Ein Beitrag von Sigurður Hermannsson
If you study a big language with millions of speakers, your biggest problem in finding learning resources is deciding which of the hundreds of options suit you best. A cornucopia of learning resources are at your fingertips with a simple Google search: LingQ and Duolingo and Babel, oh my!
What a luxury. You’ve made good life choices.
If you’re unfortunate enough to have developed a passion for a small language, like Icelandic, then when it comes to learning resources you’re up shit creek without a paddle. Why would anybody bother making learning resources for such a tiny language? It has fewer than half a million speakers. The student body of Humboldt University equates to 10% of the country’s population. The entire population of the country of Iceland is smaller than the population of Pankow.
Would you bother learning Pankowian?
Now is a good time to introduce myself, the writer of this article. I’m Siggi, a teacher of Icelandic as a second language, and I run the website icelandicmadeeasier.com. It’s an information hub with articles that I’ve written about Icelandic grammar and vocabulary to try to help you learn Icelandic. So far there are nearly 40 articles on there, with a total word count of a sizeable doctoral thesis. The idea with the site is to support independent learners, making it easy to simply google specific questions that might come up as you read, speak, or study Icelandic, without having to go through a school for answers. Ridiculously, this used to be next to impossible (unless you got lucky with Reddit).
Why would anybody bother starting and running such a website for Icelandic learners? God knows it isn’t for the money (there is none. In fact, there is negative money because of hosting costs). In my case, it was mostly boredom.
They say Isaac Newton enjoyed an annus mirabilis in 1666, when his university closed due to an outbreak of bubonic plague and he went into isolation. Presumably the Newton household had a “no TV” policy, because during that year the absolute mad lad invented calculus, the law of universal gravitation, and made revolutionary contributions to the field of optics. Boredom is a hell of a drug.
In the Covid shutdowns of 2020, the school where I was teaching closed its doors, and since I, like Newton, don’t have Netflix, I got capital-B Bored. It wasn’t an annus mirabilis (I’m not clever enough for that kind of nomenclature), but it got me started on Icelandic made easier (IME). Originally, I figured I’d write maybe five articles. Just enough to answer some frequently asked questions, keep them in a folder on my computer and send them to students when they asked me the same question I’ve answered a hundred times. But I got friends and students to read them over and make comments (I’ve found that an outside perspective is essential for writing), and the same comment kept cropping up: “are you going to put them on the internet?” So I did.
2020 was no annus mirabilis and IME is no calculus, but I’m happy with my little contribution to the field of learning resources for my little language. When you’re up shit creek without a paddle, even a small oar makes a difference. I like to think that the site is helpful. Most of my private students, both local and international, find me through there, and from reading the articles decide I must know what I’m doing well enough that they trust me with their time. Teachers at other schools even use it for their classes, which I must admit just tickles me pink. Yes, 2020 was no annus mirabilis and IME is no calculus, but it sure beats binge watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine for the third time.
Mehr unter: https://www.icelandicmadeeasier.com