Goes up to advanced level. The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English. One that is bizarrely and amazingly still spoken.
Admittedly I do speak a fair bit of Swedish, potentially making things easier, but even without that there are many cognates that make learning it easier for English-speakers. Or German-speakers, for that matter.
> The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English.
From what I understand, written Icelandic is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, so if you learned Icelandic you could actually read the sagas. The pronunciation has diverged enough that the spoken languages aren't mutually intelligible, but nobody really speaks Old Norse anymore so it doesn't matter.
I guess it's kinda like the relationship between Middle English and Modern English. The written forms are similar enough that Chaucer is usually presented in the original Middle English alongside a gloss for whatever words have disappeared from the language since.
I can't say the opposite is true. I learned a bit of old norse in university reading sagas and looking at modern Icelandic the problem really is the vocabulary, which seems completely different from what you find in the sagas.
I wish I'd found that before I went to Iceland last August! I studied German in college but don't speak it now, but it was fun to see some cognates in Icelandic. I loved Iceland and want to go back some day.
https://icelandiconline.com/
Goes up to advanced level. The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English. One that is bizarrely and amazingly still spoken.
Admittedly I do speak a fair bit of Swedish, potentially making things easier, but even without that there are many cognates that make learning it easier for English-speakers. Or German-speakers, for that matter.