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Judging Difficulty of Foreign Literature | ||
Tags: Literature | Difficulty | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5234 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 1 of 13 25 March 2014 at 8:49pm | IP Logged |
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I've been reading Spanish literature by starting at the easiest and working my way up. A useful way of doing this is going to Amazon, and searching for Spanish children's literature. Amazon allows you to specify which age literature you're looking for. This allows me to move gradually upwards.
Spanish is one of the easiest languages to do this with, giving the plethora of material available. I wonder how one would do something similar with another language, one where Amazon doesn't have such a wide selection. I also wonder how to determine the difficulties of adult literature, some of which is of course easier than other. I wonder if there's any tool out there that allows one to determine the general difficulty of a work. The other option is to just come onto the forums and ask everyone what authors are better for beginners. Edited by ScottScheule on 25 March 2014 at 8:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5397 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 2 of 13 25 March 2014 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
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In English there's Lexile which measures reading
difficulty. It'd be great if there's something similar in other languages. edit: It didn't take me long to discover that Lexile measures books in Spanish as well! Edited by sctroyenne on 25 March 2014 at 9:03pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5234 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 3 of 13 25 March 2014 at 9:09pm | IP Logged |
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Perfect!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 5192 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 4 of 13 25 March 2014 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
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Well I don't have any fancy tools that I use, but I do have a bit of a process I use to
order my books. First, I look at font size and spacing. Books for older people, especially more technical books, tend to be more scrunched together. Second, I try reading a few randomly chosen sentences, just to test the waters. Finally, I look at the subject matter. I do this for two reasons. First, it doesn't matter how simply it's written if it's full of complicated ideas it's better left until I have a stronger grasp of the language so I can focus on the ideas more than the language. Second, no matter how easy it is to read, if it bores me it will be a chore. Alternately, something a little difficult for me but super interesting might be worth the effort. Of course, these are just estimations and won't always work. It's good to remember that if the book does turn out to be harder than expected you can always put it aside for later. I suppose as far as ordering books you'd have to have a look inside feature like on amazon for it to work well. I tend to stockpile books, so I don't have that problem. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5234 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 5 of 13 25 March 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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The more I think about it, asking on forums is probably the best way of doing it.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6603 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 13 25 March 2014 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
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Some relevant threads here.
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| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4677 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 13 26 March 2014 at 5:44am | IP Logged |
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I'm spoiled now that I've moved all my reading to the computer. I just dump something in LingQ, and it tells me how
many unknown words there are. Divide by the minutes of audio, or number of pages, and compare with my metric. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7211 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 13 26 March 2014 at 6:58am | IP Logged |
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For English readers, it can also be used to find easier or more challenging translations.
For instance, The Odyssey by Homer has several translations into English, some for children, some modern, and some difficult. That also leads one to the fact that although in the original language, a particular book may have been difficult (or perhaps easy), the translation isn't necessarily at the same level. Le Petit Nicolas... Nicolas: 1070L Even a book originally in English, like The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne has publishers that simplify the book and also a children's version. Edited by luke on 26 March 2014 at 11:47pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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