Icelandic Language Blog

Remember how just two weeks ago we got so much snow we ended up stuck in our house? It’s all gone now. Spring seems to have arrived to Iceland all of a sudden. Days are growing longer, ravens are gathering in large groups (I hear it’s called “unkindness of ravens” in English) before they head out of the cities for the summer, the first crocuses are up and Icelanders are walking around with their coats open. I’m not, it’s still way too cold for me, but as I’m not a native this may be excusable.

Spring notes also the beginning of the best travelling season, so I decided to put together an updated info post on the local public transport system. This means only buses I’m afraid, and they run sparsely: twice in an hour, four times during the peak hours, and this is within the capital city region. In case you want to travel a longer distance, for example to Höfn on the east coast, I advice you check the timetables well in advance. The buses may be going there only on two days per week.

The capital city region bus, strætisvagn or just strætó in short, is easy enough to recognize, or should I say yellow enough. The long distance ones are called langferðabíll or rúta (loan word from Danish rutebil) and are often white or blue+yellow in colour. The bus stops can look almost like anything – they’re bright red, dark green, concrete grey, or there may be only a small traffic sign marking them. The driver will stop if they see someone at the bus stop, regardless of whether you flag them down or not, and other buses will take this as a sign of you getting onto that bus and will just drive past without stopping. Good luck if you see three buses arriving in a row and yours is the last one!*

My favourite type of a bus stop, the only kind that can protect you against the wind.

If your idea is to travel between downtown Reykjavík and the suburbs you’re all set and good. There are often several buses that will take you there, perhaps with a little bit of variation to which way they go, so if you’d like to visit for example Breiðholt you can choose between a scenic route by the seaside (bus 12) and another, more urban one that goes past one of the most popular malls, Kringlan (bus 3). However, the routes are somewhat troublesome if you want to travel between suburbs or municipalities, so once again pre-planning is golden. The website of Strætó is very helpful for this. They also have an English option if you think your Icelandic isn’t quite there yet, and even though the search option only works if you write the names 100% correctly it will give you prompts of what you may have meant to write, if it doesn’t recognize the word.

Here’s the latest, most up to date price list. Taking a bus can be costly especially if you’re planning to travel daily, so it’s always good to consider the day and month cards. You cannot buy tickets or cards at the buses themselves, but you can pay for one trip, in which case you’ll need exact fare. For the cards etc. your best place to buy would be a bus station – BSÍ, Hlemmur, Mjódd – any of the larger ones you’ll no doubt pass on your way.

The white text on pink is somewhat difficult to see, but it says:

Mánaðarkort (Græna) (= one month card, green)

Þriggja mánaða kort (Rauða) (= three months card, red)

Níu mánaða kort (Bláa) (= nine months card, blue)

Eins dags kort (= one day card)

Þriggja daga kort (= three days card)

Underneath the cards there are prices for tickets, small pieces of paper, really easy to lose. Every time you need to use one you’ll just drop it in the see-through box at the driver’s side where you also put your coins in case you’re paying with cash. Let him know if you need a change ticket and he’ll print you one, which will then allow you to get on a bus within one hour’s time.

Fullorðnir (9 miðar) (= adults, 9 tickets)

Unglingar 12-18 ára (20 miðar) (= young people 12-18 years old, 20 tickets)

Börn 6-11 ára (20 miðar) (= children 6-11 years old, 20 tickets)

Öryrkjar og aldraðir (20 miðar) (= people with disabilities and the elderly, 20 tickets)

The last one on the list is

Staðgreiðslugjald (= a single fare bought at the bus)

The white and grey boxes each note one area. The first one for example is Höfuðborgarsvæðið (= capital city region) and unless you’re planning to leave Reykjavík this is the only one you need to know of. The others note prices for cities within a couple of hours driving distance: Akranes, Borgarnes, Hveragerði and Selfoss. The left column gives you the price of the whole thing that you’re going to buy and the right one the actual price per travel. In case of the day and month cards these are but estimations based on a theory that you’re going to take the bus twice a day every day. In reality no one’s going to stop you from using the card as many times per day as you want to, so in the end the price of one trip might be even half or less of the estimated amount shown on the list.

