17
votes
Why is Icelandic considered harder to learn for English speakers than other North Germanic languages?
According to Beyond Highbrow – Robert Lindsay,
Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German ...
fi12♦
- 8,937
8
votes
Why is Icelandic considered harder to learn for English speakers than other North Germanic languages?
Other people have already commented on why Icelandic is hard for English speakers.
Here are some reasons why it is easy compared to other languages:
Icelandic has a relatively huge pop culture, some ...
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7
votes
Accepted
Before visiting Scandinavia, is it better to learn one Scandinavian language to fluency or a smattering of all three?
Context
I have live in Norway (a few months shy of a year) and, before that, lived for almost a year in Denmark. I have visited Sweden, though at that time I only had mostly forgotten school Swedish ...
- 3,311
6
votes
Accepted
Swiss German Learning
A quick Google search brings up quite a few results. Pimsleur, the language learning program, has a Swiss German course available for $42 USD, which includes ten thirty-minute mp3 lessons that will ...
fi12♦
- 8,937
4
votes
What is the significant difference between the Germanic language group and the Romance group?
The main difference between the Germanic languages and the Latin (and Celtic) languages is Grimm's Law, which describes a set of sound changes that map Germanic words to their Latin and Celtic ...
- 1,133
3
votes
Accepted
Resources for learning Texas German
Since the dialect is more or less dying and the available resources and descriptions are aimed at linguists rather than language learners.
The linguist Hans C. Boas (University of Texas at Austin) ...
- 19.2k
3
votes
Accepted
Can I read nynorsk due to learning bokmål?
The short answer is that if you are fluent/advanced in Norwegian and can read Bokmål, then you will be able to read Nynorsk without much trouble.
In the situation that you are an intermediate reader ...
- 4,996
3
votes
Why is Icelandic considered harder to learn for English speakers than other North Germanic languages?
The first thing that comes to mind is that in Norwegian and Danish, for example, verbs are only conjugated according to tense, and are the same for every person - this renders the language even ...
- 151
2
votes
Why is Icelandic considered harder to learn for English speakers than other North Germanic languages?
Then there's one thing you're forgetting: actual modern Icelandic and fast-spoken Icelandic. I'm no genius in the verbs and tenses and whatnot but I can tell you this: Icelandic gets harder by the ...
2
votes
Accepted
What strategies there are for learning a Romance language when I already know a Germanic language?
The technique I was speaking of is known as Grimm's Law.
From another answer I posted a while back:
The main difference between the Germanic languages and the Latin (and Celtic) languages is Grimm's ...
- 1,133
1
vote
Accepted
Any online discussion forums in a Germanic language other than English or German?
I follow sparsely and comment even more sparsely on the Swedish roleplaying forum at http://www.rollspel.nu/forum
Some newspapers or public broadcasting companies have open comments under some or all ...
- 3,311
1
vote
Predicting language interference between Danish and Norwegian
Although I am a language learner rather than a native speaker of Danish and Norwegian, I can confidently put forward that there shouldn't be too much interference due to some evidences I have ...
- 123
1
vote
Why is Icelandic considered harder to learn for English speakers than other North Germanic languages?
It has deceptively superficial similarities with English and German. It's closer to the Scandinavian languages, but it's much more complex than any of them.
Like German, Icelandic has three genders ...
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