Language School

Today I finished my first week of Icelandic lessons. It's been fun to be doing a course again - I've been missing seminars (although not essays). They are held just outside central Reykjavík, from 9.20 to 11.30 on Mondays to Thursdays. It takes about ten minutes on the bus. There are something like twelve other students in the class, one each from India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Germany, Mexico and Canada and then the rest are Polish.

At first everything was going a bit slowly, and I was getting pretty frustrated because the things we were doing were so easy I hardly had to try at all. I mean, actually stuff like 'Hvað heitir þú?' ('What's your name?'). If you've enrolled in a course which is taught in Icelandic, and is labelled as intermediate, I'm pretty sure you've got simple introductions down. It wasn't just 'Hvað heitir þú?' sort of stuff, but really nothing challenging. I was thinking maybe I'd have to change up to Icelandic 4. And also wondering what on earth people were doing with their time in Icelandic 1 and 2.

I still think I could probably handle Icelandic 4, but I'm going to continue with Icelandic 3 because the pace is starting to pick up a bit. We've got some nice grammatical tables to get our teeth into, and I actually made quite a lot of mistakes today (a lot of kitchen-appliance related vocabulary seems to have fallen out of my head). Which is good, because obviously if you're not making mistakes then you're not learning, you're just going over things you already know.

I'm really glad we're getting more grammar now. Is it weird that I enjoy conjugation and declension? I mean, it frustrates me no end when I'm trying to speak Icelandic, but I actually find it quite fun to write out the tables and do 'fill-in-the-gap' style exercises. Hopefully we'll have more of that, and more challenging vocabulary. It would be nice to do more than the simple present tense for verbs (pretty much the least useful tense), but I suppose I have plenty of time in Iceland. I can safely finish Icelandic 4 and 5 when I'm done with this.