lusentoj (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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linguaphiles2018-01-31 10:11 pm
lusentoj) wrote in linguaphiles2018-01-31 10:11 pm
Icelandic/Faroese
Hey, is anyone learning (or can already speak) Icelandic or Faroese? I studied Icelandic some years ago and can read some amount of it; Faroese I understand about 95% of any given topic when I read. But I haven't had any friends to talk to who speak either language so I haven't ever written or spoken them and I can't really understand the spoken languages in general. Recently I've been thinking I want to improve my skills, so I'd like a friend who'll use them with me no matter how bad I am, I guess is what I'm saying...
If you'd like to learn either one I can help you "understand" things, like texts or bits of grammar, but I can't teach you something like correct writing since I can't write myself! If you're more advanced we could have a kind of book/media club where we read/watch the same pieces as each other each week and discuss if we had trouble with them.
I also speak Swedish, Esperanto and Japanese so if you're better at one of those than English, we can do things that way.
If you'd like to learn either one I can help you "understand" things, like texts or bits of grammar, but I can't teach you something like correct writing since I can't write myself! If you're more advanced we could have a kind of book/media club where we read/watch the same pieces as each other each week and discuss if we had trouble with them.
I also speak Swedish, Esperanto and Japanese so if you're better at one of those than English, we can do things that way.
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We should definitely try something out.
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My spoken Icelandic's terrible too, but I think the problem there is I don't have any "fun" media to watch/listen too (ex. I don't own any movies and I hate watching the news). Plus the Reykjavík dialect is the most muddled and hard to understand form of Icelandic, which doesn't help.
Faroese is a loooot easier than Icelandic so I personally think I should focus on Faroese first and then move on to Icelandic after I'm really solid with Faroese. It's just like, Icelandic's compound words make a lot less sense and also tend to use more obscure words than Faroese's for example, so it's harder to learn from context I think.
How do you want to do things?? If you have any questions about the grammar I can try to help, or I can at least look stuff up.
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In Faroese, I think I've come across that Harry Potter audio - did you post it on Tumblr a while back? The two Faroese books I own are "Úti á leysum oyggjum" by Marianna Debes Dahl and a translation of "The Story of a Blue Planet" by Andri Snær Magnason.
It's funny, I find Icelandic much easier than Faroese! The pronunciation is so much more related to the spelling and the compound words seem really predictable to me. It may be something to do with your knowing Swedish as well, but fundamentally we probably both think the language we know best is the easiest.
Also my understanding is that Faroese has a lot of dialects, whereas even Westfjords Icelandic just has a few minor pronunciation differences from Reykjavik. I don't know, I haven't really noticed a "Reykjavik dialect."
There is some good media in Icelandic if you look for it. On DVD, I've loved "Ófærð" and the whole "Næturvaktin" series. Someone's put most years of "Áramótaskaup" on YouTube though you have to know your Icelandic current affairs to get the best value from that (and I don't). Plus RUV has a lifetime of podcasts free to download, including a few things that are actually full audiobooks.
If you like science at all I recommend AEvar, who has both a TV show and a podcast aimed at kids: http://krakkaruv.is/heimar/aevar-visindamadur
Thank you for the offer of help. As long as I stick to passive skills I don't think I need too many grammar questions answered. I have some good grammar references and I can pretty much parse sentence structures when reading - what I need now is more vocabulary. But I'd be happy to try reading/watching/listening something together, or to try out our conversational Icelandic with a video/audio chat.
Or I suppose we could just cheer each other on with our efforts!
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For me it's a lot of things like "mammal" in Faroese is "suck-animal" (sucks-milk-animal) and it's more like "teat-animal" in Swedish and Icelandic (teat being a very odd/advanced word for a learner to know), likewise "fossil fuels" is something akin to "life-run burn-matter" (lívrunnið brennievni) in Faroese but is jarðefnaeldsneyti in Icelandic, the Icelandic again making *less* sense even if it makes *some* sense. Otherwise there's stuff like maybe there's 4 words for "people" with varying degrees of usage (ex. maður, persónur...) and Icelandic uses the most less-used ones in several random compound words while Faroese always uses the most common two.
