I Learned Icelandic Before Senior Year And I Still Can’t Explain Why
Senior year of high school, I needed one extra world language credit to graduate a semester early and skip half the gen ed requirements I didn’t want to deal with in college. All the normal classes—Spanish, French, even the random Japanese section that opened up that year—were full. The only thing left on the online dual enrollment list was Icelandic. My guidance counselor flipped through her binder, shrugged, and said “It counts for a full credit, no one ever signs up for this one. It’ll be easy enough, probably.” I said fine. I’d never thought about Iceland before that. I couldn’t point to it on a map without squinting, and I definitely had zero plans to ever go.
The first month, I did all my homework sitting at my rickety desk after school, my beat-up 2015 laptop propped on top of a stack of college brochures for schools I knew I couldn’t afford. I had to do 15 minutes of speaking practice every week, and I’d mumble those weird consonant clusters out loud, the þ and the ð that sound nothing like anything in English. I kept mispronouncing þurs, the word for giant, as “purse” and my cat Mochi would lift her head from my bed, stare at me like I’d lost my mind, and walk out. My dad knocked on my door one night, saw the screen, and laughed so hard he had to lean against the frame. “You do know a hot dog in Reykjavik costs like 15 American dollars, right?” he said. “You can barely afford a Slurpee at the gas station. When are you ever going to use this?” I shrugged and said it was just for the credit.
It was just for the credit, for the first three weeks anyway. Then it wasn’t, not really. I didn’t tell anyone that, though. Two months in, I had that weird awkward moment at the coffee shop I worked at after school. A guy came in wearing a North Face jacket with the Icelandic flag stitched on the sleeve, and I was half zoning out thinking about my homework, and I blurted “goðan daginn” instead of the “hi welcome to Beanery” I was supposed to say. He lit up immediately and started talking really fast in Icelandic, asking if I was from there, if I was visiting family, and my brain just went completely blank. All I could remember was thank you and the word for latte. I handed him his drink, mumbled “takk”, and hid behind the pastry case until he left. My coworker teased me for 20 minutes after that. I never got to have that conversation, and I probably never will.
Everyone asks what the point is, anyway. My aunt brought it up at Christmas that year, over ham and mashed potatoes, said “Why learn the language of a place you’ll never visit? What a waste of time.” I didn’t have an answer for her then, and I still don’t, not the kind that sounds good at dinner parties. Before college, every single thing you do is supposed to have a point. AP Bio is for pre-med. Yearbook is for college apps. Your part-time job is for a car down payment. Every hour has to add up to something that gets you into a good school, that sets you up for the rest of your life. There’s no room for stuff that doesn’t count for anything.
This was the first thing I did that didn’t count for anything. I didn’t even put it on my Common App. It was too weird, no admissions officer would get it, so I just left it off. It wasn’t for my resume, it wasn’t for anyone else. I’d do my lessons after I finished all my other homework, when the house was quiet, and I just liked the words. I remember the beginner reader story we had about a kid going berry picking in the hills, and the word for blueberry is bláber, and it just sounds like what it is—cold, dark, sweet, like biting into a berry you picked yourself off a bush in the rain. The word for mountain is fjall, short and sharp, like you’re looking up at one through fog. It felt like holding a tiny little piece of a place no one I knew cared anything about. It was mine, in a way that nothing else was back then. All my other hobbies were things I posted about, things I did to look cool in front of my friends. This was just something I did alone.
Now it’s five years later, I graduated college already, and I still don’t have plans to go to Iceland. I hate cold weather, plane tickets are still way too expensive, and honestly I’d rather go to the beach any day. I forget most of the grammar now. I can’t conjugate the past tense of half the verbs I learned. I can still say good morning, thank you, and blueberry. That’s about it.
Sometimes I do think it was a waste of time. What’s the point of learning a language you’ll never use, in a country you’ll never visit? I get the question. Most days, I don’t have a good answer. I do know those two afternoons a week I spent on it, I wasn’t doing anything more important anyway. I would’ve just been scrolling through the same 10 websites, re-watching the same episode of The Office I’d already seen three times, fighting with my mom about taking the trash out. It didn’t take anything away from anything that mattered. It was just a weird little thing I did, for no reason.
Last week I saw a bag of frozen blueberries at the grocery store, and I whispered bláber under my breath. No one heard me. That’s it. That’s all it ever needed to be.
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