My wish for all Americans; IAmsterdam life

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

52. I thought of trying to learn Icelandic just for giggles;

since Norwegian is so easy, Icelandic can't be that hard, right? But it is. The grammar hasn't changed much in 1,000 years, and like most old languages that haven't had their sharp edges ground off by centuries of exposure to other languages, it's horrifically complicated. I learned German and Latin in my youth, and those languages were fairly challenging grammatically, but now I'm too damned old to want to work that hard.

Danish is something else. I've been watching TV shows and movies in Norwegian to help with pronunciation and vocabulary, and sometimes I watch the Danish and Swedish ones as well. Spoken Swedish actually seems easier to understand than spoken Norwegian because they speak more slowly and don't run their words together so much (and Norwegians drop final consonants, usually t and d, in some words). But Danish might as well be Martian. I read recently that Danish children take much longer than other children to be able to pronounce their own language correctly - they're in about the fourth grade before they can speak their own language.