Heill Oskar!

You said that you thought the examples I presented
were too easy, because it was stuff that everyone
knew.
Yet Eysteinn said the material I presented was too
difficult.

Personally, I would have liked to be on a list where
you receive a "daily portion" (of Old Norse).
Because I think that is the way to learn a language.
An Italian girl I met on the net (where is she?
did any one tell her about the course?) Had learned
both Swedish, Dutch and German by using the internet.
And she was only 17 years old!

I think the same thing could be possible with Old
Norse.

Okay, so the soup I presented yesterday didn't taste
good :( But at least it was soup :)

I think that it is okay to present stuff that
people already know. That is because languages are
learnt by constant repetition of things you already
know - interspersed by a small amount of new things.

It is of course a problem if everyone were to shift
to the "let's talk ON" mode all of a sudden, because
everyone would then make lots of errors and no one
would know what was right. That is why I thought up
the idea of phrases. Because if communication
happens by play upon a limited but sufficient
set op phrases, then you get the effect of constant
repetition for free. And you don't get many errors
either, because everybody can check their words
against a common list of phrases. That would also
approximate the way childeren learn, because they
have good memories, and learn by storing phrases.
They don't worry about grammatical detail. That
comes later, after they already know how to
communicate
about simple things.

And often it is accidental things that cause you to
learn best. For example when you wrote Reykjav�kur
and I reacted by calling it "nominative", but you
corrected me by saying that it was a genitive
(because v�k is a femininum), then that's an example
of us accidentally stumbling onto something that
cased me to learn something -- yes, an example of
some good teaching. All honour to you for that!

And what does the pupil do? He takes this tiny little
gem to the library, and there tries to expand upon
his newly acquired knowledge. And so he looks up
ON v�k, verifies it is fem. and sees that its gen.
is v�kr, and so is its plural. From there he goes
to a grammar book and looks for the relevant model
noun. And indeed, he finds the right(?) scheme under
"eik" f. (oak), which has the following pattern
of declension. (See in the back of Geir T. Zo�ga's
dictionary, where there are tables of noun
declensions).
The so called 3rd Declension of feminine nouns is
as follows:

SING.
NOM. eik
GEN. eik-ar
DAT. eik
ACC: eik
PLUR.
NOM. eik-r
GEN. eik-a
DAT. eik-um
ACC. eik-r

From that I'd say that v�k follows the same pattern.
But I don't *know* this without actually checking
with other books that may be more complete. But who
knows, I was told by someone far up in the ON business
that Zo�ga's ON-english dictionary is actually quite
good. And judging from that, it would appear that
there is some chance that his noun-tables are complete
enough to cover the case of v�k, which isn't an
uncommon word. (v�king!).

So, I therefore *propose* the following *solution* :)
v�k, v�kr, v�k, v�k; v�kr, v�ka, v�kum, v�kr.
(s;p/N,G,D,A)
But I will then be dependent on the teachers goodwill,
if he actually has time to answer my question.
The question is:
"did I use the right kind of tools?"
"did I use the right kind of logic"
"was the answer correct?"
"where did it go wrong?"

The goal then is - to be able to decline any ON
noun ........ a distant asymptotic goal.

In good cheers,
Keth








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