Languages of the World

A collection of links and tips

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Bridge to humanity's core : languages. This blog presents Merlin's travels in the world of languages. Each post deals with a language.

Sunday, April 9

Icelandic - íslenska-

Icelandic is spoken in Iceland, a most beautiful northern island, located between Europe and North America.
It's an old germanic language, derived from the old norse language spoken by the first Viking inhabitants of the country.

Alphabet : even with its 32 letters, it isn't very different from the French alphabet.



There are many rules to pronounce Icelandic the right way, and it's best to begin by learning them, here for example. This site is also very good because it provides audio files, but it's written in Icelandic. Just click on the letters or sound icons *winks*. Listening to the Icelandic radio helps a lot, even if you don't understand a single word : you still manage to get the "musical" feel of the language (ruv).

Grammar : Icelandic has four declension cases : nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. Check out the mimir site. If you're having troubles with verbs, you'll like it here.

Various links : Icelandic online is so far the best site I've found to learn Icelandic on the net. It includes audio files, interactive excercices...
=> Mentalcode Icelandic is good if one wants to practice vocabulary and some verbs conjugation. I admit that, as my keyboard don't have icelandic letters, I have to use an online keyboard, and copy and pasting can be annoying after a fashion. But well, we can't buy a keyboard each time we learn a new language...
=>
Icelandic Medieval Manuscripts, a site for those who love the sagas and medieval history.
=>
Wikipediu

1 Comments:

Blogger Bryce Wesley Merkl said...

Here's another Icelandic site that you might want to check out: Íslenska wiki browser

5:31 PM  

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