Tag Archives: intermediate
Ready, steady, rhyme! Posted by hulda on Nov 10, 2016
This blog post won’t have anything political in it. Instead I’m going to fill it with poetry and cute animals, because every now and then everyone needs at least a few moments of something calming, harmless and good in their lives. Besides, I believe that looking at pictures of cute animals is good for the…
Achoo! Posted by hulda on Oct 20, 2016
Autumn is here, which means the flu season is here as well. Now’s the time when students going to class will find their classes abruptly canceled with only a note “Tíminn fellur niður vegna veikinda” (= the class is canceled due to illness) stuck to the door. The lucky ones may have seen an…
Icelandic habit. Posted by hulda on Aug 18, 2016
Yesterday morning I heard a raven croak somewhere nearby, possibly on the neighbour’s roof. Today, for a while, it was sunny on one side of the house and rained on the other. August has definitely arrived and you know what it means – time to go back to school! 😀 …at least for those that…
Easter proverb time. Posted by hulda on Mar 28, 2016
What’s Easter without the Icelandic tradition of people giving each other gigantic chocolate eggs filled with more chocolate, candy and proverbs? Not a proper Easter says I! The eggs must absolutely be of the Icelandic variety too, nothing else will do unless… unless the eggs meet a certain criteria. The chocolate itself is delicious but while…
Icelandic names’ gender rules. Posted by hulda on Jan 21, 2016
A new girl’s name has been accepted by the naming committee (link)! Although the word “new” there does not quite describe the name itself, it’s in fact so old it can be found in some of the oldest texts written in Iceland. Everyone knows the lady, she’s a key figure in Norse mythology… but up…
New words for Icelandic Posted by hulda on Nov 19, 2015
On the 4th August this year Samtökin ’78 declared a competition to find new words for the Icelandic language called Hýryrði, Gay Words. By this they meant it was time to find Icelandic equivalents for words that were only used as loanwords from English because – well, as many of you readers probably know already…
Run for your life! Posted by hulda on Oct 15, 2015
The autumn nights are growing colder and we’re heading for the long dark season, so let’s talk about spooky things! Icelanders of old thought that the only safe place in the world was within the walls of a house (and occasionally not even there, but more on that later on) and well, they were right…