Tag Archives: Icelandic lessons
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…
The helpful helping verbs. Posted by hulda 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…
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…
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…
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…