Aside from that there's also just that Faroese has more regular and simplified grammar, and in the special case of that if you know Scandinavian, it uses a ton more loanwords in casual speech so ex. I can understand Faroese net-slang because it's the same as Swedish net-slang but just with a different spelling. But I guess that means, if you DON'T know Scandinavian it's going to be a lot harder to look up some of the words you don't know lol, in which case you can just send me the sentence and I'll figure it out for you.
I lived in Reykjavík for two years some time ago so I can tell you there's a dialect lol. Or perhaps a socialect. In any case, they run their words together and mumble; people in the countryside speak amazingly more clearly, as do people who didn't grow up in Reykjavík and people who had to get speech training as a kid. Countryside people also just have more patience in general (especially towards foreigners) than capital people...
I know there's media technically speaking but I've been unemployed for my entire adult life so I've never had the money to buy anything lol! Even now I want to buy some e-books really badly but can't justify the what, 20-30 USD it takes to get any. I only own the few Icelandic books I do because I got them for like 3 USD each at the Reykjavík flea market/used bookstores. When I first started learning Icelandic like 8 years ago there was almost nothing online anywhere about it but now it's probably a lot different... Podcasts are a good idea, I used to listen to a certain podcast right when I was first learning but the podcast got cancelled ;_; Then I never tried another oen haha.
Sure, I'll check out the show this evening!
I need to practice my output a lot more than my input, but I need to practice my input too so anything's fine haha. I'm on exchange in Japan at the moment so timezones for Skype might be difficult though.
Yeah that was me that put that audio up >.> I just merged the sound files from the radio website together. I even contacted the radio guys to ask about the missing part and never got a response.
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Because of that, I wouldn't want to ask you to go to any trouble with OCR. I mean, if you end up doing them for your own use I'd love to take a peek (Little House on the Prairie was one of my favorites as a child), but don't do lots of work on my account. I'm sure there's plenty of online content that we could discuss.
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Yeah, it's fine, I SHOULD just OCR the books and toss them - I can't really justify letting like 7 Icelandic books just sit around on my shelf completely unused for like 10 years. But I can't seem to find a free OCR site that lets you OCR double-column images (as I'd be taking photos of 2 pages at once) : / I have other books I want to OCR too; my eyes are bad so I have a hard time reading physical books and that's why I've kinda stopped trying in the last few years.
Yeah in the Nordics they use the SSNs for everything "for security" - can't log into my bank or library or anything like that without my number. But in Iceland's case it's also "for keeping foreigners out" lol (well actually I think it's because they assume no foreigner CAN understand Icelandic/would want to buy something like an Icelandic book, an opinion I met many times when I lived there...)
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What I was meaning to say is that Icelandic ebooks from Amazon are dirt cheap compared to the physical copies. I mean, the newly released ones are $30 but all the ones that are more than a year or two old are $9.50 - which by Icelandic standards is almost miraculous! Though still not as cheap as some US ebooks, obvs.
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Sorry for spamming
I started learning Icelandic in 2008, at the time there was a LOT less of ANYTHING online in or about Icelandic than there was even just 2 years later (when I quit learning). For example, the "Learn Icelandic!" site was completely different and taught almost nothing in comparision to how it was in 2010; there was also absolutely nothing on Wiktionary or Wikipedia, etc. I managed to convince my parents to let me study Icelandic at a/the university in Iceland, but that didn't go well as the classes were meant only for people who actually already knew Icelandic (literally all my classmates were living with Icelanders, and/or had lived in Iceland for 8+ years etc).
