I’d have to agree. I don’t have extensive experience with Icelandic (I took one semester with two weekly hours of basic Icelandic a few years ago and am very much into Icelandic music, and that’s it), and I have absolutely no trouble understanding the above-quoted text. In some cases, I can read and Icelandic text and be completely baffled; but in others (like this one), I find it hard to understand that a Dane should understand as little as Nanna claims to (or not to).

A translation of the text, as I read it (without consulting dictionaries or anything):

Many Icelanders consider Icelandic to be a more ‘original’ language that has changed less than most others. That’s not altogether/necessarily [not quite sure what ‘alls kostar’ means precisely] correct, and it is necessary to mention in this connection that out of the eight Proto-Indoeuropean cases, Icelandic has only four, whereas most Slavic languages have six cases, and Polish seven.

For Nanna, and to illustrate the similarity for others, a very direct translation into Danish follows below. It's not a good translation into good Danish, but it's comprehensible and is made using words close to the source text’s words and constructions, sometimes adding the regular Danish words in brackets, where the meaning of the equivalents of the Icelandic words is not immediately obvious (some articles are in brackets, since Icelandic uses fewer non-enclitic articles than Danish):

Mange islændinge tæller [=mener] islandsk at være [et] ‘oprindeligere’ mål [=sprog] end [de] fleste andre, og at hun [=det, sproget] haver brødes [=ændret sig] mindre. Det er ikke fuldstændig/nødvendigvis [alls kostar] ret [=rigtigt], og [man] må i dette sambånd [=sammenhæng] nævne at islandsken haver enligt [=kun] fire fald [=kasus] af otte ud fra [det] indoeuropæiske fornmål [=ursprog], (i)medens [de] fleste slaviske mål haver sex fald og polsk syv.

Though there are obvious differences, there are also very obvious similarities; similarities that are great and obvious enough that a native Danish speaker who is otherwise good with languages (as we must assume a translator is) should be able to grasp the general, basic meaning of the text with only a little practice.

Thank you, Janus, you are right!

I was merely being lazy and not interested in trying to decipher the Icelandic text, which might have resulted in 'but can you translate this or this or this?' 

Still, I do not understand Icelandic.

Nanna

PS: Jeg kan sagtens følge din danske oversættelse. Tak, Janus. Your Danish translation is quite interesting and you obviously know more about the Icelandic language than I do. Fascinating!

 Very interesting comment Janus,

  Thanks

              Ricardo

A quick comment I forgot earlier, in reply to your first comment, Ricardo:

Föll is not the preposition ‘for’ (that would be fyrir); rather, it’s the plural of fall, which means, well, ‘a fall’ (or in this case, well, ‘a [grammatical] case’).

How would this guy fare on our poll?

Is it possible to learn German in just days? Linguistic savant Daniel Tammet managed to do so in the course of a week. Using his own special technique, the 30-year-old, who has a mild form of autism, has learned to speak more than 10 languages.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,611381,00.html

Hello everybody,

Well, German in just 10 days is almost impossible, but I believe that he at least got familiar with the language and could understand and talk in a few days.

Same thing has happened to me when I was in Greece, for just 5 days. In 2 days I could manage to understand and talk some greek (just spoken not written language of course). This may be a talent, I agree. Same thing with spanish. I'm very familiar with the Spanish language, and 1 telenovela (which I have seen for this purpose) was enough for me to learn the language, the spoken one. Then I had to read a bit to get familiar with the written language too.

Yes, I can call myself a polyglot, as I speak (excellent knowledge-spoken-written-grammar) 5 languages and I'm quite familiar with all of them

Yes, based on the complexity of the vocabullary and grammar that is characteristic of some telenovelas, one can easily speak 15 languages in 10 days.

Well, after having edited subtitles for more than ten years, which include translations of Spanish language soap operas, I can affirm that it is a common misconception that in order to translate these seemingly simple dialogues one requires a superficial knowledge of the language. It might not be rocket science, but these types of translations nevertheless have a certain degree of difficulty and I can assure you that only a few translators manage to deliver qualitative work. Sometimes poor translations are the result of overconfidence.

Ines

This was just kind of sarcastic, Ines, I am sorry, I hardly ever use sarcasm. I do not believe anybody can learn any language in 10 days, or even in half a year: learning a foreign language is a complex process, which takes at least a few years. Knowing a few phrases is not really knowing the language.