Mjølnir Norwegian 9+

Excellent Norwegian learning tool so far

As an expat Norwegian learner around A2-B1 level I have realized independently how important vocabulary knowledge is. If you know the words along with basic grammar, you can make yourself understood and understand a lot of spoken and written Norwegian just via context. If you don’t know the words, it’s a lot harder.

Mjølnir app looks perfect for addressing this, as it uses spaced repetition (effective and widely used memory technique) AND it’s also targeting the most used phrases and vocabulary first (trying to find these on the net can be difficult and of uncertain reliability.) So you’re learning the most efficient content, paired with the most efficient learning method. Excellent.

Finally, I also like that all the flash cards come with audio from native speakers (super useful to train your listening and pronunciation skills), and that it doesn’t allow you to overload yourself - when you’re done for the day, you’re done. The UI is simple but looks good and is bug free for me so far, so good marks there.

All in all I’m very happy with it and look forward to finishing the entire content within the next year. I think it’ll be helpful as another tool to increase my Norwegian knowledge.

Solid, serious, useful tool

I’ve been learning Norwegian for a few months now and this has become my most important tool for serious acquisition of the language. What I like most about Mjølnir is that it feels like a halfway point between a serious book on Norwegian language and grammar and (on the other hand) many of the “popcorn”-level free apps out there that only give you some basic vocabulary without serious grammatical instruction or listening practice.

They know Norwegian but not pedagogy

There’s a lot of good Norwegian content, and I really like hearing the different accents of the speakers. But, this is a very difficult app to learn a language with. Memorizing random words in random order is tedious, and it’s hard to build connections between concepts and vocabulary this way. I’m often reaching for my dictionary to look up words on a flashcard that I havent seen before. No one learns a language by memorizing a list of nouns, then a list of verbs, etc. There should be more thematic decks (say a deck about food that includes all the parts of speech and listening to sentences about that topic, where cards reinforce each other and you build connections between ideas). I’d also appreciate the ability to bookmark cards and create my own decks of things I want to prioritize reviewing.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your feedback. We know (traditional) pedagogy, but we have consciously decided not to follow it. Its main issue to us is that it lives up to its etymology ("leading of children") and we thought of our product as something aimed at adults.

Here are our comments to your 3-star review of our app.

1) Our words are not in random order. They are, for the most, in order of frequency of use in the language (see Zipf's Law). Although at the beginning there will be a feeling of "wax on, wax off", our approach of front-loading your learning with pronunciation notions, with the top grammar rules and with the 100-200 words (in all of their forms) that, statistically, happen most frequently in everyday Norwegian is the shortest path to begin reaching the critical mass of knowledge of the language that allows users to continue learning further simply by using it every day.
Users are NOT requested to "memorise a list of nouns, then a list of verbs", because the app proposes to learn a mix of topics and lexical classes every day, unless the user deliberately overrides this approach.
We are happy to take the risk of being subjectively tedious to some people if it means that we can be objectively more effective at providing the needed results to anyone using our app consistently.
2) We are not sure what particular connections need to be built between "concepts" (?) and vocabulary. Verbs are verbs. Nouns are nouns. If users know English well enough to use the app (and we can't cater to those who don't), they can naturally leverage on the similarities between English and Norwegian. Whenever "context" is truly needed (i.e. å vite vs å kjenne, å tro vs å synes vs å tenke, noe vs noen, ska vs vil vs kommer til å etc), we provide plenty of explanations and full-sentence examples.
3) Thematic decks are introduced at what we have assessed is the right moment. However, users can select them whenever they want from the B1-to-B2 section at any time, which we welcome you to do. We are not interested in aligning with the old-fashioned approaches that dive into themes straight away, because they inevitably introduce low-frequency words that shouldn't be a priority for the learner (thus delaying the learning of what should be prioritised).
Again, we are not sure what are these "ideas": the grammar, pronouns, conjunctions etc used to make statements or questions about food are the same used for politics, wildlife, transports or any other topic. What changes are the nouns, verbs and the adjectives specific to that topic. The problem is that many of these words don't make the top 1000 of the most frequently used words in the language, so they are low priority for our learners up until B1. If anything, most other resources follow that approach, which means that Mjølnir can be a better complement to the average book/app/course. We aim to be a new and different tool in the toolbox of language learners, not a copycat of existing ones.
Also, we know we have enough cards that require our users to think up a whole sentence from zero in sufficiently demanding ways. This practices the critical skill of "stringing a sentence together". Once that is achieved, mastering one topic rather than another will only be a matter of vocabulary or set expressions to be memorised. It's unreasonable to think otherwise.
4) We are planning a bookmark functionality, but the reality is that, with the feedback the user provides (i.e. wrong/hard/normal/easy), software is much better positioned at managing the time at which something should be revised then users would be. Spaced repetition is so efficient at enabling mnemonic retention exactly because it aims to show a notion for review just before it's forgotten, but not too soon as to cause over-studying. But yes, we understand the appeal of being able to over-study certain flashcards.

All the best