Customer Reviews

Icelandic: Grammar, Text and Glossary

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I begin with telling this is not a book for beginners. To grab the basics, buy Daisy L. Neijmann's Colloquial Icelandic. After you have completed that, this book will become your ultimate authority on this difficult but beautiful language. The reason for that is, this book assumes you have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of language in general, needed for learning the Icelandic language as well. The Colloquial Icelandic book introduces you this very gradually, whereas it is presented in bigger fragments in Stefán Einarsson's book.
The book is: very good-looking, very thick, very complete. However, is also very old (written around the second world war), so for newer words, you have to look elsewhere. This said, its biggest impediment is also its biggest advantage: everything is presented in a very thorough way (like only could have been done long ago), accompanied by beautiful pictures of various texts and exercises.
The book has been devided in various parts, and not in chapters:

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1) INTRODUCTION (page I - XXVII)
* preface
* preface to the second edition
* how to use the book
* topical index
* bibliography
* abbreviations
* contents
* list of illustrations

The target of the introduction is to learn how to use the book. Everything is well done here, but it's a pity that the bibliography does almost only mention books that are out of print.
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2) GRAMMAR AND TEXTS (page 1 - 293)

* contents of grammar
* grammar
* texts I
* texts II

This is of course the actual heart of the book. The grammar is build up of three parts: pronunciation, inflexions, and syntax. The pronunciation is very profound and every possible sound is mentioned. The inflexions teach the possible forms of ANY wordtype (and is therefore very valuable), while the syntax focusses on WHEN everything is used, and also explains what "cases" are, etc. etc.
The texts come in two varieties, the one kind being texts with references to which grammar to learn, the other kind being texts without that. While the themes of the first are sometimes unsignificant, the latter are really about parts of Icelandic society. And, remember, each text comes with a separate glossary to learn.
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3) GLOSSARY (page 295-502)

The glossary may be the best reason to buy the book. In fact, it's an Icelandic/English dictionairy, with reference to the grammar part for the inflections of the words. Honestly, this is the only book which contains (something close to) a dictionairy, with the full forms of any word. Too bad it isn't English/Icelandic!
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I hope I've helped you with my review, just remember that you won't regret buying this book! =)

If you have an interest in the Icelandic language, you've definitely been frustrated by the lack of learning materials for English-speakers. Looks like Routledge is coming out with a "Colloquial Icelandic" sometime this summer (finally!), so that will definitely fill a huge void. Even so, I believe Einarsson's book will still fill a need.

It employs an interesting methodology. In my 1945 edition, pages 1-31 give a very thorough introduction to the pronunciation. (too bad there are not accompanying tapes.) Pages 32-104 give the grammar (nouns, pronouns, verbs, in table form). Pages 105-180 covers syntax, with English translations of all sample phrases and sentences. Pages 181-246 is the pedagogical "heart" of the book; it consists of "aefingar" (exercises, drills). They are short readings with vocabulary. Before each of these, the author tells you what sections of the grammar and syntax sections you need to learn before going through the reading. For example, for the very first reading, you are instructed to learn the present indicative of the verb "to be"; the personal pronouns; and the weak declension of masculine and feminine nouns. So what you do is dip back, again and again, into the grammar and syntax, gradually learning more and more. At the same time, you're learning vocabulary through the readings.

This "learning" section is followed by about 50 pages of readings, and there is a complete glossary at the back.

Bottom line, it's a big book (about 500 pages), and if you work through it conscientiously, you'll have an excellent READING knowledge of Icelandic. For spoken Icelandic, you'll have to look elsewhere.

The good points first:

- Very complete. Everything is included in a huge grammar.
- Lots of readings. Not just the sagas, not just the everyday dialogues - actually, you get a lot of both.
- quite a lot of exercises.
- much better than the OTHER book. (which, I believe, you should have as well.)
- a glossary so large that it would cost about the same if you were to buy it separately.
- where else do you get 500+ excellent pages for this price?

However, this book is not written the way you would expect it. Of course, it is about as old as my grandmother. For starters:

- A topical index and a bibliography at the very BEGINNING of the book.

- A rather thorough and very technical grammar before any introductory exercises. (Yes, I know, it says right after the preface that the absolute beginner should start by the exercises, but it is not very usual to start a book on page 181)

- No discussion of vowel changes before a lot of exercises where they are needed. "Teach yourself" has the same problem. However, it is not something easy to explain, but future authors should at least try to either discuss each vowel shift just before it is needed or to use as few as possible in the first exercises.

- You need a good memory. As an example, in order to go through the first group of exercises, you have to memorize (I couldn't do it in any other way) 6 different forms of the verb to be, about 40 different pronoun forms and about 12 different kinds of endings for nouns. Of course, no one said it was going to be easy. Icelandic has three genders, four cases and a huge amount of different verb forms... but this is HARD.

