The Icelandic Canadian - 01.10.2002, Blaðsíða 41

Vol. 57 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
83
Book Reviews
ICELANDIC
Daisy L. Neijmann
Colloquial Icelandic
by Daisy L. Neijmann
London & New York, Routledge, 2001
('SviiJ?, 370 pp. + 2 cassette tapes)
This book and the two 60 minute cas-
settes are being sold in a single package.
The author, Daisy Neijmann is an experi-
enced Icelandic language teacher. She is
certainly well known to the Icelandic
Canadian community of Manitoba, where
she was a lecturer at the Faculty of
Icelandic Studies at the University of
Manitoba between the years 1994 to 1998.
The author has put together a series of
lessons aimed at giving the student an
opportunity to study the Icelandic lan-
guage outside of the traditional classroom
setting. The narratives and situations fre-
quently reflect the author’s time in Canada.
For instance, characters are as likely to
refer to Saskatchewan as Scotland in
describing where they are from or some
other aspect of their lives.
The book is divided into sixteen sec-
tions, each with a theme and the vocabu-
lary of each theme is the focus of that sec-
tion. Themes deal with such issues as trav-
elling, health, shopping, accommodations,
family relationships, eating out; all vocabu-
lary one would encounter as a visitor to
Iceland. A visit to the doctor and the drug-
store is covered. The age-old Icelandic tra-
dition of asking about one’s family history
and relationships gets its own chapter.
Buying shoes and clothes are all laid out in
a conversation. The themes are useful for
introducing various diverse groups of
words such as colours, parts of the body,
compass directions and cooking terms.
With each theme there is a secondary
lesson on grammar. An explanation of
active and passive voices, personal and
impersonal pronouns, strong and weak
verbs, definite and indefinite nouns are all
woven in with the various conversation
themes. There are several sections in each
chapter called “Language points” that
introduce a grammar lesson and explain the
subtleties of Icelandic grammar in layman’s
terms, or as near to layman’s terms any
grammar lesson can be! This helps the
reader relate to the Icelandic grammar les-
son by reviewing the English examples that
describe the point being taught. There is
even a four-page glossary of grammatical
terms for those of us whose junior high
school grammar lessons have been long
forgotten.
Each individual theme chapter includes
several dialogues that are transcribed on the