Lastly, here are some handy sentences you might want to use while traveling by bus in Iceland. Have a nice trip!

*There’s a solution to this, though: do a wild “I DON’T WANT TO GET ON THIS BUS”-dance for the first two and then flag down the third one.

Last week really gave us a proper taste of Icelandic weather at its worst! Starting with a storm on Monday and growing into a snowstorm that began on Wednesday morning, ending up with an ash fall. The snowing was no ordinary kind either. We got so much snow that the schools were closed and guess how common that is in Iceland? Answer is: extremely uncommon. Schools here just don’t close for weather unless we’re expecting a hurricane and even then it has to be a pretty wild hurricane.

I’ll start out by apologizing for failing to make last Wednesday’s blog post, though. I was stupid enough to wander out on Monday evening, right into the storm, with less than suitable amount of clothing and already feeling a bit under the weather, and yes I got very ill. I would say I deserved to! At the moment I’m all better again but I still haven’t got my voice 100% back so alas, the audio post I was planning for this blog post has to wait a bit – I hope to get to it on the next Wednesday, but let’s look at the highlights of last week instead.

Monday

The day started out as any day on Iceland, with nothing out of ordinary, but by afternoon the wind picked up. I had a choir practice in the evening (fun fact: there seems to be a disproportionate amount of choirs in Iceland in comparison to the amount of population, and the general quality of them is quite good!) so I just threw on a sweater, thinking it would suffice like it so often does. Icelandic wool makes for almost water- and windproof clothing.

However, that’s when the weather is normal. What was waiting for me outside was this.

In Breiðholt where I live the wind was still negotiable but the downtown area is near the sea, with wind force considerably worse. I had to lean against it even to stay still and then try to run for it between the gusts. At one point the wind threw me sideways off my feet and I seriously considered just trying to make it for the nearest cover and calling help. Still, as the only thing I hurt falling down was my pride I made up my mind to just head on and eventually I somehow did get to the choir practice, mostly ok but thoroughly frozen.

Wednesday

Eight o´clock a.m.

Noon. It was still snowing outside for several hours after this but by now I didn’t even try climbing over all that snow.

Not surprisingly at all I woke up feeling less than good and sent an sms to a classmate about how I wasn’t going to go to the lecture that morning, to which she replied she was going to skip it herself because of the weather.

What you’ll see in the photos is what was going on outside. Thank goodness our front door opens inwards!

I draped some clothes on because ill or not I wasn’t going to NOT photograph this. This may have been a big mistake because after I came back in I had lost my voice almost completely, but hey, I would not have wanted to miss this chance for the world!*

Around 8.00 a.m. at the front door.

Turned out that not going to the lecture had been a wise choice, and that it would have been so even if I had been in full health. Breiðholt got snowed on so thoroughly that it was near impossible to get out of the house with snow piled at our door all the way to the thighs. The snow cleaning units had to put all their work into keeping the main roads open, and as a result the residential areas were snowed shut for most of the day so there would have been no way of driving through all the snow, let alone walking to and from the bus stop. Had I gone out I would have been lucky to get to the uni and even luckier to manage to return home…

The view from the window.

By nine o’clock the buses had stopped running outside of the  Capital city area and by half past the east Reykjavík as well, some schools were already closing and the police were issuing pleas for people to stay indoors and avoid going out. By midday this changed into a warning to not wander out at any cost, and that the children that were at the schools that had stayed open in the morning would have to wait for the storm to be over: driving over to fetch them was forbidden. This might sound a bit heartless but it was very necessary, because with the roads as they were the last thing anyone wanted was for people to cause accidents, get stuck in the snow etc. The traffic jams were already several hours long and there was a 20 cars collision on one of the roads.

