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Tag Archives: grammar

Not just a number. Posted by on Mar 31, 2014

Explaining one’s age or the length of time that’s not measured with a clock (weeks, months, years etc.) in Icelandic is a mildly complex sport. My best advice for a student would be to just learn the example sentences by heart and use them until they come automatically; it takes some time but it’s far…

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Suffix to say don’t panic. Posted by on Feb 6, 2014

There’s a magic trick to learning Icelandic that I’d like to share with you today, and I guarantee that learning its basics will broaden your vocabulary skills in one go. Sounds too good to be true? Well, I’d say Icelandic is such a difficult language that using all the cheats you can find is not…

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How is a bus like a deck of cards? Posted by 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…

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A sheep by any other name… Posted by 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…

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The helpful helping verbs. Posted by on Sep 19, 2013

Auxiliary verbs – they’re both an Icelandic language student’s best friend and worst friend*, and therefore this grammar post will be marked with all the difficulty levels from beginner to advanced. The basics are easy to learn and will come in handy when you speak because that means you won’t have to suddenly be able…

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Holy genitive case in Icelandic Batman! Posted by 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…

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Using the subjunctive mood, part 3. Posted by 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…

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