What talar.is is
talar.is teaches Icelandic from the alphabet to CEFR A1 for adult learners who speak Ukrainian and/or English: an original 12-unit course (48 lessons, one continuing cast in Reykjavík), a structure track that makes grammar a visible system, a lexicon of about 760 words and chunks with glosses, pictures and two voices, adaptive cards, tests and a speaking tutor.
Every adaptation — which cards come up, which exercise format you get, when a pattern becomes a repair programme — is computed from your own answers and explained in one sentence. No language model decides your exercises; the AI runs only in the speaking tutor and in the scoring of the free-text parts of the mock exam.
Attributions
talar.is is built on open data and open tools. Their authors deserve the credit; their licences are honoured as follows.
Pictures
Emoji graphics by Twemoji, licensed under CC-BY 4.0 — Twemoji on GitHub · CC-BY 4.0
The pictures next to words and in picture exercises are Twemoji SVGs, served from this site at a pinned release. Only the graphics are used; the alt text of every picture is the Icelandic word.
Word forms
Beygingarlýsing íslensks nútímamáls. Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum. Höfundur og ritstjóri Kristín Bjarnadóttir.
The inflection tables and the verification of every word form in the course come from BÍN (the Database of Icelandic Morphology), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paradigm data shown in talar.is is therefore available under the same licence. bin.arnastofnun.is · CC BY-SA 4.0
Voices
All course audio is synthesised with Microsoft Azure AI Speech neural voices for Icelandic — Guðrún (is-IS-GudrunNeural) and Gunnar (is-IS-GunnarNeural) — at a slightly reduced rate; the "slow" button plays the same clip at 0.75× in your browser. The speaking tutor uses the same voices, plus optional alternatives configured by the site.
Icelandic language tools
Content is checked before publication with the open Icelandic NLP stack by Miðeind: Tokenizer, GreynirEngine, GreynirCorrect, BinPackage and Icegrams (MIT licence). They run only at build time; nothing of them runs while you learn. github.com/mideind
The application
The talar.is application code (PHP, JavaScript, CSS) and the course content are proprietary — © 2026 the talar.is authors, all rights reserved. They are not available under an open-source licence.
Your answers and recordings stay on this server and are used only to adapt your own learning; nothing is sold or shared.
