Last week I got a letter in the mail from the Icelandic Statistics Office, saying I'd been randomly selected from the national registry along with about two thousand other people to research technology and internet habits of the Icelandic population. It was accompanied by a little pamphlet showing the results from previous surveys, with that oft-quoted statistic that Iceland is the most wired country in Europe.
Since then I missed two phone calls that ja.is showed to be the statistics office number, and then finally yesterday I got the call, a most determined woman with a long list of questions. She quizzed me about whether I had a TV, a projector, a PalmPilot, a blog, and what I'd done in the last three months with respect to downloading music, playing internet video games, buying stuff on the internet, or filling out web-based forms. It was a lot of new vocabulary but for once, she did not break the Icelandic and throw me an English bone.
At the conclusion of what was about half an hour of questions my head started to hurt with her practiced speed of questioning, but I think I understood everything, and now next time you read the Icelandic technology statistics, you'll know at least in part where those numbers come from.
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2 comments:
I think it's official: you've achieved Tri-linguality! I'm so jealous! (I've gotta crack those "speak Icelandic" books one of these days)
Congrats!
-Sarah :O)
thanks for the congrats but I don't think I've quite achieved that yet, since my speaking talents lag faaarrr behind my comprehension, plus, the word for "palm pilot" completely threw me, among others. Still, I don't think I'm useless in the language, which is nice.
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