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Learn Icelandic in 6 Laborious Steps

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Get an Account on a learner-oriented forum

Here is a good one, albeit brand new: LearnIcelandic.net At low volumes, mailing lists are worthless. At high volumes of traffic, mailing lists are unusable. Forums remain usable even at high volumes of traffic because you don't have to follow all conversations. If you post to the forum, consider letting the world on twitter know. Twitter has lots of possibilities are learning Icelandic.

A learners' forum is a good place to post your translations to and from Icelandic and get feedback from random people. Obviously forums exist for Icelanders and you may want to graduate to there once you're ready: Hugi.is is one example.

Get Cranking on Vocabulary

Anki. It's all about Anki. You learn words so fast with anki it's like magic. But also try out BYKI. BYKI's has better audio support and makes sure you know the most common 1000 words backwards and forwards.

Join or start an in person study group going

Language learning is a social process, not an intellectual one. Here's the one in the DC area serving the Northern Virgina, DC and Maryland area If you know of another one, contact me at icelandic@suburbandestiny.com -- let me know if you'd like an account on the wiki or if you'd like me to just post your listing.

You don't need to be fluent, or even good at languages to start a group. Just get a copy of Beginners' Icelandic (~$20), create a Meetup group ($140/yr for the organizer, free for members), and post an ad on Craig's List (free).

Practice some structured conversation

Aside from an infinitely patient Icelander, what else can one do to practice Icelandic? CannedQuestions are good way to study.

Get the movies, podcasts and RSS feeds to the news

To maintain momentum you have to expose yourself to a little bit of Icelandic everyday-- something more fun than 10 exercises and a grammar chart. Nammi.is will ship you Icelandic movies with English subtitles- the website is navigable even if you only know English. RUV has lots of podcasts. Mbl.is, Pressa , and DV all offer RSS feeds of newspaper articles. The podcasts and news are all free. To buy the equivalent amount of Icelandic material would cost probably a million bucks. They only thing that they could do to make it easier is to fly out a technician to set up your podcast and RSS client (or you can just use iTunes and Google Reader).

Oh, and take a trip to Iceland

Here is a school in the West Fjords, which sold out this year.

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