Því miður, ég tala ekki íslensku. Talar þu ensku?

I'm sorry, I don't speak Icelandic. Do you speak English?

Friends have asked how my Icelandic is coming and I have to frankly reply that it's not. I have resigned myself to not learning it for the following reasons:
1. Icelandic is not easy. It would take some serious brainpower and time to learn - two things that I already seem to be slightly short of.
2. Almost everybody speaks English.
3. I am only here for 2 months – thus spending time studying does not seem to be an efficient use of my precious time. Plus, who wouldn't rather be out exploring than hovering over books?
4. Virtually everybody speaks English.
5. There is very little opportunity for me to use Icelandic once I get home – I may be able to find someone to talk to in Vancouver, but chances are slim, especially since there are only about 260,000 people in the world who speak Icelandic with a native tongue.
6. Nearly everybody speaks English.
7. There is really no one to teach me here. Obviously there are many people around me who speak Icelandic but speaking and teaching can be 2 very different things, especially when one asks questions like, “Why are there 8 conjugations of the word table?”
8. And practically everybody speaks English.

Thus I’ll stick with my native tongue for now. Even the French girl who is here for 5 months has resorted to improving her English over studying Icelandic. However I have met several people at the college who have been able to decipher and communicate in Icelandic – most impressive. I'll still try to pick up a few words here and there, but any ambition that I had of becoming fluent is quite honestly, beyond hope.

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If you are more ambitious than I to learn Icelandic or just want to hear what the language sounds like, there is a great website hosted by the University of Iceland called Icelandic Online. It offers basic Icelandic lessons with sound demos as well.