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Teach Yourself Icelandic Complete Course | 
 enlarge | Author: Hildur Jonsdottir
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy New: $7.37
You Save: $11.58 (61%)
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 617668
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0071420258
Dewey Decimal Number: 439.6982421
EAN: 9780071420259
ASIN: 0071420258
Publication Date: January 31, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: SHIPS TODAY!! BRAND NEW BOOK, MAY HAVE REMAINDER MARK
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Product Description
Learning Icelandic as easy as 1-2-3 With this book, Icelandic is attainable for any beginning student. You can use Teach Yourself Icelandic Complete Course at your own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. This complete course is based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly. Prepared by experts in the language, Teach Yourself Icelandic begins with the basics and gradually promotes you to a level of smooth and confident communication, including: - Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
- Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
- Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
- Practical vocabulary
- Regular and irregular verb tables
- Plenty of practice exercises and answers
- Bilingual glossary
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Glendening March 16, 2008
Michael J. Maquilan (Moorestown, NJ United States)
If you really want to learn Icelandic, you are going to have to buy all of the books on the market and work and work and work on it for several years. No single book is going to do the whole job, and furthermore, the job will never be fully completed. Each book adds a little bit to your journey. Accept them all for whatever good they can do. Anyway, this book can teach you to say all kinds of interesting things, such as "Hva er or i af henni? Hun drekkti ser i brunninum." (What has become of her? She drowned herself in the well.) and "Lattu mig i fri i, eg brenndi mig" (Leave me in peace, I burned myself). They just don't make 'em like that anymore.
 A Brief And Challenging Introduction To Icelandic November 15, 2005
Robert I. Hedges
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Having been to Iceland and wanting to return, I decided to explore the Icelandic language. I wanted to learn basic conversational and written Icelandic, and that is exactly the subject of this book. It should be obvious, but let me say it clearly: this is not an easy exercise. This book is also available with practice recordings to listen to, and while more expensive, I highly recommend spending the extra money. Trying to flip back and forth between the pronunciation keys and the exercises was often laborious.
The book itself is very fast paced, and my biggest issue with it is that it presupposes a strong grasp of grammar and parts of speech, and quickly rushes into things like nominative, dative, accusative, and genitive forms, obscure rules about irregular forms varying by gender (Icelandic has masculine, feminine, and neuter), and some extremely unwieldy tenses and verb conjugations, which combined with the Icelandic alphabet and unusual pronunciations, make this a very challenging book. As an example, on page 121 she discusses plurals of feminine nouns with this passage: "It should be pointed out that the genitive plural form of some weak feminine nouns is very seldom used and many native speakers of Icelandic have problems deciding whether to use the ending -na or -a." If native speakers don't find this useful, perhaps it could be edited from a book for beginning students of Icelandic. My point here is not that the book is bad; it just is a bit advanced for absolute beginners.
On the positive side, the book is current and topical with discussions of modern technology, web pages, and e-mail addresses ("netfang"), which given the predisposition of Icelanders to be early adopters of technology, is a very useful feature.
Jonsdottir picked an extremely difficult and complex subject to tackle in a 216 page book, but attempts to cover the myriad of complicated rules and grammar issues completely. Her explanations of things like the u-umlaut vowel change rule, and pronunciation and grammar tips are good overall, although there are a couple of places where editing could have helped (for instance there is an exercise asking the reader to tell time on page 64, while the lesson teaching how to tell time starts on page 69.)
The book claims to move at "an energetic pace," and that is a vast understatement. Despite my toils with this book, I recommend it overall with the understanding that is not the equivalent of "Icelandic for Dummies" (which I wish existed), but is a challenging introduction to Icelandic which will definitely make you think. I recommend augmenting this with Icelandic language CDs or tapes. As for me, I eventually hope to attend the one month Icelandic summer program at the University of Iceland for native English speakers.
Good luck!
New edition now vastly improved October 19, 2004
Seth Morabito
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
All of the reviews for this book seem to be directed at the previous edition, written by P.J. Glendenning. As most of them correctly point out, that edition was woefully out of date, and not a particularly useful book for a student interested in learning conversational Icelandic.
As a student of Icelandic for quite some time, I'm aware of how difficult it is to find materials worthy of recommendation. The new edition by Hildur Jonsdottir is just such a book, vastly superior to the earlier editions. It follows the new Teach Yourself style of introducing the language through conversation rather than rote grammar memorization. It starts with useful greetings and moves on to everyday conversation smoothly, introducing the necessary grammer gradually and naturally.
If you need to learn Icelandic, this seems like a very reasonable aid. Don't let all the negative reviews for the old edition scare you away from this new one.
 Not for absolute beginners, despite claim February 23, 2003
A. Butterfield (UK)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
It says on the back of this book that it's "invaluable both to the absolute beginner and the student of Icelandic literature and its culture."Unless you're a very academically-minded beginner, I don't think this is true at all. This book assumes that you already understand something of the way Icelandic works. And it assumes that you know ENGLISH grammar pretty well. If you don't, you might want to get a book on English grammar at the same time so you know what this book is talking about. This was the first Icelandic book I bought, and at first I discarded it as useless. Then I spent some time with Daisy Neimann's 'Colloquial Icelandic' and came back to this one when I felt a little more comfortable with the basics. Now it starts to make sense. It's a bit like a school book, but I think useful for those fairly tedious taks that you can't avoid, like learning how to decline nouns, adjectives, prepositions... Having said that, it does seem old fashioned. The long list of idioms near the back are full of archaic phrases that seem a pointless inclusion. I notice that the letter 'z', abolished by the Icelanders some time ago, also makes an appearance throughout this book.
 Sketchy and Poorly Edited July 28, 2002
Yasha Hartberg (College Station, TX United States)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
While this book may be reasonable for linguists or people with extensive experience with Scandinavian languages, it is virtually intractable for newcomers to the field. Grammatical concepts are merely sketched with little or no explanation. The pronunciation guide is extremely cumbersome, listing phonetic symbols without clearly telling students which Icelandic letters represent which sounds. Translation exercises require grammatical concepts before they have been introduced in the text and the glossary is woefully incomplete. Definitely NOT a text for beginners!
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