Archive for July, 2012
Difficult sounds in Icelandic Posted by sequoia on Jul 14, 2012
First, I’d like to say these are all rules that have been taught to me – I’m not making up any rules based on my own observations. This post from earlier shows how to (approximately) pronounce the alphabet. If you’d just like to buy a book, I recommend “The Pronunciation of Modern Icelandic“, which is…
Falling Fall and Mountain Moo. Posted by hulda on Jul 13, 2012
Despite that it’s föstudagurinn þrettándi (= the Friday 13th) I hope you’re all doing well! One of the quickest and the most effective ways of widening your vocabulary in any foreign language is to pick up a map and begin to translate the names of places. It’s not only easy – the repetition of certain…
Reading Receipts Posted by sequoia on Jul 10, 2012
If you ever go to Iceland, a fun souvenir is your shopping receipts. They’re almost always in Icelandic and there are two main types with slight variations. You can also get other receipt types from various more unique events and places. The first type is the real receipt. This shows the items that you bought…
A hot dog for Mr. Clinton. Posted by hulda on Jul 9, 2012
Today I put together a short grammar lesson with some easy rules on the use of hjá, við and með, three prepositions that can all be translated as “with”. The difficulty lies in the different nuances and usage of all three, and getting them mixed up will hardly ever work in a grammatical sense. And…
Icelandic Food Part Three Posted by sequoia on Jul 7, 2012
Here is the third, and probably last, post on Icelandic food. The first post is here and the second is here. This is “chocolate soup”, it doesn’t taste like plain chocolate though. They also have a variety of thin fruit soups in the same style, although I lost my photo of those. You put cold…
Where the wild Moomins are. Posted by hulda on Jul 5, 2012
One thing you’ll notice quickly when you live in Iceland is that when the locals talk about something they’re much more prone to using a nickname than a real name. This is perhaps related to the way some names tend to be extremely common throughout the history: if you want to talk about Jón instead…
Most Popular Icelandic Sites Posted by sequoia on Jul 3, 2012
Here is a chart of some of the most popular Icelandic websites. It’s not out of all the websites that exist, but it still shows some of the major ones. Here is a link to the full chart. The first three on the image (not on the link) are news sites. The fourth is a…