Archive for 'Icelandic grammar'
How is a bus like a deck of cards? Posted by hulda on Jan 24, 2014
Like mentioned in the previous post, counting in Icelandic is no simple matter, especially when you’re quickly trying to come up with a sentence that includes a number. I doubt one blog post is even enough to cover the whole counting problem, but let’s look at the basics at least. The good news: the only numbers…
Getting understood in Iceland: eight times G. Posted by hulda on Dec 4, 2013
Back to the pronunciation series! Speaking a new language is something that’ll grow on you little by little so don’t even think you’re supposed to learn this all in one go, but it may be helpful to read over and then go back to if/whenever something puzzles you. Something probably will, sooner or later, because…
A sheep by any other name… Posted by hulda on Oct 8, 2013
Afi á Á á á á á is a perfect example of the dangers of speaking Icelandic; it has a good selection of both homophones and homonyms. Homophones, words that are written differently but pronounced almost or exactly the same will become a challenge when you speak, homonyms such as á that are spelled and…
Feeling under the weather? Posted by hulda on Sep 15, 2013
A certain sign of autumn has now arrived to Iceland: the storms. It’s good to remember that Icelanders call some kinds of storms drizzle, a bit breezy etc., so always be prepared to almost get your window blown in if the weather forecast states there’ll be light rain and some wind. Rubber boots and a…
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…
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…