Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Icelandic

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It won't take you very far, but after 3 months of regular reading, I could communicate in Icelandic. A pity there is no volume II.

There are several editions of this book. Although Amazon shows a colourful front page image for the 1980 edition and claims it had 208 pages, it is not true. What they sent me is a small blue book with 190 pages which is a reprint of the 1961 edition.

With any language course, what the student gets out of it depends on how much effort is put in. Constant repetition is the key, with ten minutes a day being better than a long session weekly. Keeping that in mind, this book still has serious flaws.

The first downfall is the pronunciation guide, where many sounds are spelt out so ambiguously it's very hard to guess at the correct pronunciation (while buying an audio kit would remedy this, a better written guide would make it unnecessary). The lessons are badly organised. The grammar is shoved in a big bundle of long lists, instead of being introduced a step at a time as with superior courses.

The long list of idiomatic expressions seems good at first glance, but the book fails to explain them properly. For instance, "Eins daudi er annars braud" is given in the nearest English equivalent ("One man's meat is another's poison") but it doesn't explain that 'daudi' actually means 'death' and 'braud' means 'bread'.

Additionally, the book is only for beginners, with no sequel for intermediate or advanced students.

On the plus side, however, is a chapter explaining the key differences between modern Icelandic and Old Norse.