And thanks to stuff like the bad dictionary and bad "textbooks" (which were actually phrasebooks + one huge book entirely full of conjugation charts + 2 crappy books written entirely in Icelandic), I didn't even know stuff like words like "fireman" are put together out of compound words until about a year and a half into my studies, and was constantly thwarted by that the dictionary was literally telling me the wrong meanings of things, etc etc.
Well after 2 years of "learning" by simply tackling everything with a dictionary (despite living in Iceland, I had no Icelandic friends and all my fellow "learner friends" dropped out/off) I quit Icelandic. Moved to Sweden, learned Swedish and Esperanto, the former giving me more vocab for Icelandic and the latter making me suddenly understand the entirety of Icelandic grammar. But I had no one to use Icelandic with etc and a lot of bad memories from Iceland (ex. if I wanted an Icelandic documentary/TV show, I'd literally see people I knew from my time there who treated me really badly) so I just shelved it out of bad feelings.
Until now!!
Re: Sorry for spamming
If you don't mind my asking, what's made you decide to pick up Icelandic again now? (Since it sounds from your journal like you have a lot of other languages on your plate.) And what are your goals for it?
Re: Sorry for spamming
Anyway. I never intended to completely give up on Icelandic, partially because I do actually like it and partially because I'd feel terrible knowing I "wasted" years of my life studying it and that I'd be proving everyone right that "No foreigner can learn Icelandic", "Icelandic is useless", and the exchange-student cliché of "as soon as you leave the country you forget the entire language"... It's sort of a self-challenge to finally master this monster haha. I'm at a point in my other languages where I don't really have to study all that much anymore - Japanese is my newest and weakest language (in reading) and yet now I can read novels and do everyday-life stuff, so it doesn't seem like I have a REAL "language-learning" project anymore. So it's time to pick up an old one I think.
With all my languages, ideally I'll eventually get to the same level as a native speaker. It just depends on the language with how hard I try for it, like Swedish and Icelandic (maybe Icelandic'd be more pressing if I had Icelandic friends to talk to) I really don't care "when" reaching that level happens but with Japanese I want it to happen ASAP haha.
In general my weakest language is actually Chinook Jargon but considering it only has like 1,000 words in its vocabulary, if I tried really hard I could be fluent in 2 weeks so it doesn't really count lol. I was thinking that after Japanese I might try Russian, Korean, Chinese or something but I don't really care about those languages/cultures and they're "normal" languages so they're not so easy, so I think I'd drop them really fast... I dunno. Maybe we can learn Russian together too haha.
Re: Sorry for spamming
I was thinking that after Japanese I might try Russian, Korean, Chinese or something but I don't really care about those languages/cultures and they're "normal" languages so they're not so easy, so I think I'd drop them really fast... I dunno.
Doesn't sound like you're particularly keen on any of them, to be honest. Personally I'm less into the pure linguistics side of language learning (though it does interest me) and much more motivated by interest in specific countries, histories or cultures. Though sometimes I think I'm just learning in order to have an excuse to buy more books! There's a surprising amount that I'm really keen on reading in Icelandic, given that it has a relatively small publishing output. Then French is obviously one of the world's great languages for literature and culture, plus I'm keen on cycling and French is one of the key languages of the sport. With Russia, I've recently fallen in love with the history/culture and I've always been interested in the literature, so it seems an obvious next step.
After that, I tell myself that I would rest content, but I probably wouldn't!
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So ex. I like Vladimir Nabokov and that makes me want to learn Russian, but outside of that I don't have an interest in Russia. If I were to learn Russian I'm sure I'd find various interesting things but it'd just be a side-effect. Or, I think learning Greenlandic would really open up my brain a lot for the next languages I learn so I want to learn that (but can't really since I'm dirt poor).
If you ever do go to live in Iceland I extremely strongly suggest living anywhere that's not the capital, which is full of foreigner-hate (or just discrimination) and general bad attitude and stuff like that.
I've never liked any romance language(s so far), I know Esperanto but that's out of convenience (the "brain-expanding" thing) and it's only "romance" in the sense of the very basic words anyway.
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