Free Icelandic learning resources
27 free resources, checked and categorised.
Every link is usable without paying. Some ask for a free account or keep extras behind a paid tier, and those are labelled.
Everything below is usable without paying; where a resource asks for a free account or keeps extras behind a paid tier, the row says so. The list covers the main ways people study Icelandic: structured courses to build a foundation, dictionaries to look things up, and listening and reading material to spend real time in the language. Start with one course and one dictionary, then add listening once you can follow simple sentences.
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Step-by-step Icelandic course with free audio files for listening practice, covering spoken and written language for beginners with no prior knowledge
Blog posts on Icelandic vocabulary, grammar, idioms, and culture, with short practical explanations and interviews to read through.
Free Icelandic course with multiple levels, including Survival and Icelandic Online 1 through 5, for self-paced study and registration access
Jonas Halgrimssons poetry with translations, read in English and Icelandic.
Sixteen-hour beginner Icelandic MP3 course with grammar, vocabulary, and linked resources for practicing basic modern Icelandic
Collection of Icelandic inflection examples showing individual word forms for looking up and comparing how words change
Icelandic news site with articles across politics, sports, entertainment, food, and opinion; you read headlines and full stories rather than follow a language course.
A textbook for children learning Icelandic as the second language.
Free downloadable etymology dictionary (approximately 2.5 GB).
Interactive site for children learning Icelandic, part 1.
Interactive site for children learning Icelandic, part 2.
Reading material for Icelandic with chapter links from 2 through 16, plus a teacher guide, bookless activities, and an audiobook.
Icelandic science news and reading site with article categories like people, nature, health, technology, and history, plus an archive of recent stories
Online collection of Icelandic reading texts, including classics, poems, novels, short stories, folktales, fairy tales, and other material organized by category and alphabetically
Free Icelandic eBooks in Project Gutenberg’s library, where learners can read classics and other public-domain texts online or download them
Live and on-demand RÚV television player with channel and age-group controls for watching Icelandic broadcasts
Icelandic news, radio, and TV homepage with current headlines, plus sections for English and easy-language news and a searchable archive
Searchable archive of Icelandic theses and research papers, where learners can browse titles, authors, subjects, and abstracts for reading practice.
YouTube video lesson for Icelandic learners, linking to a PDF transcript or text file for the first lesson
Twenty-one Icelandic TV lesson episodes with subtitles and written summaries, covering daily life topics like shopping, travel, and appointments
Icelandic Q&A archive where users send science questions and read expert answers across subjects, with recent posts and popular answers listed
Icelandic news homepage with text articles, live broadcasts, podcasts, and sections for sports, business, weather, culture, opinion, and classifieds
Course materials for adult Icelandic learners, organized into four books with accompanying audio and guidance pages
A small Icelandic grammar book.
Learn it there, practise it here
Free resources are great for input: reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking Icelandic out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
Say it out loud
Talk to an AI tutor that answers back, or get matched with other learners and native speakers for a text chat.
Practise what you read
Turn a grammar point or article into exercises, so it moves from recognised to usable.
Keep the words
Save new words to My Words and let spaced repetition bring them back before you forget them.
This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources, a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.