As per plan, I'm taking a more relaxed approach to both Icelandic and Greek than previously. I'm dividing my time about 50/50 between listening and reading. Listening is some didactic (VLI for Icelandic, again, and FSI and HAU for Greek) and some native podcast material (see last few log posts for links). Reading is almost exclusively Snjóblinda and Κάτι θα γίνει, θα δεις; I'm relying mostly on dictionaries (paperback Oxford for Greek, UWDC for Icelandic) - I have the English translation of Snowblind, but not only is it not literal enough to be very useful, the translator has also taken considerable liberties with the text, changing the order of lines and adding entire paragraphs at some points. I wonder if the Icelandic author has read it?
(cf. the Icelandic Dracula...)Anyway, whether listening or reading, I'll take in a sentence or two, then speak or write-and-speak it out from memory, then check against the original and analyse errors (in writing, this is in effect scriptorium); except with the podcasts which I just listen to without stopping, even if I'm only understanding 20%. I fondly imagine my speaking skills are improving through all this, but I'm also trying to get in a few minutes of talking to myself most days.
In actual fact I understand substantially more in Greek than Icelandic, probably a combination of the amount of listening I've done so far and the smooshed-together-yness of spoken Icelandic. I was musing earlier today on the sentence 'Hvað ertu búinn að vera lengi hér á landi?', which the dictionary says ought to have fourteen syllables but I reckon would normally consist of about nine. Greek sort of does this too, but in much more tractable ways (basically it just elides vowel-vowel sequences between words, not unlike Italian).
I am not doing Anki or Icelandic Online (sorry IOL) - I just can't get them to fit into my daily routine. Listening is for the morning walk to work, reading is for bedtime; screen/keyboard stuff just doesn't have a place in the day.
As per plan, I'm alternating seven days Greek with seven days Icelandic. As far as I can tell this is going fine. I'm certainly not getting bored with either language, they're not interfering with each other significantly, and I'm not feeling any problem coming back to one after a week with the other. Whether I'm making as much progress per day of study as I would be if I was concentrating on one language, that's hard to know, but since this year's goal is really to have fun rather than to reach any particular level, so far so good!
