Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.12.2012, Síða 12

12
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 18 — 2012
A year and a half since I first picked up
a copy of ‘Teach Yourself Icelandic.’ A
year since I realised I'd be moving here
and started taking it seriously. Half a
year of actually speaking Icelandic. It's
been an interesting ride. And one that I
take seriously indeed.
Assuming all goes well with permit
renewals, I plan to live in Iceland for
the rest of my life. I see it as my new
language. My mindset is such that I
feel extremely uncomfortable speak-
ing English with people who speak
Icelandic, and I often don't know
how to respond when someone tries;
they usually get a delayed, awkward
response in Icelandic or simply, ‘Ha?’
(“What?”).
I know that other immigrants I've
talked to find this odd. Apparently
immigrants are supposed to want to
speak their native language when pos-
sible, for example amongst each other.
But that's just not the case with me. In
my mind, speaking English with people
who speak Icelandic is firmly con-
nected with failure, and a person who
starts speaking English with me is tell-
ing me, “you have failed at something
you've been working hard at and is
very important to you.” I not only need
the practice, but I also like Icelandic
and I prefer to speak Icelandic.
I used to make the occasional
exception, but there are no longer any
exceptions in my life. On the Day of the
Icelandic Language (Dagur íslenskrar
tungu), I even made a pledge not to
speak, read, or write English (to the
extent I could avoid) with anyone. I
even told my family that if they wanted
to talk with me on that day that they'd
need to use Google Translate! But just
because I always speak the language,
whether at work, shopping, or out par-
tying, doesn't mean that I'm anywhere
near fluent. Without anyone to correct
me when I mess up (a benefit to having
an Icelandic partner), I've had some
very basic mistakes go uncorrected for
long periods of time.
It was less than a month ago that
I discovered that the reason nobody
understood me at loud parties when
I'd say “Ég get ekki heyrt þér, það
er of hárt” (“I can't hear you, it's too
loud”) was because it should be “Ég
heyri ekki í þér, það er of mikill hávaði”
(literally “I hear not in you, it is too
much noise”). Recently I learned that
an email that I sent out that contained
the phrase, “Mér líður veik” (“I feel
sick”) sounds funny in Icelandic, that
a person just says “Ég er veik” (“I am
sick.”) I anticipate it will be a long time
before all of my English-style sentence
structures work their way out.
The process of learning to say and
understand everything right routinely
leads to events that are extremely em-
barrassing at the time but are simply
amusing in retrospect. At the Bræðslan
music festival this summer, I was trying
to tell someone that I eat lots of pota-
toes, which of course means declining
the word for lots (“mikill”). It should
have been “mikla,” but without having
time to ensure that I did it right, I said
that I eat “miklaða” potatoes. This
came across as “myglaða” (“mouldy”)
potatoes! Several minutes of very
confused conversation followed before
the mistake was cleared up.
On the way to the festival I had
hitched a ride with a bunch of nice
guys who were incredibly impressed
with how much Icelandic I could speak
versus how short of a time I'd lived
in Iceland. They called some of their
friends who were already at the festival
and talked about the great Icelandic I
spoke. We pulled up and the first thing
any of them said to me sounded like
“góða tjalda.” ‘Tjalda’ means “camp-
ing,” and my mind analogized it with
the phrases “góða ferð” (“have a good
trip”), “góða helgi” (“have a good
weekend”), etc. So I said “góða tjalda
sömuleiðis!” (‘sömuleiðis’ = “like-
wise”). Everyone in both cars started
cracking up. He had actually asked
me, “Góð að tjalda?” (“Are you good at
camping?”) and I had replied “Are you
good (feminine) at camping likewise!”
These sorts of things make you
want to find a hole to hide in when
they happen, but in retrospect, they
just make you smile.
Mouldy Potatoes To You, Too!
Learning A New Language On The Top
Of The World, Part 1
Icelandic | So Damn Tough
You’re either angling for better
work here, studying at the universi-
ty, or have been wooed by the thick,
thick skull and sodas of Egill Skalla-
grímsson. In any case, you’re a for-
eigner learning Icelandic now and
can’t get past its toughness. Aside
from the usual sympathies from
Icelanders and platitudes about its
challenge, how do expert speech
pathologists assess its difficulty?
Brass grammar tacks
Assistant Professor of Speech Pathol-
ogy at the University of Iceland Dr.
Jóhanna Einarsdóttir says the basic
components of a language are pro-
nunciation, vocabulary, sentence-level
grammar and pragmatics—or the ways
in which context particularly contrib-
utes to meaning. Of these four, the
lion’s share of difficulties source from
the grammar.
“The difficulty of different lan-
guages manifests at different stages,”
Jóhanna says. In Icelandic’s case, tak-
ing that first crack at the grammar is
daunting.
