Grammar and pronunciation

Today, I decided to stop taking an Icelandic Grammar class I was enrolled in.

Naturally, being a language teacher, I knew I would probably judge my teachers more harshly than other students, but I wasn't prepared for my reaction! But I quickly got over it when I gave the whole situation more consideration. I know that when I first started teaching English, I wasn't very good. And I know that through my years of experience, I have gotten better at realizing what students feel and expect from a language class. So when my very inexperienced teachers handed out reams of photocopies and told us to learn, I finally was able to forgive them!

I was originally enrolled in three classes: Icelandic Language, Conversational Practice and Grammar. The grammar is the problem! Borrowing a little from Wikipedia, here are a few differences between English and Icelandic which makes learning Icelandic so difficult!

1. Icelandic is inflected with four cases. Basically, words have functions in sentences, each function is a case and these functions are things like subject, possession, object, etc. In English, for the most part, no matter which function a word is fulfilling in a sentence, it doesn't take a different inflection. For example, whether the word "cat" is the subject or the object of a sentence, it doesn't change its spelling. In Icelandic, with four cases, this means that words can have four different endings.

2. Add three genders to the mix, masculine, feminine and neuter, and you then multiply the amount of endings. A masculine noun in the nominative case has a different ending than the same noun in the genitive case.

3. Among the three genders is another separation: weak and strong, which also take different endings.

These three issues mixed with a very traditional teaching style make learning it very difficult for me! My grammar teacher stood at the front of the class and lectured and lectured and lectured and told us to memorize everything. All of the books for the course are in Icelandic, so I don't understand the instructions, nor the example sentences. Because I've only just started learning the language, I don't have enough vocabulary to practice the grammar!

I am finding the pronunciation fascinating though. In Icelandic b, d and g aren't voiced and are different from p, t and k in that p, t and k are aspirated! It's an exercise in muscle-control trying to pronounce a non-aspirated unvoiced "b".

Studying Icelandic though, is really showing me what kind of teacher I'd like to be in the classroom. I see the value in really, REALLY teaching the basics, in spending time teaching the alphabet no matter how basic it feels. There are a two letters in Icelandic that I'm finding hard to even write, so I can a little how some of my students feel when they must learn entirely new characters. I also see the lack of value in using too many fillers in class. I can see right through it when my Icelandic teachers are doing it. The other students appear charmed, can't they see through it too?

The other two classes I'm taking might sound boring to you, but are extremely interesting to me! One is The Ancestry of the English Sentence and the other Syntax and Argument Structure. I'll bet some of you reading this, you know who you are, would love to have a great big discussion about argument structures! Why can we say, "Helen broke the window.", "The window broke." and "Helen hit the dog." but not "The dog hit."?