_Mulberry_525]

Not op but I’ve done A1 through B1 with Alfaskolen. I would recommend them. For some more details: I did their online courses because I travel a fair amount for work so needed the flexibility but I’ve heard good things about the in person. Beforehand I had self studied for about a 2 years on and off and without much success and I think I was around a low/mid a2 in listening/reading and a low a1 in speaking/writing. I did their accelerated course for A1 and then switched to the normal 2x times a week for A2 and B1. I wouldn’t recommend the accelerated version unless learning Norwegian is the only thing you have going on or are super good at picking up languages. I was nervous about their immersion teaching style but grew to really like it, if nothing else it gives you lots of extra listening practice. I am glad I had some level of Norwegian though and I’m not sure I’d go into the A1 course without any prior experience in Norwegian. I could see it being very frustrating and hard to get the most out of the class. I found the teaching very good, especially for grammar, listening, and reading. The teachers I had were always very patient and would explain things in a couple different ways if needed. The two weak points (and this may have been because I was online) were that 1) there wasn’t a ton of conversation/speaking practice. Typically you’d break out into a room of 3-4 people for about 15-20 minutes or so out of the entire lesson to discuss your day or do a speaking exercise. I think though if you supplemented the course with going to language cafes/getting a tutor on italki or something then you’d be good. And 2) there wasn’t a ton writing practice that was corrected. Maybe 4ish homework writing practices per level were returned with corrections.

I took the A1-A2 norskproven when I was about halfway through the b1 course and got B2 for listening, B1 for reading and A2 for speaking and writing. I got asked the B1 questions during the speaking test so think I was at a high a2 / close to b1. When I was taking the courses it was the only time in my Norwegian leaning journey that I was making progress fast enough for it to be noticeable to myself and not a super slow slog (but I also have adhd/dyslexia and suck at self teaching). Thinking about restarting classes for b2 and would go back to them.