Charlie vs. Iceland 2017: Can We Please Get Some Guð Damn Translations Please and Takk

For 1/3 of our course credit for this trip, we have to take introductory level Icelandic. This has been quite the experience, considering Icelandic is widely known as the most difficult language on the planet and we have only had about 2 weeks to try to learn it.

Day 1 of class, we were nailed with three hours of Olí, our kennestar (teacher), speaking at us in fluent Icelandic. It is important to note that we knew negative Icelandic coming into this trip. So he was speaking at us, and we were sitting there staring at him wide-eyed and terrified. By the end of the three hours, I felt like I had just walked out of a General Chemistry exam – panicked, defeated, helpless, and pissed off. When we got home from school that day, Megan had to tell our host parents about our day at school because I was too brain dead to process what just happened.

Since then, I will admit that Icelandic has gotten better, if only by a little bit. It’s especially fun to make fun of ourselves and the language, or to insert the few Icelandic words that we know into common English phrases or song lyrics. Larry sent many a snapchat that I opened in class and had to hold my breath to contain my laughter. The title of this post is one example, where we were getting really fed up with Olí´s PowerPoint slides that had plenty of Icelandic but no English. I’ll put some more of Larry’s snaps at the end of this post.

So here is a little introduction to Icelandic for you:

1. Takk! Takk (sounds like Tock, like a clock) means Thank you in Icelandic. So like “Please and takk,” which we say often because we think it’s funny. Fun fact: There’s no Icelandic word for Please.

2. Nei! Nei (like neigh, like a horse says) means No in Icelandic. Helga used this word often, and it has pretty much replaced the word No in everyone on this trips’ vocabulary.

3. Já! Já (like Ow with a Y in front of it) means Yes in Icelandic. We like to say it kind of seductively like “yow yowwww.”

We got these three words down, for sure. As far as the other ones go…I’m not so sure. We have our final exam tomorrow in this class that a lot of us are worried about. Last night, we were practicing our Icelandic in the living room of this house we are staying at (about 20 minutes from Ísafjörður...should probably teach you how to say the place where I was staying for the past 2 weeks...it sounds like eeesafyorthur, with the emphasis on the eeesa part). Our teacher was in the room with us, probably just laughing at us.

Olí, our teacher, is a tall dark-haired guy with a beard and really dark eyes. I have only ever seen him wearing black. He lives in Croatia now with his family, and runs this Icelandic language program mainly through Skype. He speaks a lot of different languages, I can‘t even list them here, but English is not his strong suit.

But one thing that he does know are the English swear words. Almost all Icelanders, at least that I‘ve met, swear in English, even when speaking pure Icelandic. My favorite Olí moment was when we were in the middle of an exercise in class, busy at work, and someone asked a question about which version of a word to use when. Olí went up to the board and said, “When you doing this, you use this mother f******, but when you are doing this other thing, you use THIS mother f*****!“ It was the most casual usage of that term that I have ever heard in my life, right in the middle of Icelandic class. Carter and I looked at each other like, “How do we react to this?“, but really we couldn‘t hold in our laughter. It was just too weird.

Which is a good way to descirbe Icelandic...just too weird. Probably should give up now.