Customer Reviews

Beginner's Icelandic (Hippocrene Beginner's)

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Finally! I've been waiting for this book forever--Hippocrene really took their time with this one (from announcement to date of release). Let me start by saying that I have not worked through this entire book yet (I haven't had it that long). So, my review will just give you a general overview of what to expect.

Beginner's Icelandic conforms to Hippocrene's `Beginner Series' (the newer ones) format, which has been quite good, in my opinion. It is similar in form (and pedagogy) to Beginner's Norwegian, Beginner's Swedish, and Beginner's Danish.

You get the book and two CD's. The book has a brief cultural intro, pronunciation guide, 14 lessons, a two-way glossary, and a CD track list. The lessons generally consist of two dialogs, a vocabulary list, a phrase list, a grammar/structure/function section, and a few exercises.

The dialogs are FULLY transcribed into English (thank you, Hippocrene!), which saves so much time (not having to thumb back and forth from dictionary to dialog). The vocabulary lists could have been typeset into columns a bit better, but at least they are there! For a beginner's book, the grammar sections look to be a substantial intro to Icelandic's quite formidable grammar, but primarily stick with present tense on the verbs. As is the case with most all language books published within the last 20 years, the exercises are a bit skimpy, but they look to be good solid drilling rather than the `fluff' that many texts attempt to pass off as practice these days.

The CD's have an extensive intro to the alphabet, diphthongs, pronunciation of vowels, double consonants, stress, and length of vowels. Good stuff. After these guides, there is very little wasted time in English. You get the dialogs (full speed, then slower speed on some), and the vocabulary/expression lists. There are probably some dialogs skipped somewhere along the way (I've noticed this on other Beginner's Series CD's) to keep it down to two CD's. But what is there is great--good quality audio, clear speaking, no distracting background noise, and fairly pleasant voices.

As for Icelandic: although it's a member of the North Germanic family along with Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese, etc, and although you hear that `North Germanic' sound to an extent, it is quite a bit more `exotic' sounding than its cousins. It brings to mind a touch of the sounds of Irish Gaelic and Russian. To me, Icelandic is one of the most beautiful languages, if not the most beautiful (of any I've heard). On the other hand, Icelandic grammar is significantly more difficult than it's cousin languages, so be prepared for that.

As I get further into the book (I'm polishing my Norwegian right now) I will add to this review any annoying tendencies that present themselves. But, truthfully, it looks to be a good solid introduction from what I've seen so far... provided you are willing to put in the study time--and you WILL need to put in study time with Icelandic. :-) Good luck with this beautiful language!

I agree with the other reviewers for the most part. Yes, more exercises would benefit this particular title. Icelandic is a very conservative language, linguistically speaking - very archaic. Grammar drills are very important, and I have made it a practice, when learning languages like Icelandic, to develop my own drills. Continuous practice in drilling the noun, adjective, and verbal patterns is a must in order to conjugate verbs and decline nouns quickly and accurately when speaking. The main disappointment I had with this book is that it doesn't teach the past tense of verbs. This little bit of information is only cited in the beginning of the book near the end of the introduction. While it does have some instances of past tense sentences, it was intentionally not included as part of the course. So, if you're speaking of the future or present. If you want to talk about the past, perhaps some creativity will be required.

I'm only about halfway through this--I just started on the second CD today. I would heartily second the other reviewer's comments. The book is well-structured, and introduces the tricky Icelandic grammar in small bites so it isn't overwhelming. I, too, would like more exercises, but that seems to be the modern method. Older books I've seen have LOTS of exercises, but no answer key, which kind of defeats the purpose unless you're in a class.

Pronunciation is a real issue in Icelandic. It's not at all intuitive ('á' is pronounced 'ow', while 'au' is pronounced 'oy', just to give you an idea). So I find myself going back to the first CD over and over, just to listen.

The dialogs are more entertaining than is often the case, with a sort of story being played out. And yes, a couple of the chapters have two dialogs, and the second one is never on the recording. But any new words are included in the recording of the vocab list.

This is a good, solid introduction to Icelandic. You won't achieve full fluency, but you can't really expect that in 14 lessons, now, can you?

I've been running an Icelandic study group for about 3 years, fluent teachers are rare, so the group gets by without one. I've used Teach Your Self Icelandic (TYS), Colloquial Ice., Learning Icelandic and this one. Of the three, Beginner's Icelandic is by far and away the best. The word lists and glossaries have very good coverage of the words in the dialogs and exercises, so you won't need to resort to an external dictionary. The exercises are easy enough to fill in having only read the preceding chapters. However, there are far few exercises to really gain much mastery just by doing the exercises-- an important omission when you realize there is only one hard to find Icelandic workbook on the market.

Unusual for an Icelandic textbook, the author doesn't resort to throwing large tables of words and word endings at the user, but instead introduces word forms and their appropriate context at a rate that mere mortals can absorb.

The lessons take about one hour each, but if you only spend 14 hours studying the fourteen chapters, you will feel a bit rushed. That said, the pacing is excellent and no chapter feels dramatically more difficult or easy than any other.

The CD is well done-- the speakers don't speak too fast or slow.

In sum, if you are just starting, start with this book.

Having it on the Kindle is great, not having the CDs is not. The product description for the Kindle version does say the CD's are included, however Amazon does not provide them.

Otherwise, it is a good introduction.

I have read most of the Icelandic beginner books out there, if not them all, and this one is the best. It is structured in a way that makes sense. The people in the conversations seem like actual people and not 90 year old Icelandic college professors, which is so common in other courses. I have found a few minor examples where a sentence or expression wasn't somehing used in conversation, or didn't quite make sense, and caused my Icelandic boyfriend to crack a smile but again it was rare, where as with other books I would hear "nobody talks like that" all the time. If you are looking to learn the basics of this complicated but interesting language this book is your best bet. At least I think so anyway.

Though this is not a bad book to start learning icelandic, I would not recommend it for some reasons:

- not all the dialogues come in the cd (maybe only a half or so);
- almost in every dialogue there are few things -sometimes a lot of them- that are not explained in the following sections of grammar or vocabulary, so you have to guess what that means and hope they will explain this to you some day;
- also there are words or expressions that do not appear on the glossary;
- the exercices are few and not very useful;
- there are no images or pictures that would help to learn the vocabulary.

Anyway, it has some good points:

- the grammar explanations are rather clear;
- the recording comes with an slow version to work on pronuntiation;
- the conversations and vocabulary are based on a day to day life.

Is not a bad book, but you cannot rely only on it to learn this language.

Great book, great method to learn and useful, and the most important, you don't get bored learning the language!

!00% recommend it!