Becoming Icelandic: Gamithra Marga On Emotional Language Learning And Building TVÍK

Gamithra Marga’s relationship with Iceland is a bit of a love-hate affair. Over the years, it’s been a mix of both obsession and discomfort. Originally from Estonia, she learned Icelandic without ever attending a formal institution. In 2022, Gamithra won the entrepreneurship competition Gulleggið for her idea of building a language learning app. Three years later, her brainchild, TVÍK,  aka “your technology-powered Icelandic teacher” — is finally coming to life. This is just a glimpse into her journey of finding her footing in Iceland.

I figured out Iceland existed when I was, I don’t know, 13? There was some magical pull towards it. I was becoming obsessed with or having a crush on something, but it was a country — the entirety of the country — the culture and everything in it and the language. I became known as the “Icelandic girl” in my school. I’d never even been to Iceland but I obsessively absorbed everything I could find that related to it.

“I became known as the ‘Icelandic girl’ in my school.”

I first came here in 2016 and met someone who was like, “You can stay at my place”, to help me fulfil this dream of moving here. I was 17 at the time, and I had about 200 euros, so there was absolutely nothing to build upon. But I quit my high school in Estonia. No one knew what I was doing, and I didn’t really know either but there was a strange pull and a mission I knew I needed to follow.

Iceland, here I come

[I ended up in Akureyri] because the person that I could live with lived there. My first legal domicile was at my Icelandic teacher’s place from high school. It was all a bit of a legal mess. There were lots of documents that my parents had to sign, send over, and notarise. I’m actually quite amazed it all worked out.

There was very little community — the only people I could hang out with were the kids who were playing card games in school and speaking English, even though they were Icelandic. It was the most outsider group, and it was very hard for me to find anyone to hang out with, or just any community whatsoever.

In high school, I was exposed to a lot of Icelandic immediately. I was mostly doing subjects like chemistry and maths, where the language was quite easy for me to decipher. In the beginning, I always replied to everything in English, but I’d Google translate whenever I had a question, which worked pretty well. I was a bit of a sponge immediately.

I was in Verkmenntaskólinn for a year, and then I switched over to Menntaskólinn á Tröllaskaga, which does completely remote studies. So I’d never been to the high school I graduated from until my graduation day, which was really nice. I always learned quite quickly and felt that sitting in a classroom was a waste of time. Being able to do everything at my own speed I had way more time available. This is when I really got into programming and had the time to pursue other curiosities or interests.

Fluency through discomfort

“It’s just so emotionally taxing to attempt to speak in a language you know you can only express yourself at the level of a three-year-old.”

I got my first job in Iceland at a sheep farm. I moved there for a month, and when one of the owners of the farm picked me up, I realised in the car she didn’t speak English. At that time, I was four months into living in Iceland, and over the years, I had built up vocabulary but not really any confidence or understanding of grammar. I was totally thrown in the deep end of the pool and just had to figure it out and rescue myself in that situation, which ended up being one of the bravest and best things I did.

It’s just so emotionally taxing to attempt to speak in a language you know you can only express yourself at the level of a three-year-old, while also being a foreigner in a new society where you’re trying to prove to everyone that you’re worth something, you’re building a network, you’re interesting, and you’re trying to find friends. You’re absolutely not in a position to sound like a three-year-old; you’re not at a level where that is available to you socially.

All of my progress really happened on the sheep farm during this ridiculously uncomfortable month where I had no other option than to figure out what I was trying to say.

Starting with a pitch

I always knew I wanted to build something of my own. I had quite obsessively participated in innovation competitions and hackathons over the years — every time there was a competition where you had to make up a business idea, prototype it, get judged on it and get some prize, I would be there.

Then Gulleggið happens. I’m like, “Oh, here’s another competition” — I’m gonna participate in that because I want to win it. I opened my list of startup ideas, and one of the first ones was some kind of system to get people to sheep farms in Iceland — ship them up so they can learn and won’t be stuck in this environment, just like I did. This was when AI was really cool, so when I talked about using an AI solution to learn Icelandic, it hit the point. Although, as the project progressed, I’ve removed as much AI from it as I can.

“Although the first simulations in TVÍK are quite simple, by the end of it, we’re talking about index loans, capitalism and eavesdropping on old people at the pool.”

I ended up winning Gulleggið — I had this story about me in the sheep farm and how I was going to use computers to teach people Icelandic. And then one of my friends comes up to me and says, “Do you know that now you have to actually go through with the project?”

During the past three years, I felt like I was never going to get there and now I’ve kind of gotten there. It feels a bit unreal still — I just had this idea, and now I’ve made the thing.

TVÍK’s got you

TVÍK is different from Duolingo [or other similar apps] as it is kind of the next step. It doesn’t start really in the beginning — it doesn’t start with things like “this is the alphabet” and “this is how you say woman and cat.” Although the first simulations in TVÍK are quite simple, by the end of it, we’re talking about index loans, capitalism and eavesdropping on old people at the pool.

It’s meant to force you into situations where you have to say something, and you have to say it in a grammatically correct way. This is what TVÍK is built on — like the sheep farm experience of “I now have to make sentences, oh my God” but you get all of the tools on the way, and it all happens in context. All of TVÍK is a single storyline — you meet this weird robot and his non-binary friend, then you go to a party, and then TVÍK gets really depressed, and there’s a storm, and then you try to go on a road trip, but there’s a volcano and all that goes bad, and then people die in the end. It’s super dramatic.

So people ask me, is it an app, or is it a game or a story, or is it a piece of art? Why does it have its own soundtrack? And I’m like, do we have to categorise this? It’s a new category, I guess. It’s an experience slash learning thing; a work of art that takes you through a story where things happen and it’s really emotional. I wanted to create something that’s kind of all of the above.

Learning something is such a social and emotional experience, especially learning a language, like learning to become a new person and learning to find the words that define you and your voice. It’s so much more than experience that you can do sitting in a classroom with a book. I wanted to create an experience that was equally immersive and equally all-encompassing.

It’s an experience that will work for many people and it won’t for others. But then again, it’s made for humans — it’s made for messy and complex humans that want different information and different ways of interacting with different information. Basically, everything in TVÍK is a button of some kind — to a large extent, you decide the amount of interaction that suits you.

Still not an Icelander

I think I’ve reached the understanding that it will never happen and that maybe I don’t want to. I’m finding this balance and plurality of my coming from multiple cultural backgrounds, and none of them is me. I am the weird blend and amalgamation of all of them. I’ve grown to appreciate some of my Eastern European traits and a form of humour that I’ve never found in Iceland — banter and memes that you absolutely can’t find anywhere else, some aspects of social life, art, and political conflict and unhappiness that just doesn’t exist here. It’s culturally a part of me and I don’t want that to go away.

I want to get to the point where I’ve wrapped up all the grants, posted the launch party, and things have settled down for a bit. There are still some bugs in the app that I need to go and fix, but in a few weeks, everything will settle down a tiny bit more, and I can see with a bit more clarity what will be next. There will definitely be some kind of next. There are so many options for what’s next that I need to step out to see what it is.

[For now,] I’m gonna celebrate the thing I’ve been doing for three years — the biggest thing I’ve ever made, and I’m gonna host the biggest party I’ve ever thrown to celebrate that.

TVÍK Launch Rave takes place on March 8th at 19:00 at Höfuðstöðin. Download TVÍK at: tvik.is