Teach Yourself Icelandic

I have not completed this course yet, but I have looked ahead. This is an excellent resource to start learning Icelandic. It starts out with pronounciation and works you through simple questions like What is your name? to more complex sentences and words. Cases and gender are introduced right at the beginning.This is a great resource and I recommend it for those who want to start learning Icelandic.

I've had a fascination with Icelandic for a while now, and I've tried many books. The Colloquial books suck. period, the end. Don't buy the Colloquial Icelandic book. They just MENTION case very late in the book, and just throw a giant chart at you and have only ONE exercise. This book is jsut the opposite. It gently introduces the topic of case at the beginning, and it is discussed throughout the entire book. The CDs are excellent. Icelandic is a hard langauge, and not learnable in one book, but this book gets you pretty darn close.

The Icelandic learning program is well-presented and well-written. The dialogues are concise and aidful enough to allow the learner to understand the language much easily. The audio CDs is a must for the program as this is a language which requires careful listening and imitation of the sounds. Overall, the vocab. is sufficient and the grammar tools provide a great feedback on allowing the learner to either have a thorough knowledge or the language or learn it all together.

Having been to Iceland and wanting to return, I decided to explore the Icelandic language. I wanted to learn basic conversational and written Icelandic, and that is exactly the subject of this book. It should be obvious, but let me say it clearly: this is not an easy exercise. This book is also available with practice recordings to listen to, and while more expensive, I highly recommend spending the extra money. Trying to flip back and forth between the pronunciation keys and the exercises was often laborious. The book itself is very fast paced, and my biggest issue with it is that it presupposes a strong grasp of grammar and parts of speech, and quickly rushes into things like nominative, dative, accusative, and genitive forms, obscure rules about irregular forms varying by gender (Icelandic has masculine, feminine, and neuter), and some extremely unwieldy tenses and verb conjugations, which combined with the Icelandic alphabet and unusual pronunciations, make this a very challenging book. As an example, on page 121 she discusses plurals of feminine nouns with this passage: "It should be pointed out that the genitive plural form of some weak feminine nouns is very seldom used and many native speakers of Icelandic have problems deciding whether to use the ending -na or -a." If native speakers don't find this useful, perhaps it could be edited from a book for beginning students of Icelandic. My point here is not that the book is bad; it just is a bit advanced for absolute beginners. On the positive side, the book is current and topical with discussions of modern technology, web pages, and e-mail addresses ("netfang"), which given the predisposition of Icelanders to be early adopters of technology, is a very useful feature. Jonsdottir picked an extremely difficult and complex subject to tackle in a 216 page book, but attempts to cover the myriad of complicated rules and grammar issues completely. Her explanations of things like the u-umlaut vowel change rule, and pronunciation and grammar tips are good overall, although there are a couple of places where editing could have helped (for instance there is an exercise asking the reader to tell time on page 64, while the lesson teaching how to tell time starts on page 69.) The book claims to move at "an energetic pace," and that is a vast understatement. Despite my toils with this book, I recommend it overall with the understanding that is not the equivalent of "Icelandic for Dummies" (which I wish existed), but is a challenging introduction to Icelandic which will definitely make you think. I recommend augmenting this with Icelandic language CDs or tapes. As for me, I eventually hope to attend the one month Icelandic summer program at the University of Iceland for native English speakers. Good luck!

This is book is geared towards studying Icelandic grammar and culture, and not necessarily towards learning to speak the language. It was exactly what I was looking for to understand more about the etymological origins of the English language. It's true that if you do not have a firm grasp of grammatical concepts, this book may deter (frighten) you from persuing the learning of this beautiful language.