Goodbye grill, I miss you. ;^;

Here are some videos at the webpage of the Morgunblaðið, or Mbl.

Enn víða vonskuveður. (= Still bad weather far and wide) A quick look at the weather in the south and south-west plus recommendations of not attempting to travel by car.

Vandræðin og veðrið kom á óvart. (= The problems and the weather came as a surprise.) Björgunarsveitinn, the voluntary emergency units, had their hands full all day. Keep an eye on the uniforms, it’s helpful to know what your potential saviours look like. Also see the locals just trudging through the weather like it’s no big deal.

Annasamasti dagur frá upphafi. (= Busiest day from the start) Tells about the snowstorm from the point of view of árekstur.is, the people who help those that end up in car accidents.

News of Iceland gives an overview of the storm in English.

And don’t miss this – Mbl has collected all of their storm news on one page! You can go click on the links for amazing photographs and news (all in Icelandic, but translating texts is a wonderful way of learning vocabulary). Who was born in an ambulance during the storm? What happened with air traffic? What about the car that got stuck after it drove off the road and was left on the spot for overnight, it was vandalized but how?

The next day I was in for an even bigger surprise. All that snow of the previous day was now with a filthy-looking, brownish gray layer on top. By asking around I quickly found out that this was all because the storm winds had picked up the ash of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption and carried it, once again, all over Reykjavík. You heard right, it’s now the year 2013 and the ash is still lying on the ground just waiting to be picked up and carried around by the wind.

The car… 

As the ash very quickly damages the paint on the cars, it has to be washed off ASAP. You can tell when an ash fall has happened by everyone suddenly hosing down their cars. The ash is  made of tiny particles that are very sharp, so scrubbing the car would just result in scratching it.

A close-up of the snow and the mess the ash creates. The only thing to do is to wash it off with lots of water as soon as the weather clears up. Btw if this is not bad enough remember that it’s poisonous.

Previous blog posts on volcanoes and their effect on the daily life in Iceland:

Greetings from the Grímsvatn volcano.

When the volcanoes wake up.

*All photographing of Hulda’s blog entries is done by an idiot with a low regard to her health and safety, do not try this at home.

A typical problem, when trying to use Icelandic to speak with the locals, is that for some reason they look at you quizzically and go “ha”* and you end up repeating yourself over and over again. Yet in the classroom or when talking with your teachers you never run into this same problem. Why is that?

It’s because you’re mispronouncing. Other foreigners are in the same position with you – they all have their accent that can come in the way of pronouncing correctly – and your language teachers have a long experience of listening to various foreigners use the language. In short, everyone else except for the usual Icelander is already trained to listen to you. The good news is that the problem is easy to correct. Just pay attention to a couple of crucial points while you speak.

Most importantly, do not try to speak as fast as the locals. It’s tempting because it gives a chance of avoiding too difficult sound clusters and Icelanders themselves mutter, mumble, and cut every word into bite-sized syllables anyway, don’t they? But unlike them, you don’t know what those important bits are that absolutely have to be included. Besides you already have an accent which may make it challenging for the locals to understand you, so it’s best to not make it even harder for them.

However, Icelanders will understand you sooner or later if you keep on trying, and this is a point I wish to stress: your mistakes don’t really matter. You won’t be ridiculed because of them, most likely they’ll be politely ignored. In fact, making mistakes will help you rather than harm you. They should be considered a very important part of learning any new language, getting over your initial fear of using it. When it comes to pronunciation it feels worse to fear the mistake than to make it, trust me on this.

K, p and t

Consonants in Icelandic are pronounced sharply, often with an added “h” which is made by pronouncing the letter and then “blowing” through it. This happens especially at the beginnings of words: the English “k” is in fact pronounced similarly to the Icelandic version, only in Icelandic you would exaggerate the sound, making it into a “kh”. The word kaka (= cake) sounds more like “khaaka”, to name an example. Other consonants that work this was are “t” and “p”, so imagine you’re saying “th” and “ph” instead. However, there letters lose the “h” sound if they’re not the first letter of the word – (að) tapa (= to lose) has a sharp “t” and a softer “p”, “thaapa”.

