Icelandic

I've spent about a week doing Icelandic, perhaps more.

I'm concentrating on Mandarin for the time being so I'm just doing the minimum for Icelandic to keep it fresh.  I've done at least a couple of minutes each day but understandably it's not really becoming second nature but I will make some progress despite the small amount of time I'm devoting to it.

Is it really as difficult as they say?

So far, the greatest difficulty has been the fact that even in lesson one the declension number and gender and the conjugation number is given for each new noun and verb... and for now at least, they're just arbitrary numbers that go with these random pieces of vocab (I say random but they all occur in the first dialogue so I've seen them in context) and they are really difficult to memorise.  After all, language learning is normally about learning sounds, with the accompanying meaning, but memorising the verb number that goes with certain verbs is memorisation without having anything to hang it on.

Perhaps this will change once I actually learn how verbs conjugate, so I can memorise the past tense with each verb and that will make the verb number obvious. Or perhaps it's the present tense pattern... I don't know yet.

As for progress, I'm still doing lesson one, but I've become familiar with each piece of vocab and all the sentences in the dialogue.

Icelandic

I've just made a start with Icelandic.  I've got a few books on Icelandic but I recently noticed that I have the Linguaphone Icelandic course.  In the past I've done the Norwegian Linguaphone course and it seemed pretty comprehensive so I think Linguaphone will also be good for Icelandic.

The 3 books I've already got lump a lot of the noun declensions together so seem pretty daunting.  Linguaphone has lots of audio and every word introduced is done so in the context of a sentence  so I think new vocab and grammar are easier to deal with.  I suppose Assimil does a similar thing, the main difference though is that Assimil has much shorter dialogues and they (unfortunately) don't provide a vocab list for each new lesson. (Oh, I should point out that Assimil doesn't have an Icelandic course.)

Anyway, I've written up the first chapter, audio, text, new vocab and grammar.  I've made a start learning the first ten items from the audio.  So far so good.  I'm sure that as I work through it I'll be able to understand each text.  The question is, will I be able to produce my own sentences.

We'll see.