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Writing by hand in Norwegian always feels weird. Typing it is no problem, but handwriting it is another thing altogether.

I was bored at lunch, so decided to try slapping down a few sentences. Wasn't bad. Atrocious grammar, of course, but I think the sentences were mostly coherent, and the words that I didn't know were all ones that I'm pretty sure I have never seen, rather than ones I forgot, so that's a good sign.

Kept accidentally writing å as @, though. Whoops. I think my brain assumes that a + o = @. Which, to be fair, is not that far off....

Since I've finished the Norwegian tree on Duolingo, I've been giving some thought to Dutch. I don't want to commit to anything yet, so I haven't added the course, but I've been looking through the resources posted in the Dutch section of the Duolingo forums. The Dutch team is so organized, wow! They have like, a shitload of notes and explanations and resources listed, all posted in a really tidy way. And there are volunteers translating the Duolingo Stories and reading comprehension questions, since that feature isn't available for Dutch. How neat.

So far, I'm just poking through everything out of curiosity. The language is different enough from Norwegian that I don't think I would have too much trouble keeping things straight. In fact, in the cases where the vocabulary is similar to Norwegian, it might help me remember it - I do know that I've had luck with remembering Norwegian vocabulary when it's similar to Middle English.

I really love the way written Dutch looks - there's something about the texture of it that's appealing to me. And sometimes the similarity to English is almost uncanny, as if I'm trying to read some very strange and obscure form of Middle English.

It would be nice if I could ladder the course by learning Dutch from Norwegian, but that's not possible. ;) However, if I do learn Dutch, I'd then be able to do a reverse tree for it after that, since a course for Dutch -> English exists (unfortunately, there's no reverse tree for Norwegian). And Dutch -> German is currently in development, so theoretically I could eventually ladder that if I wanted to.

But, anyway. Current goals for Duolingo are:
1. Continue to level up Skills until my tree is switched to Version 4.
2. Go through the entire course again to make sure I grasp all of the new material that will come with Version 4.
3. Gild the Norwegian tree/bring up all Skills to Crown 5
4. Add Dutch course?

And my main non-Duo plan, particularly for my upcoming time off during the holidays, is to go through my Norwegian textbooks and work on some reading. I have one with quite a few excerpts and passages etc, and I want to take a serious look at that. Working on reading by using newspapers can be interesting, but it's way above my reading level most of the time, and can be a little frustrating. So, we'll see how this goes.

...And I should push myself to write in Norwegian more often, but. Um. Well. We'll see about that.