Norwegian word a day

I’m cultivating a new habit to practice Norwegian every day, to make it easier when I visit there and make drawings amongst the fjords and mountains (plus it will help me communicate with my family!).

After I spent a lot of money on “normal” language resources I realised it was more helpful to watch TV series with Norsk subtitles. Using different language subtitles with your favourite shows can also give you a better insight into the program’s subject matter. Desperate Housewives has such an intense focus on food – many repetitions of spise (eat) and middag (dinner), unsurprisingly another top hit was elsker (love). But if I had Will Powell’s realtime translation glasses then I wouldn’t have to do all that searching. In the meantime I’ll watch my backlog of Grey’s Anatomy first (in Norsk, naturally!).

Learn Norwegian kit!

So how do you find which TV shows and movies have the subtitles you need? This is where extra information in library catalogue records comes in handy, if the subtitle information is included then of course it’s searchable. Here’s how to find DVDs with subtitles of your language of interest, keeping in mind that there will be display and menu variations between library catalogues:

First, get a moment alone with your regular library’s catalogue, or for a bigger overview, use the general Trove site which is the library catalogue for the whole of Australia (I know! It’s mind-boggling).

From the Advanced search option, use an “any keyword” or “general” field and type in your language, e.g. “Norwegian” and combine it with the word “subtitle*” (using an asterisk might be a help or a hindrance – at the moment you’re searching for subtitle/s, but if it doesn’t work just remove it).

If you don’t get the results you seek, try using the name of the language itself, i.e. “Norsk”.

Still no results? What about looking at the format menu (this tells you the materials being searched, so you can restrict your results to just one type), select limits of “All DVD” or video or video-captioned or AV materials. If these options aren’t available, another workaround is to include a general search term “videorecording”. Even if you want a DVD (not a VHS), this will still work for some items, as this word can be used in the title description. However, some libraries have changed this to state DVD.

The results will really vary based on the Norwegian vs. Norsk search terms, “Norwegian” was certainly more successful in terms of results in this Trove example search. Notice how some results are in “Books” and after scrolling, some are in “Music, sound and video”. I’m sure someone has created a guided search to make getting these results in any library catalogue much easier!

I’m tweeting my progress and will cluster the results to make a little vocabulary list so that my Dad can see that I’m doing my Norwegian homework! (or you might like to learn with me). #EttOrdOmDagen

(note on the image: the orange jumper was knitted by my very talented Farmor, and the little wolf badge used to have a nose but the cats ate it.)