A language with a grammar so complex that the brain knots itself and an incredible richness of words of which many mean many different things is literally made for making the most weird mistakes.
I seriously dipped into Icelandic while I was in Sweden. I was always able to pick up the Scandinavian languages in shortest time and spoke Danish very well and wasn't bad in Swedish either - but I felt very lost with the Icelandic. It's old and very complex, oh yes, but it's a Nordic language after all, with plenty of similarities to the Danish and Swedish, so why didn't it come to me? Why didn't I understand a single word of it? A language course in Stockholm helped me finally. I realized how much words can change. But they are still the same words.
Words change with case. There are four cases, so in the worst case your term changes in four different ways. And they might change a lot. So when your name is Anna it's worth knowing that people are talking about you when they say "Önnu". And when your name is Egill it's good to know that "Agli" is the dative case of your name and not an attack on your appearance (since "Agli" sounds like the English "ugly").
And it's good to know that a guy saying "svangur" and a girl saying "svöng" talk about the same thing: they are hungry.
So with a little bit of basic grammar knowledge I threw myself into the cold water and started speaking Icelandic in April when I moved here. Well, some kind of Icelandic. With many mistakes. But actually it goes quite well in most situations.
However, I never encountered a language where it's so easy to make to most weird mistakes and ending up saying the most weird things ever to people.
Here are my favourites which I gathered since April.
The other day an avalanche came down the roof and I talked about "þaksniðurgangur" which translates directly as roof diarrhea. I innocently assumed the word "niðurgangur" (down going) could be used for anything which goes/comes down somewhere.
Also I tell people to "burn the car" instead of "starting the car". (kveikja í/kveikja á, one tiny word makes a whole difference!)
Once I told Gauti's Dad innocently that there soon will be sex instead of "It will become dark soon." ("mök" meaning sex but "mörk" in the Scandinavian languages meaning "dark" and West Germans can't roll the R ....).
One night on our way to Keflavík airport the car broke down and Gauti talked about getting a "leigubíl" which made me very confused because I knew that "leigubíl" means literally "rental car" and I asked "And what shall we do it with while we are abroad, just abandon it somewhere?" which made Gauti very confused. Till we found out that he was talking about a taxi (leigubíl) and I understood rental car (bílaleigubíl).
Then for some reason people started grinning a lot when I talked about the "veðurspákona", the woman saying the weather forecast. And to understand this you have to know that "veðurspá" indeed means weather forecast and "kona" woman but that a "spákona" is a prophet. So they might have assumed that I don't believe in meteorology but in weather prophecy.
A problem of mine is that I acoustically cannot distinguish between christmas (jól) and a bike (hjól), the only difference being one almost mute H which only Icelanders seem being able to pronounce. So it would be difficult to talk about wanting a bike for christmas when people understand you want "christmas on christmas" or "bike around a bike".
Last but not least it´s too easy to confuse greedy (grádugur) with horny (graður) and I might have done that and it's probably good I haven't been told.
......................
I stop now. The weather prophet talked about upcoming roof diarrheas and I don't want to provoke them by biking on christmas.
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