It won’t change my life in any way whatsoever. It doesn’t give me a qualification that will be of any use. The subject is a hobby I will never make a living from, nor would I want to. Most of my fellow students were kids.
The thing is, if I had done this course in my first or second language it would have been no challenge whatsoever, and there would have been no pride in the achievement. Common sense and stuff I learned as a child would have got me through the exam without revising for it. But passing an exam in my fourth language, second best in my class when my course mates are all native speakers? Hell, I’m proud of myself. I don’t speak it enough, because my vocabulary and grammar make me sound like a three year old, so I’ve mostly been getting by in other languages. This is a bit of a confidence boost, though, and I will try to stop worrying and start speaking.
I’m living and working in Iceland at the moment. My exam was actually the theory part of an equestrian course - in Icelandic, which turns out to be a good way of improving your language skills too. There are language courses locally for foreigners, which are fun but you mostly end up chatting to other foreigners in English. I think I’ve learned more through Háskóli Íslands’ online courses. I also had a private tutor when I first arrived.
The frustrating thing is being able to understand very well but not being able to express yourself properly, and contributing in a group conversation is a non-starter. And the grammar is off-putting. For instance, there are 13 different declensions for something as simple as the number “one”, including the plural forms (for things like “one pair of socks”).
Because, you see, I visited Iceland in August and I can say that, unequivocally and without exception, the Icelandic language is universally unpronounceable. I mean, completely unpronounceable.
And how! I grew up as the child of an Icelandic expatriate, and my Icelandic has gotten fuzzy at best. I can tell you the right word for certain contexts, but I’d be pretty screwed if I had to get around with no English speaking anywhere. Interestingly enough, I did a week-long horseback riding camp, where I took all the testing in Icelandic; I did pretty well, but not spectacularly, as I wasn’t familiar with horse anatomy in English, let alone Icelandic.
Oh, if you’re living in Reykjavík and enjoy the club scene, check out FKNHNDSM; they regularly play Kaffíbarinn and one of them is the SO of one of my childhood besties. This assumes that you’re of an age and interest for the tiny crowded clubs and flamboyant nightlife in Iceland.
ETA: interface2x, those are pretty easy. Just learn to talk like you’ve got a bunch of pebbles in your mouth and you’ve had three or four shots of whisky.
Well, not that many more people, but still! It’s totally awesome. I’ve always wanted to learn a Nordic language myself but have never quite gotten around to it. I did, however, take an undergraduate linguistics seminar in which Old Norse was the subject language, so I do know a little bit about it and Icelandic.
I’ve got the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (bilingual edition), and I never had that much trouble parsing the OE text because a lot of the words looked either like Icelandic or like a cross between English and Icelandic. However, at the time I was reading it, I had also taken two years of high school French, two years of high school German, and three semesters of university German, so that may skew results.
LOL. My last encounter with a family of Danes was at a school I worked for. They start speaking to each other about where to meet at the end of the day and their groceries [in Danish], and all I can think about while setting up their accounts is how funny they sounded to me while still being relatively intelligible. I didn’t get as far as “you guys speak some funny Icelandic”, but I sure thought it, having not heard Danish for about 10 years at that point.
Thanks for the tip, although I am based in Akureyri, and don’t make the trip to Reykjavik very often. The nightlife here is quite impressive for a small town, it seems everyone in Iceland plays in a band of some kind.
