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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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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