Tag Archives: Icelandic lessons
Icelandic horses for courses and… courses. Posted by hulda on Jul 17, 2014
Question and answer time! During the last month you’ve asked the Icelandic blog, via both the e-mail and the comments section, a couple of interesting questions that I’ll try to answer today. First a question was about horses: what are all the different words that mean horse in Icelandic? The most obvious one is hestur of…
With with, with or with? Posted by hulda on Apr 11, 2014
“Mig langar að tala við þig, hjá þér, og þá langar mig að tala með þér upp á sviði.” Put this sentence in an online translator and you get “I want to talk to with you and allow me to speak with you on stage” as a translation. Icelandic prepositions are endlessly confusing and here…
Not just a number. Posted by hulda 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…
Suffix to say don’t panic. Posted by hulda 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…
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…
Ice is news in Iceland Posted by hulda on Nov 25, 2013
Continuing on the November theme: news and how to read them in Icelandic. It’s a sad fact that the web translators invariably fail to translate Icelandic for the same reasons a language learner does: the complex declensions, homonyms, freely used proverbs (some of which can be as old as to be Medieval), loan words, unusual…