Einar Haugen (1906–1994)

Do people review dictionaries? Whatever. This one's really good. It's got a pretty solid size to it, unlike so many translating dictionaries so it's pretty rare that the Norsk word you're looking up isn't there. It even has entries for irregular forms where guessing what the infinitive is and looking up that would be impractical. This book combines Bokmål and Nynorsk so you don't need to know which writing system a word belongs to beforehand (yay!) and clearly notes to which each belongs and any differences in inflection if the word appears in both. Best of all the definitions give multiple English synonyms so you can get a real feel for the word rather than being forced to treat it as the Norsk equivalent of a single English word. Oh, and it is really quite thorough about providing usage examples for turns of phrase that mean more than the sum of their parts.

The one thing that might be problematic for some is that it is strictly a Norsk/English dictionary so you can only look up Norsk words with English definitions. I've been using it almost exclusively to help as I learn to read Norsk and it serves me well.… (más)

This book does not have an audio accompaniment, although an extensive introductory chapter is given to pronunciation. How useful that is is debatable, as one really needs to hear a native speaker in order to imitate properly. This is not an easy book to use. The learning curve is rather steep, and certain sections will need to be reworked again and again. It is well-written, though, and although he asks for a lot, I think that Haugen knows what he's doing. I find the best method with this book is to make flash cards of all the vocabulary for the chapter, learn it, then go back and put it together with the grammar. For what it is, it is a good resource used in conjunction with another language-learning systeem. Unfortunately, copies are quite rare.… (más)