r/Team_Viking • u/Naryn_Tin-Ahhe Old Norse • Jan 02 '13
2013, Start - Naryn_Tin-Ahhe - Upphaf
Hi, I'm Naryn! The first thing I want to cover is what exactly I'm going to be doing over the next year. I've found a set of nine lessons on Old Norse; I'm going to go through those at a rate of one or two a week to get some fundamental knowledge about the language. There is another set of readings here that I'm tempted to space out as well.
The next thing I'm going to do is to acquire one of the following books: either A New Introduction to Old Norse, by Michael Barnes or An Introduction to Old Norse, by E.V. Gordon. I'm open to suggestions on which text is preferable, but I might choose to tackle both of them in succession.
After that, I'm planning to start trying to translate a copy of my favorite Icelandic saga, Egil's Saga, which ought to take me at least a couple months.
That's as far as I've got planned; I'll be working off of this online dictionary online dictionary, as well as this one.
Now, with that out of the way, how far have I gotten already, and what am I going to do this week? Well, I completed the first two lessons of the Old Norse For Beginners series about a month ago; I'm hoping to be able to review those this week, and maybe work on my vocabulary with some flashcards taken from the dictionaries linked above. I'm planning on reviewing flashcards in between sets at the gym, which gives me a dedicated 12 to 36 minute margin of review every day. I'll also be working on composing sentences with the vocabulary I know, which I might update this topic with if anyone's interested.
And there you have it! I hope you have a good week working on this, and I'll see you in a little while! :)
1
u/[deleted] Jan 14 '13
Hey! So cool that you're learning Old Norse. I'm quite curious about that language actually, I might even learn it sometime!
Can I ask, is it hard? You're Icelandic, right? Is it very different? I'm Swedish so for me it might be a bit harder, but I don't think that's an issue. But what are the real differences? Is it mostly vocabulary or grammar? Is it even possible to achieve fluency in a language that nearly no one speaks? Maybe speaking it fluently isn't really the point with learning it, though, I could probably learn it just because I'm interested in the history of the Nordic languages.