Over the past few days I've been watching some (not exclusively) Disney videos lovely people have posted on Youtube, sung in Icelandic with subtitles added in Icelandic and English. The songs are from cartoons including Mulan, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Little Mermaid and Bambi. In particular the video "Bambi learns to speak Icelandic" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNM1yGaZ468) is useful as Tunfiskurinn (who I've messaged asking where she found the songs so I can get copies of the entire films) has explained the grammar in the middle of the scene. Also that scene in Bambi is very simple, meaning that with concentration I can understand it all. It's also fricking cute. Tunfiskurinn's Youtube account can be accessed via that video. Other notable uploaders include IcelandicDisneyVids, GalacticChicken and sbsiceland.
I spent about 3 hours browsing through those today. The Lion King ones are AWESOME.
After a 5-hour trip to the pub (great fun!) I returned to read through the next couple of chapters in Hippocrene to see what to expect. Faaak. It turns out Æfingar is the plural of the feminine Æfing (exercise), not the assumed masculine æfingur, as (something that Colloquial had failed to mention in their section on plural nouns) an exception to the usual plural endings of -ir and -ur in the feminine is if the root ends in ing. I'm debating whether or not to cross through every time I wrote æfingur to mean exercise in my notes just so I can cement that into my brain.
Ah, but that's not all that made me say "faaak" today. The third, fourth and fifth possible verb conjugation patterns often have vowel changes in the singular person forms that are more or less governed by rules. I think I'm just going to have to remember those vowel changes ... also a bunch of nouns pluralise irregularly. Days of the week take different forms depending on whether you're talking about events that happen every Wednesday, events that you plan to happen on one specific Wednesday or whether you're just talking about Wednesday. I'm also pretty much half way through the Hippocrene book already and I don't want this awesome book to finish. It's too damn useful.
On a nicer side, "usually" the future tense is just the present tense with reference to future dates (Ég fer í kvöld (lit. "I go tonight") means "I will go tonight"). Although the word "usually" is ominous, that might mean that I pretty much don't have to learn an entire tense. As much as that's similar to English (just ignoring the word "will"), English has lost most of its grammar forms whereas Icelandic is renowned for being one of the most grammatically difficult languages, so hallelujah.
Tomorrow I might write and expand upon noun lists and start conjugating plurals. I could also work on verbs as now I know the five essential verb groups.
Vertu sæl, Paul x
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Here in Germany, we have also a future tense but mostly we use the simple present^^ Like Icelandic.
ReplyDelete