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Finding which foreign book to read | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7367 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 12 09 December 2005 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
When you are completing a new foreign language, you might want to read books written in that language.
There are several strategies you can use to discover authors of interest in a new foreign language. I read non-fiction and page-turners. I recommend you focus on books that were written in the language rather than translated from another language. This is not so easy for page-turners as most are written in English, but you can find loads of non fiction books in most languages. Since I am avid reader and buyer of books, and visit regularly the publisher's fair in Frankfurt as well as many, many bookshops online and in the brick and mortar world I have some tips to contribute. If you visit a bookshop abroad, find the relevant section and tell the bookshop man that you wish books that were written originally in the language and sold well. I tried that in Milan for crime novel and the bookshop man got interested - finding real Italian crime novel was not so easy as most of his aisle was translated from English. Finally we located half a dozen book. Online on ibs.it it would have been very long to locate such books since you cannot search by original language, and you have no way of telling which ones sold well (I know it's a bit unfair to assume those who sold well are the good ones but you need shortcuts when you start in the business of locating books in an unknown universe). To find non fiction books all you need to do is find a reliable online bookstore in your target language, search with keywords of interest to you and buy those books that were written in the target language. You can find loads of interesting material in many languages. English is clearly the richest but I found superb books in Italian (Food, History, Art, Fashion), French and German. Russian publishing levels are not very high but the prices are so low that you can afford to get wrong and there are very interesting books. If you travel, you can also visit specialized bookshops in an area of interest to you. There are even guidebooks to specialized bookshops for some of the world's large cities and they can help you access shelves filled with specialized books you can actually browse through. To find fiction books I would recommend the opposite approach to that used by Andy. Instead of buying fine English novels translated into your target language, try to find which novels originally written in your target language were translated into English. Very few foreign novels ever make it into US publishers' lists and they are more often than not rather good ones. I recall having read my first Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel after seeing a friend read it in French. And I discovered Perez Reverte after seeing the movie 'The Ninth Gate' by Roman Polanski. There must be no shame in the more-or-less-smart way of discovering new books as long as it works. Even if the bottle where you drink the water of knowledge if dirty, drink it up. It might not look very smart in intellectual circle to say you discovered the book, let alone the author, after seeing the movie in Hollywood, but what do you care? I watched a couple movies based in Grisham novels, then bought the novels. Edited by administrator on 09 December 2005 at 5:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7094 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 2 of 12 09 December 2005 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||
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FX,
Thanks for that very informative post. It's the fiction side of things that interests me most currently since it's fiction I mostly read in English. I like the idea of finding authors that have been translated into English - that's an approach that hadn't occurred to me. The problem with doing what I've done to-date is that I'm invariably re-reading books I'm already familiar with - fine as a beginning strategy but something I was aware that I needed to address if I'm to step my reading up a gear. Andy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7367 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 12 09 December 2005 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||
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A dependable source of high quality books on a foreign country in the 'Contexts' section of the Rough Guides. These guy spend an entire year researching their books and they recommend about a dozen books or so on the city or country the guide is about. I've always been very happy with their recommendations. Just be aware that some of the recommended books are written in English.
For French, there is a book by Bernard Pivot called 'La bibliothèque idéale' which lists 5000 (if my memory serves me right) French classics. It will probably not list cutting edge fiction but you should be all right with any of these books. The list also contains translated works. Litterary prizes are no guarantee the book will still be popular decades from now, and they can be things of fashion. If you look at the Nobel Prize for Litterature awarded last century, many of these authors are not so famous today. But I think some litterary prized are worth exploring as a source of quality reading material in a new target language. I have read books that got the Pulitzer Price in English and they were excellent. In France the most famous is the Prix Goncourt. The Economist, a British weekly, draws up a list of fiction and non-fiction best sellers across the world. They would tell you what Brazilians are reading nowadays based on sales figure. It is a fun indicator of people's interest in various countries, but can also serve as a tool to discover new books. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6934 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 4 of 12 09 December 2005 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are many ways to find good authors and novels. Here is what I did for Spanish.
