A Short Practical and Easy Method of Learning the Old Norsk Tongue or Icelandic Language After the Danish of E. Rask —— With an Icelandic Reader, an Account of the Norsk Poetry and the Sagas and a Modern Icelandic Vocabulary for Travellers

Let me clear something here: this book, when it comes to the content, is a treasure. It doesn't stick only to very basics, if you work with it you can reach an intermediate level easily. It is clear and has a nice, quick pace, without confusing you- so don't let the small number of pages fool you. BUT. The printing is like a photocopy of a photocopy-while the pages dont have any print smudges, the letters might not be easy to read. I had no problems with it, but if your eyesight is bad and your glasses need to be renewed, or if you are too used to big, clear Arial, then you will be annoyed and might have some trouble with it.

Although the book has a number of interesting reading selections, the orthography is erratic, sometimes unintelligible. The presentations of phonology, morphology, and syntax are rambling and lacking in clarity. If you don't already know some Old Icelandic or Old English, this book is not a good starting point. Sweet's or Gordon's introductory grammars and readers are far better and have much clearer presentations of the historical linguistics.

it is yet ANOTHER EXAMPLE of Amazon's failure to screen their Kindle versions: I've witnessed this many times over the years with books that deal with languages using modified versions of the Latin alphabet (e.g., umlauts, accents, added non-Latin letters, and the like) or another alphabet (e.g., versions of cyrillic). The Kindle version of such books (e.g., this one) are clearly being produced with OCR software and NO human involvement. Just consider part of a sentence chosen at random from the sample we are given for this book: < . . . the half-rhyme ... "big-i gaztu liftskost ldgan .. .s$g ek or stratum beg-i . . . >. The author at this point is discussing features of Old Norse poetry, but I doubt anyone shown this sentence fragment could identify the language, let alone the words being quoted. Some of us have complained about this for years, but it seems no one at Amazon is addressing the issue. What would it cost to hire someone to deal with this? In my humble opinion, selling such useless Kindle versions amounts to consumer fraud. So beware, live long, and prosper!