Soffía's Icelandic log

[Soffía]

So I've been absent a very long time – busy with other things. I've been writing a lot of fiction in English and I find it difficult to keep the 'English prose style' module in my brain at 100% when I'm also doing language learning. I'm also still dithering about how much time I want to spend on developing my Icelandic, versus learning French or Russian. It's funny, in some ways I benefited from how little I knew about language learning when I started with Icelandic: I had no idea what I was getting into. Whereas now, in trying to pick up another language, I know enough to be shy of the long slog. But I really do want to learn both French and Russian so I need to get going one of these days.

However, this post is really meant to be about my mother's language revival journey! My mother, who is around 70, did five years of French when she was in secondary school. By the time she finished, she was fluent enough to read and discuss Stendhal in French. She took a semester of French her first year at university, but the professor was apparently an immense stickler for correct written accents and she quit after getting a bad grade. After that, the only time she used French in the next 50 years was very basic tourist French while on holiday.

But she got interested in language learning again after hearing me talk about Icelandic. She bought Le souffle du jasmin by Sinoué and made it through a hundred pages or so, but not with any great facility. Then she decided to try Lingvist after hearing me talk about it - and loved it! She worked her way through the whole 5000 words in French. This spring, when she was around 4000 words on Lingvist, we went on holiday together and I bought her a copy of The Hobbit in French, knowing that she loves Tolkien and thinking it might be a better book for getting back into French. She had basically finished it by the end of the one-week holiday! And suddenly French came back to life in her brain. This summer she bought Lord of the Rings and has absolutely been ploughing through it. My father heard her speaking French in her sleep one night - although sadly he doesn't speak it himself so we don't know what she was saying.

My mother also loves Tolstoy so I jokingly said to her, "what are you going to do when you finish Lord of the Rings in French? The only place you can go from there is War and Peace." So you can guess what this means. She's bought War and Peace in French and it's next on the list! My parents are also visiting Quebec City in November so it'll be interesting to see how much of this reading and vocabulary review translates back into fluency.

Needless to say I'm immensely proud of her, and not a little envious. It goes to show how an investment in language learning is never really lost! And it also makes me think that I should get back to Lord of the Rings myself...

[MamaPata]

That's such a lovely thing to hear! Impressive work by your mother! Keep us updated!

[Soffía]

Sadly, Foyles seems to have stopped stocking Icelandic novels. They used to have a couple of shelves of Icelandic. Now it's a sad little handful of learning materials. I don't blame them though, because the novels were hanging around forever and this was particularly bad because the Icelandic publishing cycle is very rapid. Ah well.

It's not so tragic now that you can order from Forlagið and they have their ebooks on Amazon. But it's still sad. I'm hoping that I'm wrong and it was just a stock changeover.

Meanwhile what am I up to? Not so much, apart from having a lot of France24 on TV in the background. (It's the only French TV station I get.)

Once I put the final touches on this novella of mine, I'm going to start learning French properly. I know I've said this before – but really this time! I've found a French tutor here and plan to book a session or two to see how it strikes me. I wonder whether I ought to start a new language log to reflect this new phase?

[Soffía]

This term I'm taking a weekly A2.1 class at my local Alliance Francaise. The teacher is very good, it's taught entirely in French and it's definitely helping me with my listening comprehension. It's also forcing me to talk, which I'm still afraid of doing! But I'm definitely the least fluent in the class (everyone else seems to be reviving their school French) which isn't doing wonders for my motivation. The class is from 6.30 to 8.30 on Monday nights and it seems like such an effort to finish work and get across town by taxi in the rush hour. (I missed class this week because I had to work late.) And finally I'm doing almost nothing during the week in between classes - even getting my homework done is a struggle. Taking a class, for me, does create this attitude of "what I have to do for class" and I feel like I'm not taking responsibility for doing my own learning in between. Or maybe I'm just busy and tired and it's a dreary November.

Anyway it's been a good experiment but I feel like I'm not in a position to take as much advantage of the experience as I'd like to. So next term I'm back to independent study. If I can do 2-3 of these things every day, I'll be in good shape:

• Watch France24 for 15 minutes (this I am doing already)
• Read 15-20 pages of a book
• Work through a section of Grammaire Progressive Du Francais
• Listen to a podcast
• Do a section of the Vivre en France A2 MOOC (I did A1 before I started the course)
• 100 words on Lingvist

We shall see... I'm still being tempted by Russian as well...

