Hej, Eysteinn!

Thank you so much for your helpful clarification! Actually, although
you say you aren't in a position to answer my questions, you are
exactly the person I would like to have answer my questions about
Icelandic -- a native speaker! Hurrah! And I am very glad that you
see OI and ModI as one language, and I do agree with you that they
should be taught together and that by doing so, students would be
saved a great deal of time and effort, especially if their primary
goal was to read. In fact, that is exactly what I am doing now, using
both Stefan Einarsson's textbook of modern Icelandic and the three
Old Norse textbooks I have at hand. Unfortunately, none of them was
designed very well for the beginning READER, with emphasis on
recognition rather than translation, production, and grammatical
analysis.

The hoary weight of tradition still hangs heavy over the heads of
scholars in the archaic languages. They were taught to translate,
translate, translate, and parse, parse, parse and, unless they have
studied current trends and methods of teaching and writing textbooks
for the modern foreign languages, especially for English as a
Second/Foreign Language, a field that has blossomed in the last 30
years, and then learned to apply these methods to their own
languages, they will continue to ask their students to -- yes --
translate, translate, translate, and parse, parse, parse.

A background in linguistics and the writing and editing of ESL/EFL
textbooks as well as in teaching ESL/EFL courses has helped me in my
recent investigations of the modern methods of designing textbooks
and, even more recently, of designing online courses that focus on
helping the learner develop the ability to read a foreign language as
quickly and enjoyably as possible. I've learned that both LCTL and
CARLA offer a great deal of help.

So much can be done to make it easier for beginning students to learn
to read Old Icelandic materials. My thoughts at this point are that
the main project is to develop recognition exercises and lots of
supplementary paragraphs of simplified Icelandic prose designed to
familiarize students with the various morphological forms of words
that they have already learned. The "hell" of Icelandic for
foreigners -- at least, for this English speaker -- is the complexity
of its morphology. What a delight Norwegian -- which I have been
learning to read during the last month -- is in this regard!

Well, just a few thoughts I wanted to toss out! As always, I welcome
your comments -- and I thank those of you who have responded so
helpfully to my previous messages.

Alt det beste (I'll eventually learn how to say that in Icelandic) --

Gordon

--- In norse_course@..., "Eysteinn Bjornsson" <eysteinn@...> wrote:
> --- In norse_course@..., gfross@... wrote:
> > No one has commented on my earlier request to include modern
> > Icelandic as a part of this group. Does that mean that none of
you
> > are interested?
>
> Being an Icelander myself, I'm not really in a position
> to answer your questions. Generally, Icelanders don't
> really see Modern Icelandic and Old Norse as two languages.
> You cannot possibly learn one without learning a huge lot
> of the other. Personally I am of the opinion that the two
> should always be taught together, and that this would
> ultimately save the student an extraordinary amount of time
> and effort, but I don't think anyone on this list (owners
> included) agree with me on that.