The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Blaðsíða 45

Vol. 57 #4
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
181
in its own right, and I found the Viking dia-
logue clear and easy to follow. I memo-
rized practically the entire film, though I
knew full well that phrases like “Die, trai-
tor!” and “I’ll cut you into pieces for
Odin’s crows!” were unlikely to come in
handy on the streets of modern Reykjavik.)
And then, just two months before I
was to leave for Iceland, I caught wind of a
new language instruction book being pub-
lished, called Learning Icelandic. I immedi-
ately ordered it by email from the universi-
ty bookstore, and a few weeks later it
arrived in my mailbox.
It is no exaggeration to say that
Learning Icelandic was everything I’d been
longing for in a beginning-level Icelandic
self-study program. Co-authored by a
team of university language instructors,
Learning Icelandic consists of a 160-page
text accompanied by a 65-minute audio
CD. Although the book itself is a slender
volume, it contains the most coherent and
sensibly prepared introduction to the
Icelandic language that I have encountered.
Learning Icelandic is divided into three
parts: 15 reading lessons, a glossary, and a
detailed introduction to the grammar. The
reading lessons contain a mixture of dia-
logues and exercises that are cross-refer-
enced to the grammar section. For students
unfamiliar with highly inflected languages,
it provides a comprehensible, step-by-step
guide to understanding how Icelandic
nouns, articles, adjectives, pronouns, and
numerals decline. The book’s inventive
graphic design enhances its clear presenta-
tion of concepts. Paradigms are laid out in
an easy-to-see format, using whimsical
illustrations to keep each page lively.
If Learning Icelandic consisted only of
the book itself, the authors still would have
made an important contribution to the field
of Icelandic language instruction, but the
exceptional quality of the accompanying
CD makes this an absolutely outstanding
offering. While the CD includes question
and answer exercises as well as straightfor-
ward instruction on verb conjugation,
numbers, seasons, telling time, etc., the
majority of its 94 segments consist of dia-
logues, and it is these which bring the
Icelandic language to life for the beginner.
The CD begins with each of the main char-
acters—an extended family whose mem-
bers also appear in the book—providing
short biographical introductions. We meet
the grandparents, parents, and three chil-
dren, plus an Italian exchange student who
is living with the family and learning
Icelandic. In addition to varying the
monotony found on many language tapes,
this realistic spectrum of gender, age, and
speaking styles is extremely valuable for
anyone wishing to converse with actual
Icelanders. The dialogues build in speed
and complexity over the course of the CD,
providing the listener with steadily increas-
ing challenges. The CD format makes it
particularly easy to play and replay specif-
ic segments until you can differentiate the
individual words, then practice running
them together into natural sounding phras-
es.
For the next six weeks, I played the
Learning Icelandic CD every chance I got -
in the car, while washing dishes, even rid-
ing the exercycle at the gym - and always
found it pleasurable listening. The voices
are engaging and lively, and the situations
all too realistic: a teenage girl and her ten-
year-old brother squabbling over who gets
to use the bathroom first; a five-year-old
breathlessly counting the days of the week
until her birthday; the entire family eating
dinner together; a young journalist
attempting to impress a beautiful actress he
encounters at a bar; friends planning their
vacations; and many more.
Nothing could have prepared me bet-
ter for spending a month living with my
relatives. When my cousin came to pick me
up at the flybus stop in Reykjavik, I told
her the story of how I’d forgotten my pass-
port and almost missed my flight, entirely
in Icelandic - and she understood me! On
my first afternoon, I walked into a used
bookstore in Reykjavik and asked the pro-
prietor if he had any books of poetry by
Pall Olafsson (my great grandmother’s
brother), and he, too, had no trouble
understanding either my sentence con-
struction or accent. The next day I joined
the intermediate Icelandic class, and found
that both the beginning and intermediate
classes would be using the Learning