I do not know when they, and thus Icelandic as a language, will be added to LingQ, since LingQ 5.0 will still be in the works before any languages will be added and it can take a while for languages to be added regardless of that - but LingQ now have the files, so it will be happening down the road. In the meantime, you can still use these files to learn Icelandic if you please.
This is me making a toast in Icelandic sheep dung smoked whisky to this project finally being finished. When this pandemic is over and things return to normal and I return to my job of guiding tours at the Eimverk distillery, I invite you to come on my tour and enjoy a tasting.
Thanks to my friend Katrín Mixa, who is much better at spelling and grammar than me, who helped me proofread the texts and read most of the parts narrated by women as well as to my daughter who you can also hear reading a bit of the final story.
But since travelling isn´t the easiest or necessarily most desirable thing to do in these times, you could also order it. If you are in the USA, our distributor there is called Anthem Imports and you should be able to get it from them: Floki - Anthem Imports
The most unique whisky we have is of course the sheep dung smoked one, the first of it´s kind ever. Then there is also the mead barrel one, which is very unique and relative to Icelandic history and traditions like the sheep dung smoked one.
Iceland seems to be quite popular with Germans and they tend to do better than most other nations at learning Icelandic, since German grammar already has a lot of the complexities Icelandic does (not all of them though) - and they are both Germanic languages of course. This has actually worked quite well in my favor. After all I met my wife here in Iceland as she moved here to work for a relative of mine, because of her interest in the country.
I would love to visit if I ever got the chance. But thank you for providing that link, I will definitely have to order some to try out! I really appreciate it and look forward to enjoying it!
The man, the myth, the legend! This is a great contribution to the study of this language and I am both very grateful and very excited to one day start learning it! Kærar þakkir!
Your wife is German? Nice! Yes, there does seem to be a certain interest in Iceland due to your breathtaking landscape.
Yeah, I remember seeing a comparison between Icelandic, German and English somewhere. Icelandic looked more complex, but still more like German than English. I have the lextra course here. I had read that it was good and found a really good offer for the box with the book and CD (the box is a bit damaged, but the rest is fine). Only afterwards did I read a review where someone criticised that it’s just a translation of an English course and wasn’t adapted to German speakers.
Yes it´s also that Icelandic and German are truly Germanic languages, while English borders on being a Creole between an older Germanic language and an older Latin language, which then evolved further. It only became apparent to me how much Latin influence there is in English after starting to learn french, but you can find countless words in English that come from a Latin base, where there just about every other Germanic language has a Germanic word for the same term.
Example: EN: Animal - Danger.
DE, IS, DK, SE: Dyr, dýr, Tier, djur - Gefahr, hætta, fare, fara.
So lots of times where the word is quite similar between most German languages, but different for English cause it comes from a Latin root.
Thank you so much, Rokkvi. I can’t wait to get started with Icelandic here in lingQ. Next time I’m back in Iceland, I’ll pay you a visit at the distillery and buy you a drink! Have a nice christmas and take care.
Figured I´d give a bit of an update on Faroese too. A while ago I started searching on facebook for Faroese speakers to get Faroese into LingQ as well. I was very lucky to find a young Faroese fellow by the name of Uni, who teaches Faroese, who then naturally evolved into the project leader. He has his students translate the stories and then corrects them, while there are also a few other Faroese speakers who help too.
They have now finished or at least started on 35 of the 60 stories, although I don´t think any audio has been recorded yet. I myself can mostly read Faroese, as it´s very similar to Icelandic and I speak other Nordic languages as well, but I can´t really speak or write it, so I am not able to help directly with the work.
It remains to be seen how long it will all take. The translations seem to be going really well at least and we do have one Faroese person in Iceland who is a musician who has a studio where he can record the readings of the stories. It may well be possible to get some help from someone in the Faroes as well, who knows? Although I don´t think I can really make a good estimate on when all the work for Faroese would be finished, I think it will get done within the next year.
There are a lot of Germans who like Icelandic horses too. In fact Germany has more Icelandic horses than any other country, including Iceland itself. There are quite a few German women who move here specifically because of the horses and then quite a few of them marry Icelandic men. My wife and I know quite a few Icelandic-German couples here in the country and most of the time the woman is German and the man Icelandic. Lots of the German women we know here have horses or like to ride.
I think you can only order the standard 3 year old Flóki whisky from them, as the sheep dung smoked version and other variants probably haven´t been FDA approved yet, but it´s still a quite interesting whisky to try, made exclusively from Icelandic barley and water and the first ever whisky from our country. The other types should become available in the US down the line, or you could visit here to try them.
I know, I first started learning French at secondary school, but once I started learning Norwegian (which I picked up again here) and then Dutch, it was even more obvious.