In Icelandic, verbs are conjugated
variously for tense, mood, person,
number and voice—active, passive or
middle. Heavy inflection generates a
staggering list of possible ways to say,
in one well-known example, the num-
bers one through four. And although
the Icelandic vocabulary has far fewer
lexemes than that of a language like
English, a single Icelandic word can
have a phenomenal range of meanings
depending on the particles with which
it is used. Consider “halda,” literally “to
keep,” which can become “halda fram”
for “claim/maintain,” “halda upp á” for
“celebrate,” “halda uppi” for “support”
and so on.
There is also a tendency to com-
pound Icelandic words, often extem-
poraneously, for a non-dictionary word
brought to life for just a moment. These
include “augnablikssamsetningar,” or
“instant-compounds,” which describes
with cake-mix convenience the words
thus formed (itself another well-known
example).
Thinking in strictly abacus terms, it’s
easy to feel intimidated by Icelandic’s
tallies for obliqueness and snowballing.
Consider the following case: when
you drop a grain of salt into a supersat-
urated beaker, it crystallizes instantly in
all directions, revealing structures pre-
viously invisible. So, too, with Icelandic:
the grammar rules are confounding
because there are so many of them,
and it’s tough to choose any one place
to start because the framework is so
strong.
Why, then, contrary to public opin-
ion, do both Jóhanna and Dr. Elín
Þórðardóttir, associate professor at
McGill University’s School of Commu-
nication Sciences and Disorders, dis-
pute Icelandic’s relative difficulty when
compared to other languages?
Sound pollution
The grammar is a tough skull to crack,
but Icelandic is characterised by intui-
tive speech prosody. As Johanna points
out, stress on syllables is predictable
and clear in the form of stressed-
unstressed. A language like Danish,
conversely, has more elusive prosody,
sometimes relying on tricks like laryn-
gealisation. In terms of that fourth fac-
et, pragmatics, both experts acknowl-
edge the challenge of speaking in the
same patterns as native Icelanders, but
don’t believe it’s an issue separate from
speaking many other languages.
They highlight the external fac-
tors instead. The history of foreigners
coming to Iceland from abroad to learn
the language is a short one—extending
only back to the first post-war decades.
Contrast that with the well-trodden
paths toward fluent French or German,
and well-funded institutions within
each of those countries promoting that
goal.
Even for motivated speakers, Ice-
land’s language environment is studded
with obstacles to frustrate immersion.
Perhaps because it lacks this history of
foreign language students, Icelanders
themselves have what Elín describes
as particularly “little patience” to lis-
ten as foreigners transmute the foibles
and fortes of their native tongues into
Icelandic. Furthermore, there is re-
markably little difference in the accent
spoken between different Icelanders,
phonetically speaking, which creates
friction when foreigners with their own
accents try to assimilate.
English, meanwhile, is everywhere—
on YouTube and TV shows, at concerts
and summer camps, even in insidious
local English-language magazines.
While the language has a reputation
for simplicity, the speed with which it
is learned internationally can be attrib-
uted in part to the ease with which one
can rack the abacus up with “hours at
task”—Elín’s term—of attentive listening
and immersion.
Practice makes perfect
“Count the amount of time you actively
use Icelandic each week,” Elín says.
“If you’re studying, that can count, but
how often are you on the street talking
to people in Icelandic? If the answer is
half an hour, you can see why you’re not
making real progress.”
Elín dismisses the easy portraits
of language students here as lazy, or
Icelanders as frigid guardians unwill-
ing to part with their national treasure.
Whatever the situation, she believes
the mathematics of language learning
in any form have already been proven.
“It’s simply the number of hours at
task,” she reiterates, noting too that the
phenomenon of adults’ brains harden-
ing to language learning past a certain
age is largely exaggerated.
“They have problems recreating
sound, yes, but if I put an adult in a
room next to a child and ask them to
memorize vocabulary, the adult wins
easily. The child can imitate sound bet-
ter, but they only seem to move faster
in general because they have years of
‘hours at task’ on the adults. Adults are
just as capable, and progress in a lan-
guage is a question of time spent.”
To that end, reams of shameless-
ness and Icelandic friends to make
accountable for error correction and
speaking practice will go far, as will
education that puts a premium on ‘on
task’ speaking and listening.
It’s not until you start speaking and
interacting that it suddenly all makes
sense because of a process you arbi-
trarily set in motion with a heavy invest-
ment in time. Adequate language re-
sources and an understanding of how
you learn are critical, but with Icelandic,
it’s best to just dive in.
Why Is Learning Icelandic So Damn Tough?
Words
Nic Cavell
Photo
Alísa Kalyanova
“
…Icelanders themselves
have what Elín describes
as particularly “little pa-
tience” to listen as foreign-
ers transmute the foibles
and fortes of their native
tongues into Icelandic.„
Karen Pease is a computer programmer and card-carrying
nerd who moved to Iceland in late April with nothing but
the clothes on her back, a plane ticket, and of course the
obligatory stuff like a few dozen large tropical plants, a
12-metre shipping crate, a plug-in hybrid car, and a talking
parrot who refuses to learn Icelandic.