Dear Adrian,


I am writing on behalf of the Icelandic students from the year abroad meeting.


We are quite worried about our year abroad, mostly in regards to the expectations that have been set on us.


The Swedish/Norwegian/Danish students are doing work that are way beyond what we are doing in difficulty. Even their homework from last year is still incomparable to what we have done this year. They are able to speak their languages at a much higher level than what we are able to. Meanwhile we have not progressed past the 'Icelandic Online' resource, which we have been using since the first year. This largely stems from Icelandic simply being a much more difficult language than the other Scandinavian languages. Therefore, we feel that it is unfair to put the same expectations on us as those that are being put on Scandinavian language students.


As all three of us going on the year abroad have studied Scandinavian languages, and are interested in doing modules in either Danish or Swedish at Háskoli Islands, it seems counterintuitive to not allow us to do so. Allowing us to take modules in the Scandinavian languages would let us study things relevant to our degree that we would not of been able to study otherwise. As our understanding of the Scandinavian languages exceeds that of our understanding of Icelandic, we would also be absorbing more information from those modules. There are so many Scandinavian modules related to our degree, and we would really be missing out if we are limited to just taking one of them.


We are taking into account that we will be learning the language as the year abroad goes on, but we still do not see ourselves improving to the point that we will improve to the point that we are able to do this, especially as we are starting with a much lower understanding than the Scandinavian students are.



Ideally, we would like to be allowed one english module, a few modules in the Scandinavian languages and the rest in Icelandic. We feel that if we have fewer modules in Icelandic, it will be easier for us to focus on those wholly and give it our best. We are not asking to be allowed to do more modules in english, we only ask that we are allowed to take more modules in the Scandinavian languages. We are also not asking to take away the Icelandic modules, we would still like to do those, but we feel that it would be too difficult to do too many of them, considering how difficult the language is. Especially in regards to Icelandic where we are able to understand it a lot better than we are able to write it. It is almost impossible for us to write a single sentence without grammatical faults, and that would disadvantage us in the assesment. This also seems to of been the experience of those who previously went on the Icelandic year abroad.



Considering that more Scandinavian languages would benefit our degree and allow us to perform better on the Icelandic modules, we therefore ask that we be allowed to take more than one Scandinavian module.