The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2001, Side 27

Vol. 56 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
65
working in. I thought it was cute at the time.
Now I'm beginning to understand the wisdom
of the small child's words.
Soon after I arrived in Iceland, I received
two e-mail messages which commented on
the foolishness of attempting to learn to speak
Icelandic in a year of study. I felt defensive.
Why wouldn't I be able to learn Icelandic in a
year? Wasn't it my mother tongue? Then I met
a friend from Edmonton, who has lived in
Reykjavik for several years. He said that after
seven years he is speaking the language in a
way that brings the query "Did you study
abroad for a time?" A signal to him that he is
finally speaking close to the way native
speakers do. His five year old daughter, how-
ever, still corrects his grammatical errors. My
stomach fell at hearing this story. But surely it
wouldn’t be so hard for me. Afterall I did hear
it as a child. A couple of months later one of
my classmates told me it took him seven years
to learn to speak Finnish. That he had com-
pletely given up when finally it came. Yes,
well, that's Finnish, I thought. Not Icelandic.
Finnish has way more cases. Seven, however,
was starting to sound like an apocryphal num-
ber. Then I read an e-mail on the INL listserv
from someone who said sixteen years in
Iceland didn't do it for him, he still didn't
speak. And I met people who had lived in
Reykjavik for as many as twenty years, and
still spoke only English. Thank goodness
there were people who sent me messages
telling me their language success stories. Of
suddenly hearing a full sentence on the radio
and feeling they had made a big break
through. Of feeling relatively competent after
three years.
When I asked people how they knew
what was going on where and when, they told
me to listen to the radio, or read about it in the
paper. But I found I couldn’t distinguish
between one kind of programme and another
on the radio. I couldn’t tell when they swung
into advertisements of coming events. Certain
things I identified early on—the news;
announcements of those who had died, which
read like a mantra twice a day, each death
announcement usually ending with "born,
barnaborn og barnabarnborn;" the weather
report; stories being read. But when and
where the symphony was playing, or where
there was an opening of an art show, or when
a play was being staged, or who was giving a
talk when. No. I couldn't hear that at all.
Finally, the last week I was there, I began
hearing them, and knew I had hit it when I
heard my name blasting out—I was giving a
lecture that day.
I felt like I had to hear a new word over
and over and over again before I could
remember it to say it. I was sometimes frus-
trated to tears at how difficult it was to
remember a word or a declension of a noun or
adjective or pronoun or the parts of a verb.
Or the numbers one to four, which
decline. I walked to the university repeating
the paradigms over and over, glancing at a
paper folded in my pocket when I got stuck. It
had a chant-like quality to it—er hestur, um
hest, fra hesti, til hests, eru hestar, um hesta,
fra hestum, til hesta. Over and over and over
again. Then I would add the definite article—
er hesturinn, um hestinn, fra hestinum, til
hestsins, era hestamir, um hestana, fra hes-
tunum, til hestanna. Over and over and over
again.
I felt like it took at least five passes at the
same information before it sunk in. Our pro-
fessor for Niitima mal (Grammar), Jon
FriSjonsson, covered the material at least
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