How This Course Is Written

There are some course-specific writing choices that need to be addressed.

Goals

The goal of this course is to provide you, a complete beginner, with useful Icelandic knowledge and skills. In furtherance of this goal, the main focus of this course is not to teach you every word and structure possible, but rather to teach you highly appliable and useful skills and vocabulary. These skills include a good knowledge of grammar, a solid vocabulary with which to apply that grammar, and a fair amount of tips and advice to help that process along.

Referencing a word

Throughout the course's explanations of grammar, there will be instances where English and Icelandic words or phrases are referenced as words. For example, I may reference the word "Horse" because I am going to talk about its spelling as a word or something related. These referenced words and phrases will be enclosed in quotation marks, and the first letter of the word or phrase will always be capitalized.

In some cases, I may include phrases that clarify the context, such as using the tags "The word" or "The verb" before the referenced term. This approach is intended to enhance clarity and maintain a smooth flow of information.

While you likely do not know what this means yet, when these referenced words are used, they will generally appear in either their nominative or infinitive form unless specified otherwise.

Example 1: The verb "To be" is best translated as "Að vera" in Icelandic.

Example 2: The noun "Hestur" ends in a "-ur."

Example 3: "You are a horse" is a grammatically correct sentence.

Single letters will not typically be enclosed in quotation marks unless the letter itself is a standalone word. Single letters are always capitalized.

Examples:

"A" is an indefinite marker in English.

The word "Crumb" ends with a B.

Translations

Throughout this course, translations will be given for most Icelandic sentences and words.

Translations can never be perfect. Languages do not all have the same features, words, or culture attached to them, so something is bound to get lost on the journey between them. For this reason, a perfect translation between two languages can never happen. That said, I will attempt to give an accurate translation in regard to the context of the sentence. There can be, and often are, multiple correct ways to translate something.

For sentences, translations will be given after the sentence in parentheses and separated by a dash. Any required additional context of sentence translations will always be provided by either the rest of the conversation or by a qualifying explanation before or right after the sentence.

Example: Ég elska þig. - (I love you.)

For singular nouns, the translations will be given after the word in parentheses and separated by a dash. The translations will always start with a capital letter. If additional context is required, such as when a word has multiple possible definitions, the qualifying context will be given after the translations in lowercase following a comma.

Example 1: Bíll - (Car).

Example 2: Vaskur - (Sink, kitchen water basin.)

The rules for singular nouns apply to singular verbs, too, but verbs may require additional information to be provided due to a process known as case-steering, which affects their objects, which will be explained in the course. This additional information is given after the Icelandic verb in parenthesis. The English translations will always include the entire Icelandic phrase with the object as a form of something/someone.

Example 3: Að elska (acc) - (To love something.)

If any word/s in an explanation are bolded, it is done to give special emphasis to them.

Example 4: This is an example of bolding.

Additional knowledge

Throughout this course, parentheses are often used to give additional information, such as a quick definition of what a grammatical word means when it appears for the first time.

Example 1: A verb (a word representing an action) is used to...

Tips and notes are also inserted throughout the course. Tips and notes are short pieces of knowledge or advice that I or other Icelandic learners found useful or insightful in their learning journeys. Tips and notes always appear as their own paragraphs and are italicized.

Tips are pieces of information, shortcuts, or pieces of advice that may help you understand something written, such as a rule of thumb or a piece of advice.

Tip: Drink 8 glasses of water every day!

Notes are pieces of information that may help to clarify potential and likely misunderstandings.

Note: Those glasses should be standard-sized.

Abbreviations

All abbreviations are explained in the course by the full term appearing, followed by the abbreviation in all caps. Abbreviations are always in all caps.

Example: Proto-Indo European (PIE) is a language that nobody speaks anymore. PIE is very old.

Y'all

Since there is no agreed-upon standard in English, the second-person plural pronoun used for English in this course is "Y'all" with a possessive form of "Y'all's," since these words' meanings are generally well known. Other correct, more locally inspired interpretations of this form would be "You guys," "Yinz," All Y'all," "Yous," etc.

Photos

If you are viewing this course on a computer, it uses captioned photos in order to increase engagement and demonstrate learned concepts.

All photos used in this course were either taken by the course creator, voluntarily provided by other private individuals, or gathered from the website Pexels.

According to Pexels policy, this use of their images is permitted as long as the image is not used in a negative light, portrayed as endorsing a product, or sold or distributed unaltered on another free-image website or platform. The use of the images here is well within these generous bounds.

All rights to the original images belong to their respective owners. If you work for Pexels or have donated an image to them that you want removed from this course, please contact me, and I will happily do so.