[DaveAgain]

Meanwhile what am I up to? Not so much, apart from having a lot of France24 on TV in the background. (It's the only French TV station I get.)

If you're in England you can watch TV5Monde, and Arte.tv online. If your TV has 'apps', you may be able to download one to watch Arte (I can with a Samsung TV).

[Soffía]

Meanwhile what am I up to? Not so much, apart from having a lot of France24 on TV in the background. (It's the only French TV station I get.)

If you're in England you can watch TV5Monde, and Arte.tv online. If your TV has 'apps', you may be able to download one to watch Arte (I can with a Samsung TV).

I regret that I only have one 'like' to give! Thanks so much - I've installed the Arte app on my TV and I'm watching it now.

[Soffía]

Hello everyone, remember me? It's been such a long while since I was around but I was thrilled to find that the forum is still here and so many of my old friends are apparently still active.

I've been busy with other things over the past few years. Between 2020 and 2022 I wrote two novels. No agent yet, but one of the novels did get me into Viable Paradise, which is a very selective one-week writing workshop that gave me an amazing (and ongoing) community of writers. This year I've been busy writing short stories (fantasy and science fiction) and have recently had three stories accepted by pro markets, which I guess makes me a professional author in a small-scale way. I'm not quitting my day job. And it's typical of me that at this point, when I should be putting all my free time and hustle into building my writing career, I find myself thinking "hmmm.... what about language learning?"

I didn't finish that semester of French evening classes that I was taking when I last posted here. I had been ambitious with the level I chose and it seemed like everyone else was reviving old school French, whereas I was struggling through from scratch. The teacher was wonderful but it just wasn't working for me. On top of that I have this weird mental block about French: I always feel self-conscious and pretentious trying to pronounce it correctly, whereas I deeply love the shape and taste of Icelandic in my mouth.

So I really haven't done anything with languages since I last posted in 2019. My mother (you're all secretly following me to hear about my mother, right?) has put me to shame. She read War and Peace in French, more than once I think, and finished Duolingo French. She felt so bereft that she then started Duolingo Greek, which is a bit of a legacy language for her, but she says she has the vocabulary of a three-year-old as that's how old she was when her family moved away from the immigrant neighborhood where she spent her earliest years. Anyway I'm very proud of her.

And, stop presses, I forgot something important... of course I've done something with languages! For reasons not worth going into right now, I converted to Judaism at the beginning of 2023 after more than a year of study. This required me to learn basic prayerbook Hebrew, which I did, and enjoyed it too. Tempted to go further with it someday – it really is pretty basic – but being able to read (the alphabet) and pronounce Hebrew sufficiently to leyn from the Torah is a major achievement that I should certainly acknowledge here.

(Much more likely to end up learning Yiddish than modern Hebrew, for what it's worth.)

Although I would still dearly love to learn Russian (this is either the best or the worst time to do that, just saying), it's clear that Icelandic remains the language of my heart. I picked up the Routledge Essential Grammar of Icelandic back in 2021 when I was busy with other things, but have started browsing through it now. First, I really highly recommend it - fills a major gap. Second, just looking at verb tables gives me a warm and nostalgic feeling. Although I was very unsystematic in my learning, I did so much reading that I can look at many things and think "ah yes, that looks familiar, of course I do know how that works."

While the pandemic was terrible in many ways, it has made some things more accessible. I always used to look longingly at the UCL evening classes in Icelandic, but they were in person and I don't live in London. Now many of them are online! And I see they're offering a B1.2 class this autumn, which is exciting because they often didn't have the numbers for intermediate classes. I am strongly considering signing up. I know my reading level is beyond that but it would be good grammar revision and - most importantly - speaking practice.

This would be good preparation to go back to the Westfjords in April for another advanced one-week course, which I would dearly love to do. It would be lovely to be more conversational before I get there. We shall see...

[jeff_lindqvist]

Hello everyone, remember me?

Of course! Welcome back - good to see you gain!