Neurotip's log: Italian and Icelandic, i.a.

[Neurotip]

Not an official monthly log post - just to record a couple of significant events.

Firstly, I was at a conference during the week and happened to get chatting to an ex-colleague originally from Italy, with the result that I had my first full-blown conversation in Italian for some years. It went pretty well; on the one hand my interlocutor was sympathetic and kept it pretty clear and at a reasonable tempo, but on the other hand we were in a busy and noisy room and I only had to ask for clarification or switch to English a couple of times. There was also the unforeseen consequence that within the first five minutes two other Italians noticed that we were speaking their language and came to join in, which was not in the brief at all!

Secondly, I just bought my first (assuming there will be others...) book in Icelandic, Krabbaveislan by Hlynur Níels Grímsson. I read an online interview with the author recently and thought it sounded interesting, so when I saw it in Foyles and found I could understand the first five or six sentences without looking anything up I was sold. The first two pages have now taken me more than as many hours, partly because the prose style is in places not straightforward. Still I haven't had to give up on a sentence yet, and it's exciting to finally be at a stage with Icelandic where I can realistically tackle native material with just a dictionary to help.

[Soffía]

Secondly, I just bought my first (assuming there will be others...) book in Icelandic, Krabbaveislan by Hlynur Níels Grímsson. I read an online interview with the author recently and thought it sounded interesting, so when I saw it in Foyles and found I could understand the first five or six sentences without looking anything up I was sold. The first two pages have now taken me more than as many hours, partly because the prose style is in places not straightforward. Still I haven't had to give up on a sentence yet, and it's exciting to finally be at a stage with Icelandic where I can realistically tackle native material with just a dictionary to help.

Heavens, that's ambitious! I enjoyed Krabbaveislan a lot, but it's way too stream-of-consciousness to be an easy book. I wish you the best of luck with it.

(And I'm amused because I bought Foyles' previous copy of it. I've had an eye on your copy for months and months now, wondering whether anyone was ever going to buy it. I never thought it would be someone I was acquainted with.)

[Neurotip]

Heavens, that's ambitious! I enjoyed Krabbaveislan a lot, but it's way too stream-of-consciousness to be an easy book. I wish you the best of luck with it.

(And I'm amused because I bought Foyles' previous copy of it. I've had an eye on your copy for months and months now, wondering whether anyone was ever going to buy it. I never thought it would be someone I was acquainted with.)

Æ, hvað hef ég gert? I'll make sure I take another bite out of it tonight, hopefully that will calm the fear rising within me... I feel interested in the subject matter though, and maybe I might at least learn some vocab relevant to my line of work (I'm onto VLI episodes 6-7 now in which Ólafur has his minor head injury, so I feel I've made a start), so that might spur me on.

I wonder how many people in London are currently learning Icelandic?

[Soffía]

I feel interested in the subject matter though, and maybe I might at least learn some vocab relevant to my line of work (I'm onto VLI episodes 6-7 now in which Ólafur has his minor head injury, so I feel I've made a start), so that might spur me on.

A little phrasebook that might be helpful for you: https://www.landspitali.is/lisalib/getf ... emid=24704

I wonder how many people in London are currently learning Icelandic?

A few, at least! I once saw a woman on the Tube reading a book in Icelandic but I didn't manage to work up the courage to speak to her in any language. And UCL does offer a BA in Icelandic - "the only degree programme of its kind outside Iceland," apparently.

[Neurotip]

A little phrasebook that might be helpful for you: https://www.landspitali.is/lisalib/getf ... emid=24704

You've made my day! It's worth it for some of the English translations alone ... 'sonar' anyone?

[Neurotip]

Log post 3: March 2018

Icelandic. A bit urgh. The curve is flattening off; I can no longer see the long hand moving, which is a bit dispiriting. I guess it's a normal phase though. Urgh 2: I keep finding unpleasant little syntactic surprises which appear to have been left by trolls to snare the unwary. For example. You learn one word for 'when' and that seems like enough, but then after staring blankly at various sentences for a while you find out that the word for 'is' also means 'when' sometimes. You learn the several hundred forms of the normal definite article (I may be exaggerating slightly but not much), and then you find out that there's a whole nother type of definite article (I'm talking about hinn here) and no-one seems to be able to agree on when it's used. Then why do they keep using personal pronouns as if they're articles? And the impersonal passive (which is quite elegant: 'Said is, that...') appears to be the tip of an iceberg of peculiarly ordered words. I'm starting to feel that real Icelandic moves to quite a different beat from how I've been feeling it up to now.

Still, in practical terms I've worked through the first eight Viltu læra íslensku videos and regularly walk to work muttering under my headphones. I've been introduced to orðabók.is which is a great resource (alongside the trusty WISC and BÍN). I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable with irregular (ha, like there are any regular ones) verbs, to the extent that today I correctly identified 'fauk' as the past tense of a verb I didn't know. I can pretty much do adjectives now, at least nom/acc and given plenty of time.

Italian. Pretty much as before, reading the odd article online, reading a Montalbano book now and then, listening to quite a lot of Wikiradio. The major event was the Grande Conversazione Italiana of a couple of weeks ago of course (see above), which among other things highlighted (a) an abject and shameful inability to use the subjunctive when speaking, and (b) my pronunciation completely goes to pot when I'm concentrating on stringing a sentence together, unsurprising but a bit disappointing. Regarding my learning goals, all I've achieved is to have added an extra one to the list, namely revision of conditional and subjunctive forms. I'm pretty sure my listening ability has improved significantly though. By the way does anybody know where I can find Italian TV/films subtitled in Italian? I thought I was being very clever by searching YouTube for 'sottotitoli' but it didn't bear fruit

Any other business. Just that I'm starting to find the sound of Persian alarmingly attractive; it appears to be preparing a bid to join the queue after Greek and Russian. This is plainly madness, but what can you do?

