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Rating: 
Summary: Not for absolute beginners, despite claim
Review: It says on the back of this book that it's "invaluable both to the absolute beginner and the student of Icelandic literature and its culture."Unless you're a very academically-minded beginner, I don't think this is true at all. This book assumes that you already understand something of the way Icelandic works. And it assumes that you know ENGLISH grammar pretty well. If you don't, you might want to get a book on English grammar at the same time so you know what this book is talking about. This was the first Icelandic book I bought, and at first I discarded it as useless. Then I spent some time with Daisy Neimann's 'Colloquial Icelandic' and came back to this one when I felt a little more comfortable with the basics. Now it starts to make sense. It's a bit like a school book, but I think useful for those fairly tedious taks that you can't avoid, like learning how to decline nouns, adjectives, prepositions... Having said that, it does seem old fashioned. The long list of idioms near the back are full of archaic phrases that seem a pointless inclusion. I notice that the letter 'z', abolished by the Icelanders some time ago, also makes an appearance throughout this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Too difficult
Review: Too much grammar (as in memorizing paradigms). Better try something else.
Rating: 
Summary: Sketchy and Poorly Edited
Review: While this book may be reasonable for linguists or people with extensive experience with Scandinavian languages, it is virtually intractable for newcomers to the field. Grammatical concepts are merely sketched with little or no explanation. The pronunciation guide is extremely cumbersome, listing phonetic symbols without clearly telling students which Icelandic letters represent which sounds. Translation exercises require grammatical concepts before they have been introduced in the text and the glossary is woefully incomplete. Definitely NOT a text for beginners!
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