I Learned Icelandic in 10th Grade and I’ve Never Used It. Was It Stupid?
I was cleaning out the storage bin in my parents’ attic last weekend, digging out my old winter coat for this semester, and found the beat-up composition notebook I scribbled all my Icelandic notes in back in high school. The cover’s peeling, there’s a coffee stain on the corner from when I spilled my latte on it on the way to school, and the first page has a half-doodled thorn character (the weird þ one that looks like a broken p) that I drew over and over when I was bored in study hall. I flipped through it, and half the words are still there, like muscle memory: hamstur is hamster, lundi is puffin, draumur is dream. My best friend Lila asked me the same question back then that my uncle asked at Christmas two years later: what’s the point? You’re never going to Iceland. Your family can’t even afford a trip to the mountains, let alone a transatlantic flight to a tiny island where everything costs three times what it does here. She wasn’t being mean, just honest. I couldn’t answer her back then. I just got all pink in the face and changed the subject to whether we should get matching corsages for spring formal.
It wasn’t even like I chose it on purpose, not really. All the Spanish 3 and French 2 classes were full by the time my scheduling turn came around—my high school did that stupid thing where seniors got to pick first, so all the normal language electives were gone before it was my turn as a sophomore. My counselor leaned back in her chair and spun her pencil and said “we’ve got an opening in independent study for less common languages, you just work through the textbook and meet with the teacher once a week. Pick whatever you want off the list.” I scanned the list, got to Icelandic, and thought the alphabet looked cool. That was it. No grand plan, no hidden connection to my great-great-something grandma, just thought the thorn looked neat and I’d seen a viral meme of an Icelandic sheep that made me laugh for 10 minutes.
I spent about 45 minutes a day on it, most days. 20 minutes on the bus to school going over vocabulary, 25 after dinner working through exercises. I scribbled words in the margins of my algebra test, next to quadratic formulas I’d never remember anyway. The teacher, who was actually the German teacher who just agreed to supervise, didn’t care if I got things wrong. No big tests, no grades that counted towards my GPA—it was pass/fail, for God’s sake—no one was ever going to ask me to prove I knew it. That was the thing, I realize now. Before college, every single thing I did was supposed to be for something. My after-school job at the bagel shop was for work experience for my resume. My AP bio class was for pre-med, even though I didn’t even want to do pre-med, that was just what my mom thought I should do. My volunteer work at the animal shelter was to put on my college applications. Nothing was just… for nothing.
I did have that one awkward moment at a parent-teacher conference. My mom brought it up to my guidance counselor, like “she’s spending all this time on this useless language, shouldn’t she be doing something that’ll help her get into state school?” My guidance counselor just shrugged, said she’s not hurting anyone. But I heard that, you know? It stuck. I started wondering if I was being stupid, wasting time. Once I tried to talk about it to Lila again, told her this cool idiom I learned, that “the cow doesn’t eat grass where it stands” means don’t take what you have for granted, I thought that was neat. She just stared at me and said “okay, but when are you ever going to say that to anyone?” And she was right. I still haven’t said it to anyone. Not out loud, anyway. I just say it to myself sometimes when I forget to eat lunch because I’m cramming for a midterm now.
The only time I ever used it in public was three years ago, I saw an Icelandic photographer post a picture of a puffin on Instagram, and I commented “fínn lundi” and they liked it. That’s it. That’s the sum total of all my real-world Icelandic use. I never ordered anything from an Icelandic website correctly (I messed up the postal code trying to buy a cheap wool sweater once, it got sent back and I didn’t bother reordering), I never met anyone else who speaks it, I still don’t know how to pronounce that weird double f sound right half the time. I’ll probably never go to Iceland. Plane tickets are over a thousand dollars, I get motion sick on boats, I hate cold weather. It’s never going to happen.
Sometimes I think it was totally a waste. I could have spent that year practicing guitar, or actually studied for the PSAT, or gotten a second shift at the bagel shop to save up for my first car. That’s what any practical person would say, right? What’s the point of learning something you’ll never use, in a country you’ll never visit? But then I flip through that old notebook, and I see the little notes I wrote in the margins next to words, like “I like how this sounds” next to söngvari (singer) and “reminds me of the time we got ice cream after the game” next to ís (ice). None of this matters to anyone but me. Before college, when every single thing I did was being judged, weighed, scored, counted towards some big future goal, this was the only thing that was just mine. I didn’t have to be good at it. I didn’t have to use it. It just had to exist, for me.
I don’t have a big neat conclusion here. I still don’t know if it was worth it, honestly. I don’t think I’ll ever carve out time for another useless language now that I’m in college—everything’s too weighted, I can’t afford to waste 45 minutes a day on something that won’t help me get a job after graduation. But I’m glad I had it when I did. That stupid, useless Icelandic. It was just a little secret thing I got to have, when everything else felt like it belonged to everyone else—colleges, my parents, my teachers. I guess that’s enough, even if I never use it. Even if I never go.
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