In general it occurs to me that I'm doing very little speaking or writing. Writing is heavy on time and effort, and speaking is embarrassing (whether to someone else or to oneself, for different reasons...), but both would be time well spent I guess. Speaking of which, I don't suppose my Italian pronunciation has improved much in two months, but here's a snapshot of how I can read an Icelandic text now given a few practice goes... recording, original text. (I think I'm getting better but I can handle criticism )

[Neurotip]

Every time I foolishly believe I could handle taking on Icelandic without sacrificing anything else I have going on, I'll lurk on r/learnicelandic or read some logs here, and my basic reaction is a combination of "BRING IT ON" and "Run, don't walk, in the other direction." I've been lurking your log for the Icelandic details (and reality checks), and it's fantastic you're attempting this language with others in the mix as well. May I ask how far you are into the following goal, from the first post of your log? (ie. how many hours, and if you are close to 100 hours, do you feel you are A1 or even A2 yet?)

Goal 1 get Icelandic up to a solid A1, perhaps even A2, with 100 hours of study.

Second question: Are you able to estimate what an average day of study looks like in terms of time, eg. time spent on Italian, time spent on Icelandic, etc?

Good question(s)! I'm probably close to or at A1 now, which is pretty much on schedule. I'll be pleased if I can make A2 by the end of the year.

I absolutely agree, I am finding it challenging to make steady improvements in both my TLs week by week. However I think if all my effort was going into Icelandic, I would be getting relatively little back, so the Italian is there to keep me motivated and remind me where I can get to if I put in the effort.

A typical week at the moment looks like this: in Italian I'll listen to about an hour's worth of podcasts, read maybe 10-20 pages of a book, and read blog posts or Wikipedia for maybe another hour or two; in Icelandic I'll listen or watch through, sometimes shadowing, 1-2 hours' worth of VLI (see above) videos, attempt perhaps a dozen sentences from the web or a book, and spend an hour or two in total on Anki, split between vocab learning and audio recordings of sentences; I'm trying to make time to keep plugging through Icelandic Online as well. In addition I'll probably spend some time reading *about* one or other language (especially Venturi's grammar of Icelandic which rather wonderfully is written in Italian!). Fitting this around Real Life is a bit of a stretch and varies a lot from one week to the next.

[Neurotip]

Thank you for this information! Do you know approximately how many hours went into your probable A1? This is the meat of the matter for me. I really appreciated the details on exactly what you are doing, as well. Can't wait to see how you progress over time with both your languages!

Thanks for the encouragement! Counting up hours is a bit difficult because (a) I don't tend to count them as I'm going along and (b) when I started learning Icelandic last spring I was a false beginner anyway, as before I visited Iceland around 2012 I'd been through Alaric's first MP3 course and had also familiarised myself with the phonetics and orthography. Let's say...

bit extra to account for first Alaric course (largely duplicated by second): 10 hours
bit extra for other pre-2017 work: 10 hours
second Alaric course: 50 hours (quoted on website as 16 hours, probably listened to each bit x3 ish)
other work during 2017: 10 hours
3-4 hours a week over the last three months: 40 hours

That makes an estimated 120 hours up to now. To be honest though, this could be out by a factor of 2 in either direction...

[Neurotip]

Log post 4: April 2018

Icelandic. I've remembered why I'm doing this, and that's because it's fun. Yes, I'd like to achieve certain things, but not at the cost of not enjoying myself. I'm probably never going to be able to have a comfortable conversation in Icelandic, and that's fine, it's very unlikely that I'll ever need to. It is therefore a bit silly to feel, as I was starting to, that I should be drilling vocab in Anki instead of having fun decoding a random news article.

With this realisation in place, I've relaxed a bit and am doing more of what I feel like, probably not quite as many hours per week but the thrill is back for now. It is still properly hard work though: parse sentence, check the syntax fits, de-inflect unfamiliar words, look them up, decode idioms ... realise the sentence makes no sense and start again. Ho hum.

I also still can't quite shake the feeling that Icelandic is actually an elaborate hoax.

Italian. Nothing major to report, still doing much the same things: listening to podcasts and the odd YouTube video, getting closer to the end of the Montalbano book (no I still haven't finished it). In fact in retrospect it was a poor choice - fun to read and the Sicilian dialect quickly becomes familiar, but there is relatively little standard Italian in it and so it doesn't work well as an improve-your-Italian tool. In a charity bookshop I picked up Fontamara by Ignazio Silone, which turns out to be quite famous and is very readable. The trouble is that there isn't a part of my day where reading a book is the usual thing to do - I should do something about this.

One thing though, I have done some verb inflection drills, and with not all that much effort I feel like I've learned a lot and can now produce an imperfect subjunctive, a conditional and a passato remoto much more confidently.

Oh, and:
Jan 2018: 'I'm now simply aiming to be able to understand a standard non-fiction broadcast with little effort and getting the point of pretty much every sentence.'
Well, this is basically the case now. I hadn't noticed a change, but it's hard to remember how good I used to be at something, even fairly recently - and I've found I can often overestimate improvements. At least, I've either significantly improved at listening comprehension or I've become significantly less bothered at not understanding Next step is to bite the bullet and attempt some native TV. <eek>

[Soffía]

I also still can't quite shake the feeling that Icelandic is actually an elaborate hoax.

If it makes you feel any better, I feel the same way about French verbs!