B, d, g and f

The sharpness is carried out to letters “b”, “d” and “g”, which are almost always pronounced like “p”, “t” and “k” with no “h”-sound. A good example of this difference is gata (= street) vs. Kata (= a female name), “kaata” vs. “Khaata”.

“F” is a consonant that’s rarely pronounced as it is in English, unless it begins the word. Most often an “f” within a word is pronounced as “v” like in kafald, or even dropped entirely, with the exception of “fl” combinations, f.ex. fífl (= fool, idiot) where it becomes like the aforementioned “b”, sounding more like “fipl”.

The only exception to these rules can be new, foreign loan words, but with a little bit of time they tend to become sharp enough for easy use because using two different sets of pronunciation rules can be tricky**.

Hveragerði from above – more about Hveragerði in a moment.

Kk, pp and tt

Note that with double consonants the “h” sound jumps in front of the consonants instead. I’ll write more about this in the next pronunciation guide, but it may be best to learn this rule of pre-aspiration in this context. Happ (= luck) is pronounced “hahp”: the other “p” falls off and the pre-aspiration “h” gets wedged inside the word before the “p”.

And here’s what inspired me to make this post, a little video of me trying my best at pronouncing different names of snow in Icelandic for some examples. Now this reminds me of a story -

Right before the New Year’s Eve we packed our jeep to head for the countryside for a cabin party. The weather looked bad and we were a little bit unsure of how the road conditions in the south would be, there were warnings of a snow storm and we would have to pass over Hellisheiði, driving over mountains. Regardless we decided to trust the jeep and the Ring Road.

The weather turned out to be even worse than we could have imagined. The snowflakes were indeed the “dog’s paw size” -variety and the sun had already gone down. Need I tell you there are no street lights on the way? The visibility was maybe ten metres at best and the snow was piling deep on the road, making it slippery. Soon things took a turn for the worse when the headlights of our car began to dim! We did not realize this at the moment, but the protective grate in front of them was getting caked with wet, sticky snow, covering them up almost completely.

Like this, only worse: this was the jeep before we cleaned it and headed out.

There was no way to safely stop the car as there was no telling exactly where the road ended and the drop on the side began, or how deep a drop that would be for that matter. Everything was blueish white, there was no shape or form to our surroundings what so ever. We even contemplated turning the car around and heading back to Reykjavík but in the end we made the decision to drive at least to Hveragerði (it would have been dangerous to turn the car around in the middle of nowhere, in thick snow and by now almost zero visibility) because we could still see the reflectors that marked the sides of the road.

The amount of snow at the cabin once we got there…

Getting there we quickly located the problem with the lights and cleaned them, and then had a coffee at the local gas station. I asked a lady who was working there how she thought the weather would be from there to Selfoss and she shrugged and told me it was “not very bad”. By the way, I do recommend always trusting the locals on this. If they say driving to place A is a bad idea, don’t do it. If they think it’s safe it probably is, and this time was no exception. Soon after Hveragerði the snow storm died out, turned first to sleet and then to rain… at the cabin there was no snow what so ever.

A sign reminding you to wear the seat belt.

This really is Icelandic weather in a nutshell, it’s all about extremes. When it snows in Reykjavík there may be a storm 20 minutes drive away, and there may be a mildly rainy and warm area just as near the storm. Goes to show that you can never know. Read the weather forecasts and listen to them on the radio, always have a shovel and a bag of sand with you when driving during the winter and most importantly… always take the locals’ advice. Stay safe.

* “Ha” translates as “excuse me, would you mind saying that again?”

** A good example are Japanese loan words used in English, f.ex. karate or kimono. They mean the same thing in both languages, yet the English user is likely to use English pronunciation rules. The same tends to happen with Icelanders who like to use English loan words in spoken language.