Is it easy or difficult to learn the Icelandic language?

Here’s a wonderful short poem by Bill Holm (who lived in Iceland) called:

The Icelandic Language

Icelandic phrases

It looks like a difficult language to pronouce:

However, apparently, “Svifnökkvinn minn er fullur af álum” means “My hovercraft is full of eels. (Not j/k)

Original joke from Monty Python; translated into over 50 languages. Straying from topic, I know. Sorry but too funny.

My hovercraft is full of eels

practice by listening to some of Björk’s songs (the ones that are in Iceladic) ! =)

It depends on if you already speak a Germanic language. If you already have mastered Danish and Norwegian, I imagine it would be pretty easy. Otherwise, you might have to work a bit.

When watching the documentary Brainman, about high-functioning savant Daniel Tammit, one of the things mentioned was how amazing his learning Icelandic in a week was, and the said language was notably difficult. That’s all I know about Icelandic.

Icelandic is closely related to Norwegian, which is closely related to Swedish and Danish. My direct experience is with learning Swedish as a native English speaker who has also studied several Romance languages and some German. Swedish was very, very easy for me to learn, compared to the Romance languages and German, because Swedish is like English in that the word order conveys meaning rather than changing the forms of the words, and it does it in almost the same way as English, perhaps even simpler and without all the weird exceptions, so it was almost just like learning new vocabulary and pronunciation rules (which sound foreign (e.g. sj ~= wh), but are straightforward and consistent). Swedish has been by far the easiest language I’ve tried to learn. I think Icelandic might be a little harder because I think it’s like Old Norse, though, but still, probably relatively easy coming from English, I imagine.

I’ve read that if I know English and Danish, I’ll be able to converse with 90% of the folks in Iceland. Then again, that same article claimed that the Icelandic people see the Danish language as “Scandinavian.” Any thoughts or confirmations on this?

Yes. And not so bad even without Danish since, as I described above, Scandinavian languages are very similar to English, it’s about as easy for Scandinavians to learn English as vice versa, except of course it’s far more common for them to do it than vice versa, so although they tend to be thrilled if you learn their language, most people (at least in Norway and Sweden) can understand and speak English pretty well.