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Traveling in Iceland – Reykjanes. Posted by hulda on Jul 29, 2013
After a whole month of bad weather the summer finally arrived to Iceland. We made some quick plans – quick because they had been made before and always abandoned because of the continuous rain – packed our tent and other camping items into the jeep and headed out. We decided to stay close to Reykjavík…
Swearing in Icelandic. Posted by hulda on Jul 24, 2013
Now for the blog post that some of you may have been waiting for! 😀 In fact the thing that prompted this blog post is that my SO has recently acquired new PS3 games, which means that our home is now filled with a steady stream of “Neiiii!!!” followed by something that would probably turn…
Holy genitive case in Icelandic Batman! Posted by hulda on Jul 18, 2013
Reading the Icelandic competition entries I noticed that one opinion stood out among the answers; that the genitive case of Icelandic is, to put it politely, very confusing. This sounded like a good topic to write about, especially since the one thing that may throw you off balance while you study Icelandic is that the…
The grass house that wouldn’t be blown in. Posted by hulda on Jun 30, 2013
Imagine that you have just arrived to an island somewhere in the middle of an ocean and have decided upon a place you’ll build your new home. Far as the eye can see there’s almost nothing suitable to building with except for – turf. Torfbær, the turf house, dating back from the early times of…
Getting understood in Iceland: the difficult sounds R, Þ, Ð and LL. Posted by hulda on Jun 28, 2013
If studying Icelandic in a large, varied group of foreigners teaches you anything, it’s that different mother tongues create different areas of difficulty for the language learner. The most obvious hurdle arrives in pronunciation lessons, what’s difficult to an English speaker to learn will be quickly learned by a Swedish speaker, what’s near impossible for…
Using the subjunctive mood, part 3. Posted by hulda on Jun 26, 2013
In the third part of the subjunctive mood and it’s use we’ll look at negation and subordinate clauses that start with a question word. The rules of either are not always very exact, but I hope to be able to give you some clear guidelines to work with. After all, the subjunctive mood, viðtengingarháttur, often…
Happy birthday, Iceland! Posted by hulda on Jun 18, 2013
Yesterday on the 17th Iceland celebrated its independence in the usual way: lots of noise, live music everywhere, street art, candy, flags in every form and shape and material, children running around and climbing on absolutely anything and everything they can hold on to, fierce chess matches in the rain, parades, circus shows, the selection…