Tonight, another pulse-pounding report on my ongoing conversational Norwegian project.

If you haven’t been following these posts, the situation is this: I know the Norwegian language well enough to be supplementing my retirement (and quite well, lately) by doing Norwegian translation for pay. But this facility applies only to the written word. I have a lot of trouble understanding it spoken.

To fix this situation, I took the advice of commenter Deborah HH, who suggested I download a radio app and listen to Norwegian radio. This project has worked far better than I ever hoped.

So here’s where I am. Each day, as a sort of sound track to whatever I’m doing, I listen to NRK all-day news (think the BBC, but in Norwegian for Norwegians). However, they turn the broadcast over to a BBC feed at night (around 3:00 p.m. my time). At that point I turn to Jæren Misjonsradio, a Christian station from Stavanger. A further wrinkle is that there’s no NRK all-day news on weekends. So I spend that entire period with the Christian station. This is not a trial – I rather enjoy it, and even feel it’s edifying me (“edification,” oppbyggelse, is a word we use a lot in Norwegian pietism).

However, there’s a sort of a whiplash effect. I understand what I hear on the Christian station pretty well by now. Enough to make me feel I’m making significant progress.

But when I get back to NRK on Mondays, I find I’m not comprehending at the same level. This is, I’m pretty sure, due to the fact that I listen to preachers on the Christian station, preaching the Bible. I can always recognize their texts, and it’s easy to intuit what they’re saying even if I miss some words. I know the jargon, and the customs of the tribe.

But when I’ve got people on NRK discussing the latest action in Ukraine, or who’s ahead in parliamentary polling, there’s a lot less predictable stuff. So I struggle a little, and have to revise my estimation of my progress downward.

Nevertheless, I am making palpable progress. And I suspect more and more that the process is more subconscious than conscious. When I concentrate on listening and interpreting, I have trouble. If I just relax, recognizable patterns swim into my ken.

I’m recognizing phrases more and more. It’s rather exhilarating, like surfing waves of sound. You’re not doing rational analysis when you do this, but responding with a kind of muscle memory of the mind.