17
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 grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic. Modern loans are typically translated into Icelandic equivalents ...
8
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 original and some
in translation. When a language learner can spend hours listening to
Icelandic pop, watching Icelandic TV and Movies, reading Icelandic
...
7
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 at my disposal. I can currently have reasonable discussions with people using any of these languages, though I occasionally have to ask what a strange word ...
6
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 give you a basic foundation in the language. The website Swiss German Online has a list of commonly used phrases in Swiss German, as well other language basics.
...
4
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 cognates. The Germanic sounds were shifted from their Proto-Centum or Proto-Indo-European forms, while the Latin and Celtic sounds either did not change or were ...
3
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) has been recording the dialect in order to preserve it, which is a very different goal than the creation of learning resources. See the the YouTube video "...
3
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 of Bokmål, then it will be helpful if you know the major spelling differences between the two, as covered here and here. After knowing those "conversion" ...
3
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 simpler in the sense than most other languages - e.g. Jeg sover, du sover, han sover, vi sover, etc..., while in Icelandic that is not the case. Oh yeah by the way ...
2
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 minute.
English is influencing Icelandic very much in the modern world (especially for teens and kids with phones) so it becomes harder, every minute, as ...
1
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 of their stories; I read https://www.universitetsavisa.no/ (in Norwegian) which has such, though often there are not that many comments.
It is also very easy ...
1
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 Law, which describes a set of sound changes that map Germanic words to their Latin and Celtic cognates. The Germanic sounds were shifted from their Proto-Centum ...
1
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 encountered.
An online article written by Terri Mapes supports my decision, stating they are the most similar amongst all Scandinavian languages, the differences are ...
1
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 and four cases, but it inflects its nouns and adjectives more extensively than German, and much more than the Scandinavians. The adjectives have strong and weak ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
