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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 52 30 August 2011 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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[it] Someone tipped me off to an excellent site for reading la Divina Commedia:
www.divina-commedia.it It has everything you need: - the text - a paraphrasing (think of it as a parallel translation but in prose form) - a summary - a commentary It's tough going, though, it takes me about 45min to read all of those for a single chapter. And without the paraphrasing I would be utterly lost, because even if I did understand the literal meaning (which is really hard for at least half the verses) the allegorical meaning is waaay out there. I literally read the verse and the paraphrasing in parallel verse by verse, sometimes line by line. There are also quite a few false friends in the text that I would misinterpret without the paraphrasing. All in all it's hard, long and quite boring. Not least because I know nothing of the historical context or care one whit about the theological doctrine it's based on. Who is Virgilio? Don't know and don't care, I'm treating this as a purely linguistic exercise. It doesn't help that I don't like poetry. I really doubt that I'll have the patience to read all 100 chapters at this rate. But another part of me says that I should try, because Italian has become so easy to read now that I need a challenge. In a way I could use something as hard as this, but on a subject that I care about. Anyway, part of me is thinking that since I'm not going to get more than a superficial understanding of this text now, I can come back to it later, like in a year, and to a second pass. Edited by numerodix on 30 August 2011 at 5:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 52 01 September 2011 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Odd thought, but I've been thinking in the past few days that I kinda would like to
study a language that I don't have anything invested in. I can't really explain why, but somehow the idea of just studying for the sake of studying seems to appeal to me. As a kind of pure experiment I suppose. I think it's because of the fact that even though I have so much more to do in my languages it all seems a bit too easy already. It's been a while since I really hit the wall for real. The first Dutch book was really hard, it was a proper struggle. But it was also kind of exciting to have so much work to do to decipher a sentence, it was satisfying. And I suppose that I have discovered something that many people around here already did. When I first started this thing two years ago I had no doubt in my mind that the most hateful part of language study is the beginning, where you have to understand the most basic parts, how to conjugate être and stuff like that. Probably because in junior high and high school I spent basically all my French at that level without getting any further. But somehow it seems that people who study languages and take to it really enjoy starting on new ones. And if you're just playing around and you don't care about the language then you can walk out any time you want, no inner pressure to succeed, that seems very liberating. So I think I might start to become infected with this impulse myself. I don't know what the language is going to be, it doesn't seem to matter very much. Just something different from the current ones. Japanese might be a cool choice. The only thing that bugs me is the characters, cause that is such a mission impossible project and I want something smaller. I'm relatively sure that I want to start from a French Assimil base. All these courses that teach from English are great, but it's not very exciting. I'm going to be in Brussels in a few weeks on an unrelated mission, and I might just take the opportunity to browse around some bookstores. I don't really know when I ought to do something like this, maybe I should even make sure it's completely unprepared, unsystematic etc, so that it doesn't feel like anything I'm doing now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 52 03 September 2011 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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[ru] A mini-experiment with Russian. Russian has always bugged me because I can't read it and if I could maybe I could understand enough to make sense of it? Don't know. So I learned the alphabet in an hour or two with this course, very handy. I then went through the mini course to the language. It didn't take long at all and now I have very basic literacy.
It feels like a perverse kind of thing to stare at a piece of text and force myself to use the Russian alphabet to read it rather than read the latin letters the way I've done it all my life. I can now go on pravda.ru and with effort read some of the titles, headlines even. It's a lot of effort though. I wonder how long I have to practice this before I can read it fluently. On the listening end I was told about the NHK website with news broadcast in a bunch of languages. It's really cool. I've listened to the Russian and the Spanish, but maybe I should always do Spanish first, which is like reading the transcript basically, and then try to recognize as much as I can in Russian. I'm not quite sure what to expect, because although Russian is a very close language linguistically I've never had any interest in it or exposure to it. I have the sense of being on the threshold of just that amount of intelligibility that makes it worthwhile to try. I don't feel like trying hard though, it's just a distraction from my other stuff. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 52 06 September 2011 at 8:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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[ru] Russian pronunciation is bizarre and I'm having a great time butchering it with my
Polish accent. It's so funny how everything I think I know by instinct about the pronunciation is wrong. I can just imagine how much pain a Russian must have teaching Russian to Poles. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4956 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 13 of 52 06 September 2011 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Only 45 minutes? It takes even more Italian students - though most don't even read the original text, they hope they can cope with the paraphrasing...
There are other difficult texts in the Italian literature. Dante's work is fundamental for the history of the language, but it is full of references, both to the classical world and especially to his contemporary Tuscany. If you have no passion for Florence and for medieval Italy, I'd skip - or concentrate on a few timeless cantos, which are able to move and fascinate the modern reader even without knowledge of Dante's world. I guess you know who is Virgil by now. By the way, out of the five years of secondary school in Italy, four are devoted to Virgil & Dante: 1st to Aeneid, 3rd to 5th to the Commedia, one cantica each year. The exception is 2nd class: Manzoni's Promessi Sposi.
Bad news for you: it is generally recognized that the Inferno is the most interesting part - Purgatorio and Paradiso are duller, and very few people have the patience to read them all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 52 06 September 2011 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks a lot for your insight!
You say other difficult works, anything in particular you would suggest? (I've read Manzoni, was quite easy.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4956 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 15 of 52 06 September 2011 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It depends on your interests really. Have you tried Guicciardini & Machiavelli? ;-)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 16 of 52 06 September 2011 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well you see the problem is that my ignorance is breathtaking and it's not so much about having tried as it is even knowing about them. A few months ago I read "Il principe" and it was a really good learning experience. Hard at first, but it's definitely readable. Later on I read about 60 pages of "Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio" and while the language wasn't giving me any problems (anymore) I just found the long political treatise quite boring. Guicciardini I've never heard of before, he seems to be another political writer of the same period. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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