NIS opened the door

“I applied for a Master degree taught in Norwegian and NIS opened the door to me for doing that”. This is how learning Norwegian through the NIS course changed Lina’s and Azahara’s lifes to accomplish their future goals.

An interesting fact the NIS course has is that a lot of students that are taking part were doing an exchange semester or year as an Erasmus first, they fall in love with the country and decided to stay longer and learning Norwegian.
These are the cases of Lina, a media graduated from Germany, and Azahara, a Spanish teacher:

– I first came as an Erasmus+ student in 2016. I was supposed to stay one semester but after one month living here, I decided to stay the whole year… and I left Norway knowing that I’d come back one day, says Lina.

– In my case, while living in Norway I discovered I love being here and I told myself that I’d come back to Volda again. And 6 years later, with a Bachelor degree and a Master degree, I’m doing so, says Azahara.
Lina first thought was to start a Master degree while Azahara saw herself living and working in Norway, but both of them knew there was something to do first in order to reach their aims, and that was learning Norwegian.

About the course

– You need to put a lot of effort and dedication to really learn the language, if you do so it’s amazing how fast you’re progressing. I’d never imagined when I started, that my level of Norwegian would be that good now. Explains Azahara, which gives more details about the structure of the course:

– The first month and a half, classes are taught in English and Norwegian, because you start from 0, from level A1. After that, teachers only talk in Norwegian. They’re really nice and teach on a clear and easy way, so they help you a lot.
There’s literature to read and grammar books to follow, and we always do an exam at the end of every month to see how well we’re developing our skills. On the second semester, we started having level B1 and we’ll finish with the level B2.

Asking them what is the best thing about the course, Lina doesn’t hesitate to say:

– I like the fact that we covered topics like Norwegian literature, politics, and society, and here I found out I love literature. During high school, I was so stressed studying 10 subjects at the same time that I didn’t pay too much attention to this one, and it’s been a second chance to learn about literature.
But NIS is more than a course, it helped them to follow what they want to do in their future.

– I applied for a Master degree taught in Norwegian, and I got accepted already. NIS opened the door to me for doing that, says Lina.
Azahara, on the other hand, comments that “I wanted to come here and learn the language because I want to work as a teacher here. I believe the Norwegian educational system follows more my philosophy, my way of thinking. I also love living in Norway, meeting new people, and learning new languages, so these pushed me into applied for the course too”