icelandic that I have every heard from a foreigner was a 50-something year old polish coworker of mine. When he started working he knew okay english and no icelandic, but he didn't utter a word in english, and ignored you if you didn't speak icelandic to him, well actually he didn't ignore you, he yelled at you, but in a funny kind of way, to not to speak english to him. After a month he was chatting away, with very broken grammar, bad pronunciation and simplifying sentences. He got better and better over a couple of months and then I switched jobs. I met him two years later on the street and chatted with him a little bit and OH MY GOD he spoke such good Icelandic with a absolutely beautiful vocabulary, which was expressive and non-repetitive and honestly with a not-so-bad accent. I am curious to know where you are from. Since you think most icelanders never learn a language, I´m guessing something like Luxembourg, Swiss or german/french border or something where everybody and their dog speaks four languages :P Did you know that the university of iceland has free icelandic courses online? Check it out and see what you think. I hope your icelandic studies go well in the future.
Ha ha you guess pretty close. No I'm am not bilingual in anything, I had to learn everything the hard way (well English immersion in daily life make it easy though). I'm glad to hear that somebody learned it... the few people I know for being successful in Icelandic are actually pretty bad and here since a veeeeery long time. Icelandic Online is crap. I did most of it but with no translation, the texts read directly quickly and no general line... that's actually a disaster. Too bad, they would just have the English translation of the texts it would skyrocket as one of the best method ever. But you need nearly an hour of researches per lessons to have an approximate translation). However I know only one person who really speaks Danish and learned it at school, I now no Icelanders with a decent lever of Danish or Spanish ... But as you guessed, I am not surrounded by a lot of locals and have to work (as every foreigners) in tourism, in English.
I still power though and hope though but damn.