In fact, the language generally shows its age in a lot of its syntax, cf. Other than that it's a pretty typical European language. Verbs have a simple present and past tense, subjunctive forms, auxiliary verbs with infinitives and participles, and such. German ich kann fahren . If you're going to seriously study Icelandic, be prepared to memorize a lot of inflections.
Verbs are more complicated, but they fall into patterns.
All it takes is practice. The thing that really disturbed me was that the numbers inflect like strong irregular adjectives. I had taken it for granted that numbers were always just numbers. I should be grateful that it was only up to 4, since 5 and up are indeclinable. Here are a few strong noun declensions for your sadistic enjoyment.