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Which Scandinavian language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 20 28 July 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I found some more comments about the Finnish connection to Donald Duck.
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| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5227 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 18 of 20 02 August 2011 at 2:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It all depends on your own personal tastes. According to my tastes, Sweden has the better movies and Denmark the better children's stories. Ingmar Bergman is my favorite non-American director. He may put you to sleep, but there are A LOT of people out there who really admire his work tremendously. Comedies, on the other hand, are not something I care all that much for, although I will watch them occasionally, esp. if they are very well done. As far as children's lit goes, I would have thought that Dane Hans Christian Andersen would be considered a far more significant author than someone like the Swede Astrid Lindgren (not that she's not good too). There are also a lot of people out there who actually like to learn languages not just to watch "non-artsy" movies and read comics and to consume other forms of pop culture, but to read literature and do other "arsty" things. The main reason I started learning a little Swedish myself was to understand Bergman films without subtitles and to (hopefully eventually) read Strindberg in the original. The main reason I wanted to learn Norwegian was to read Ibsen. You've given decent reasons (though still not entirely convincing imo) to prefer Danish for those whose tastes are similar to yours, but these sorts of reason may also encourage others to avoid Danish and go for one of the other Scandinavian languages instead. At any rate, if the original poster wants to learn/eventually understand all three of these languages, then he (or she) might as well learn Norwegian. If he really only wants to learn one, then it would make more sense to pick the one that he has the most personal interests in (travel, reading, movies, TV, business, friends, music, etc.) and not worry too much over whether he will be able to understand a few extra words or sentences in another related language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| matthewmartin Triglot Newbie United States suburbandestiny.com Joined 6199 days ago 22 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Toki Pona | Message 19 of 20 02 August 2011 at 3:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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re: the merits of Engmar Bergman
Yes, if you authentically enjoy fine art, by all means, pick the language that has the sort of fine art that you like. That was my point. Pick the language with content that will motivate you to learn it and the process will feel easy. Faroese will feel hard because there is (numerically) so little written in it-- popular or otherwise. (And I'm not picking on the Faroese, I got Eivor Palsdottir on my iPod, it's good stuff) I dabbled in all of the Scandinavian languages and have settled down to almost finish learning Icelandic. When I hear other Scandinavian languages I understand more than I feel I deserve too, but not enough for it to be useful as a communication tool-- it's just a parlor trick. No 2nd language learner, imho, should consider this in picking a language. I would only add one more caveat to what you said-- I wouldn't learn a language primarily to read it's prestige literature, at least not if was my only motivation. Imagine an English as a second language learner trying to learn English to read James Joyce's Ulysses. I read somewhere to get near native fluency is a ten year project and I would guess one would also need the equivalent of a English degree to appreciate it. Reading a prestige book in a foreign language (before the 10 years of experience), reminds me of the joke Woody Allan made after speed reading War and Peace ("It's about Russia") Fortunately for me, I'm reading and enjoying Harry Potter in Icelandic at the moment (page 124 and it still makes sense!) If I had to start with Halldór Laxness (say for lack of anything easier and well.. more popular), I likely wouldn't have made it to to page 124. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5227 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 20 of 20 03 August 2011 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It certainly might take someone ten years or more of real study to be at a point to read Joyce's Ulysses, but let's face it, most native speakers can't make it through that one with much understanding. There are a lot of great classics of literature that someone should be able to read in far less than 10 years of dedicated study. Ibsen and Strindberg's plays certainly shouldn't take anywhere near that long. Ulysses might take 10 years, but surely the average learner should be able to make his or her way through a Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway book or a Eugene O'Neill or a Tennessee Williams' play after maybe two to three years or so of dedicated study, depending on the person and the efficacy of their learning methods. Dante will always be really challenging, but why should Pirandello be?
So I more or less agree with you if you mean very difficult or very old literature like Shakespeare, Milton, or Dante, etc. (although even then someone really hyperfocused on learning to read specific books or authors should be able to make it happen in a shorter time). But reading (easier) good literature in general is a very reasonable goal for almost anyone. I've seen university students, for example, take one year each of beginners-level and intermediate-level language study and then take literature classes in the foreign language in their third year. I did that myself for German (though I had one year of high school German too). We read fairly easier classics (by Hesse, for example) and harder ones (by Kafka, among others). At any rate, I do think you have to build up to more difficult literature. Starting with decent quality children's lit (like Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Astrid Lindgren's stories in Swedish, The Little Prince, etc.) is a good idea. From there, it's not so hard to gradually increase the difficulty level of your reading material. Harry Potter is great as a stepping stone (I have copies of the Potter books in several languages myself), but if a person continues to read and study the language, then eventually he or she should be able to understand more complex texts without too much difficulty. For example, a reasonable progression in German might be: The Little Prince > The Chronicles of Narnia > Harry Potter > The Brothers Grimm fairy tales > E.T.A. Hoffman > Hermann Hesse > Erich Maria Remarque > Franz Kafka > Thomas Mann > Goethe & Schiller. The point is to keep moving forward and challenging yourself, but to do it in steps so that it's never too difficult for the level that your currently at in the language. Yes, it would definitely be better not to have reading literature as your only goal in learning a language. The more reasons you have to learn something, the better your motivation will be. However, if someone really loves literature and reading, then this really isn't an impractical goal and certainly should not take a decade to accomplish unless the person is just dabbling in the language. Edited by RMM on 03 August 2011 at 6:39am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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