I am happy to announce I will soon be taking a week long vacation in the Faroe Islands, with the goal of learning more Faroese and recruiting people to help me get Faroese into LingQ.
For those who don’t know me, I’m the one who got Icelandic added into LingQ. I’m also a polyglot and one of the more active LingQ users.
Since I am Icelandic and Faroese is the one language that is most related to Icelandic, there is a lot of common or similar vocabulary and grammar, but the pronunciation is very different. I have not had a great deal of time to study the language so far, having invested most of my language learning in French, Dutch, Norwegian and even some Spanish/Italian. So far I have read one whole novel in Faroese and listened quite a bit to their national news.
If there is anything difficult in Faroese for Icelanders it’s two things 1) The different pronunciation, but for me this is not a difficult step, since it just requires listening and I am very much a mimic 2) The closeness of the languages actually makes it hard to remember the exact words, ironically. That is because they are so much like Icelandic words, you understand them, but it’s like having to remember wrong spellings of you own words, if that makes sense.
My aim is to try to get everyone to speak Faroese to me and see if I can start to talk back (otherwise answer in Icelandic or Danish which should work).
My other aim is to get more Faroese people to help me both get Faroese into LingQ and subsequently add more material. I already have some people working on it, just need more of them. The Faroese are actually super friendly to Icelanders and I will even get to visit a couple of Faroese classes to introduce them to the program and the project.
I hope this all goes well and I will post an update to how much I learned and how it all went. I really hope I will succeed in getting Faroese into LingQ within a year or so if not sooner.
LOL I guess nobody gives 2 cents about Faroese, since it’s a microlanguage. Got lots of responses when I was doing a similar experiment with Spanish, but zero on Faroese. Well since most people don’t even know this country exists, I probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Actually a very beautiful and peaceful place if you want to visit.
Very interesting! I wish you a lot of fun and hope you can practise a lot of Faroese. I don’t know much about the Faroe islands but I remember a documentary about women from the Philippines on the Faroes. Maybe for the immigrant community, Faroese on LingQ is a really interesting project, because I imagine it’s difficult to learn a language with few resources. Also, you could draw attention to Tagalog on LingQ for curious Faroese.
Very interesting. We have quite a lot of Philippino and Thai women who have moved to Iceland too. Many men in Iceland and the Faroes who have a hard time finding wives for various reasons and many women in SE-Asia who are simply trying to get out of poverty and even wishing to send money to support their families or bring some family members into more well to do countries. Thus there have been lots of marriages like that. Often the men are quite a lot older than the women. Some times it goes well, sometimes not. Sometimes the men are abusive and the women then don’t always know their rights, which is sad. Sometimes the women are just trying to get as much out of it financially as possible and take advantage of the man, even leave them bankrupt and divorce them as soon as they can. But many of these marriages also work out well.
I have not listened to much Faroese, but written it is very intelligible. The sources I have seen imply that Faroese orthography is etymological which would explain how the spoken language has drifted quite far away from the phonological spelling.
I do wonder what content is available in Faroese that could be imported into LingQ. Is there a Faroese Forlagið?
Mofibo/Danish Storytel does include Faroese as a search option, but they will not take my money to allow me try it out.
There would not be a great amount of material in Faroese to import into LingQ for public sharing, but there is some and obviously that is where we’d begin. They do have news sites that could be used for the news feed. All small languages are a challenge in getting enough material. Norwegian was seriously lacking when I started learning it here in June of 2020 or so for example, so Icelandic and Faroese offer bigger challenges as that goes.
I would LOVE for this to be added to the site. I have a good friend who lives in the Faroe Islands and we alternate between English, Icelandic, and Danish to talk to each other. He has challenged me to learn Faroese but there aren’t many resources
Even if people aren’t as interested in learning it, I am sure you are doing the language a great service by preserving it in some way and will be much appreciated by the people there. I’d say its a worthwhile endeavour. Will be interesting to read how you get on with speaking it!