- An old-looking rather small font that makes you read slower than on a modern book. Besides, it does not have a lot of white space. Pages are thick with text. This gives you the impression that you are going very slowly.

Icelandic is not an easy language to learn and this book is a real antique in its approach to language learning, so I can imagine the frustration of a student whose previous experiences are high school or college courses (say beginning Spanish or French) or a Berlitz or Teach-Yourself course with tapes or CDs. Be warned, this is not that kind of book. If you speak native-level English and have studied Greek, Latin or German, this book will do you much good. If you know something about grammar and linguistics, so much the better. No phonetic descriptions are going to teach you to speak Icelandic or any other language. For that you'll have be around a native speaker, and you might do well also to get a phrase book and tapes. If, however, you want to learn to read Icelandic(and also old Norse)this is the best book I've found. It's surely an indispensable reference work to accompany other Icelandic programs as well. I don't know where else you'll find so much information to help unravel the complexities of Icelandic. Get it, but be prepared to work. It will take even an experienced language learner a couple of years to digest half of what it has to offer.

Though I have carried & used the Glending grammar for many years in my isolated study of Icelandic, this book, by Einarsson, offers direct & enlightening descriptive explanations of the orthography of Icelandic and examples of usage. I consider it an impotrant asset to anyone studying Icelandic on their own.

As was mentioned above, this book is best for people who already have the 'sound' of the language in their heads. It's not worth the trouble to try to use the pronunciation guide in the beginning of this book; with easy access to CDs, etc., it's quicker to learn from them.

After that, however, this book is a great resource. I recommend skipping over the grammar sections (at least at first) and beginning with the first text. What I did was I looked at the words in the word list and said them all out loud with their definitions, then went and read the text out loud right after that. This helped me remember what the words meant as I read them, and so the text was comprehensible right from the beginning.

I didn't bother with the exercises (as they necessitate using the grammar portion of the book, which is too abstruse for most learners, I think). I just happily learned about Icelandic culture reading the texts.

I went all the way up to the end of Texts I (the part with the wordlists), then went back and did it again, this time only using the wordlist to check words I couldn't remember. After that, I took on Texts II (which don't have wordlists and rely on the glossary). This meant that I needed to look up the words in the glossary when I got stuck. It was a bit slower than using the wordlists, obviously, but this was outweighed by the enthusiasm of being able to read and enjoy real Icelandic after only about 75 hours of learning (that includes learning pronunciation through the Teach Yourself series)!

My plan after this is to finish going through all of Texts II, then pick up an Icelandic-Icelandic dictionary along with a real Icelandic book and I'll be on my way! I'm certainly not done yet, but this book was a vital step and much appreciated.

A bit dated, originally written in 1949, but everything is covered. The vocabulary is more than adequate and treats the grammatical aspects of the vocabulary well. Excellent discussion of syntax and declensions. You might be accused of speaking a bit old-fashionedly, but all-in-all correctly nevertheless.

Just so you know this book is as colloquial as you can get. It is worth every penny i spent on it. Information & all. Icelandic text is hard to find, but as of this moment to the next Liguist around will help bring more and more products to the states. trust me i have searched, Here and there THis site has good material to start with. Very precise for the retentive.

I just wanna say that you can't beat this price. I had to special-order mine from the publisher for fifty bucks.

Also, this book is a lot of fun (for anybody who likes languages). The grammar and syntax are presented very straight-forwardly and the readings are many and varied. The language is beautiful and just feels good; it always makes me wish I were there. (And if this book's a bit old-fashioned, it's no more so than the sagas.)

Gangi þér vel!

Most reviews are very positive, if not downright enthusiastic. I beg to differ. This book has serious shortcomings. Contrary to the opinion of many reviewers, the grammar (inflections + syntax) is not huge, it's a mere 150 pages. This isn't much to cover a very difficult language like Icelandic (my favourite German grammar runs to 600 pages). The noun classes are presented in a very disorderly and confusing manner. Instead of giving the paradigm for every noun class, the author gives the two or three most important ones and then accumulates footnotes to account for possible variations. The tiny Teach Yourself volume by P.T.J. Glendening is much clearer and more methodical: its "Appendix" gives all the classes at a glance.
On the other hand, the phonetics are very complete and exhaustive, but then no beginner needs that much, and nobody ever learnt to pronounce a language by reading a description of its sounds, no matter how thoroughly the job was done.
Unlike Glendening, Einarsson doesn't provide any key to the exercises. How can the beginner check his answers? Here again Glendening is better.
But then, given the dearth of available material on Icelandic, it's good to have another textbook to browse in when looking for some particular grammatical detail. In addition, there are a few nice pictures in it. The cover has a nice blue-green colour. Just make sure that you have a strong reading lamp on your desk: the print is tiny, and in the dictionary part the diacritics are difficult to make out.