Books in Icelandic

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Hae!

Fyrirgef mín saensku lyklabord… :slight_smile:
Ég er ad laera íslensku i thrír mánadur og hafa stórt “break through” i “reading comprehensibility”. En ég lesir bara baekur úr snerpa.is, sögur úr forntídinn. Mun thad vera megilegt (possible :slight_smile: ) ad fá baekur til Lingq úr nútídinn? Modir mína segir mér ad thad finnst margar baekur frá “hverr gerdid dråpid?” (detective books…). Og sögur slíka Harry Potter og Inn litli prins séu og goda daemir!

Hope that’s somewhat readable…

Bless!

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The original post asks about adding books to Icelandic. The problem with that, as always mostly has to to do with copyright issues. There are many books and works that are not copyrighted, like the Icelandic Sagas (Viking sagas), folktales, old Icelandic stories and some old international ones like The Little Prince, but then the recordings of the readings of these texts are usually copyrighted and behind a paywall. LingQ does not allow adding and sharing content that is text only of course.

Here is what I am doing now:

  1. I am currently trying to negotiate with some publishers about being allowed to put the first few chapters of some of their books into LingQ (in both text and audio form).
  2. I am trying to negotiate being allowed to add material from mms.is to LingQ, which is also a copyright issue. I am trying to get the authorities to just pay the authors whatever extra money they should get for that sort of use of their material. After all, it could help foreign kids in the Icelandic school system learn their school lessons.
  3. I am trying to negotiate with hbs.is on being allowed to put some of the open books from their page back into LingQ, with the audio. I had to put them there with a link to the audio, which was not really good enough and may have been frustrating some users, so for now these lessons are not public.
  4. I have personally translated The Little Prince and Steve’s book: The way of the Linguist into Icelandic. The latter is being proofread as we speak, the former will probably be once the latter is complete. I will personally read both so they can be added to LingQ.
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(Ég skil hvað þú ert að meina, en hérna er hvernig þetta væri sagt á réttri íslensku)

“Fyrirgefðu að ég er með sænskt lyklaborð”
"Ég hef verið að læra íslensku / ég er búinn að vera að læra íslensku
í þrjá mánuði og hef náð miklum framförum í að skilja lesmál.
En ég les bara bækur úr snerpa.is, það er að segja sögur úr fortíðinni (gamlar sögur). Er það mögulegt að fá nútímalegar bækur í LingQ? Móðir mín (mamma mín) að það séu til margar íslenskar sakamálabækur. Sögur eins og Harry Potter og Litli Prinsinss eru góð dæmi.

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It sounds like you have a lot of projects ongoing! And it all sounds very good, I really hope there is some luck to be had with the Icelandic authorities!
And big thanks to you for all the work you’re doing, The Linguist and The Little Prince will be amazing!
And thanks for the correction too, I will import it into lingq!

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@carlinberg,

Since you mentioned Harry Potter, you can find the entire collection in one volume, Harry Potter Heildarsafn, at a few online stores for less than $60 US - a fantastic price considering the amount of material you get. .

I chose to purchase it from Harry Potter: Heildarsafn (1-7) eBook by J.K. Rowling - EPUB Book | Rakuten Kobo United States (I include a direct link because Kobo’s search is so bad you can’t actually search for it by the title its listed under) because Kobo, unlike most popular vendors, allows you to download the ePub with SDRM (Social DRM) as opposed to other, more restrictive forms of DRM.

SDRM represents the best of both worlds because it not only allows you to load your ePubs on any of your devices but also contains a digital watermark that allows publishers to trace it back to you, if you were to host it on a pirate site. This means you can copy and paste it into LingQ and keep it private without issue.

You can also purchase the audio from the Google PlayStore and be able to download the mp3 without restriction, unlike other popular vendors.

Before LingQ supported Icelandic (thanks again to @rokkvi and all his hard work), mms.is was my main source of material. If you’re not terribly interested in children’s stories, you can focus mainly on the middle-school/ high-school aged material as I did.

If you take the time learn to use the search well, you will find many easy-to-read and listen-to offerings such as retellings of classics (like Drakúla, War of the Worlds [Innrásin frá Mars], and The Hound of the Baskerville [Baskerville Hundurinn]) as well as nature- and historical-based pdfs and mp3s.

Best

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Yes mms.is is probably the best and most vast source for Icelandic learning material, which is why I hope I end up getting the permissions needed to put their material directly into LingQ. Of course it’s still a great source for people to import from into LingQ as long as they keep the lessons private.

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Thanks a lot! That’s very good to know about SDRM!
And those books at mms.is sounds nice too!

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