To get started: (a) Find a few dual-language antologies of short stories. They can be used in their own right, but will also familiarize you with several worthy authors, although mostly not the very latest. For Spanish, the following seem pretty standard. Simplified (a lot) for beginners: First Spanish Reader (Dual-Language) by Angel Flores (Editor) Unabridged: Cuentos españoles by Angel Flores Spanish Short Stories 1 / Cuentos hispánicos 1 Spanish Short Stories 2/Cuentos Hispanicos 2 (Penguin Parallel Text) Short Stories in Spanish : New Penguin Parallel Text (New Penguin Parallel Texts) Similar editions from Dover and Penguin are available for French and other languages. (b) Whether you are a student or not, visit a university bookstore at the start of a new semester. If there is a Spanish or Latin American literature course being taught, they will stock up on the novels for the course, which you can peruse and buy. (c) Visit the stacks of a university library. Even if you are not a student and can't check things out, you can look over what's on the shelves and see if you like some book, which you can then buy elsewhere. (d) Near really major universities, and in some major cities, you may well find a store specializing in foreign books. Check the phone book - you may be surprised. (For the specific case of Spanish in the US, Barnes & Noble and Borders stores now usually have a few shelves with Spanish books, although the size of the selection varies from store to store.) ===== Once you are ready to expand your reach: (1) If 19th century novels tickle your fancy, you can often find copyright-free complete texts online which you can read before acquiring a paper copy, if you are going to need one at all. For Spanish the major site is www.cervantesvirtual.com, and for French the National Library of France should do. For Spanish (look first under "Portales->Obras y autores clásicos", but if not there, also search in the general catalog), authors Benito Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), Juan Valera, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, and Ricardo Palma (Peruvian) can be easily recommended, among others. Googling for an author's name will often lead you to overviews of his or her work, suggesting which particular novels by a given author are the most important ones. (2) You can look up Spanish Department web pages at various universities, where they sometimes have reading lists for their courses. For example, this page at Cambridge mentions novels that, besides being good, are also useful for language learning reasons. In this particular instance, I happen to have read La Colmena and half of El Jarama, and they are certainly worthwhile (there is even a movie La Colmena with Victoria Abril, which you could pick up for 6 euros on www.elcorteingles.es - I own it, but have not watched it yet.) There are, of course, many other universities, where useful information can be found. (3) Online stores in the target country, e.g., www.elcorteingles.es or www.casadellibro.com will have lists of bestsellers in various categories, often have special pages listing books that have won specific literary prizes, etc. Used creatively, it is a great resource. (American amazon.com can also be used to glean some information, as it has a separate Spanish-language section.) (4) Book reviews in major newspapers may be useful, for example this one, which I believe also has a search engine for old reviews, if you want to look up a particular author. There is also magazine Hispania published by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, which will have book reviews, if you can locate it somewhere - you will probably need a university library or an online access for that. (5) Literary prizes, if cross-checked against descriptions in online stores in the target country and reviews at amazon.com (if such exist, at least for translations), help one find new authors to read, especially recent ones. Here are a few Spanish literary prize winner lists: Premio Primavera Premio Planeta Premio Nadal (This list of literary prizes is by no means complete - usually it is mentioned on the cover of a book if it had won some prize, so if you liked the book, you can then look up others (at that same site, for example) that had won the same prize, until you build up a list of prizes you find consistent with your own literary tastes.) Edited by frenkeld on 14 December 2005 at 2:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 12 19 December 2005 at 3:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Very specifically, I would recommend "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Sainte Exupery for anyone who is picking up a book in their target language for the first time. It has been translated from French into every language imaginable. Of course it's always best to read a book in the original, but for a beginning learner, the thought of plowing through an entire novel can seem pretty daunting, and "The Little Prince" has simple vocabulary and reads almost like a children's book. Anyone with a knowledge of past tense should be able to understand it (and most people are familiar with the story in their native language anyway - reread the short book beforehand in order to prepare!).
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| Tristan Newbie United States Joined 6952 days ago 22 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 6 of 12 20 December 2005 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the advice Lucky.
For those interested, I found this story online in both English, as I've never read it, and Russian, my target language. I imagine with a little effort, you can find it in your target language with ease. English: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/ Russian: http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/exupery_antuan_de_sent/male nkiyi_princ/exupery_malenkiyi_princ.html#TOC_id2484948 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| screamadelics Newbie United States Joined 6978 days ago 34 posts - 35 votes | Message 7 of 12 29 December 2005 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Perseus Project is THE place if you're looking for works in Ancient Greek or Latin. It's got just about everything imaginable in the original and in translation, and with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary entry. There's often commentary, as well. It's also got a tool to find the most frequently-occurring words in a work or works. Wonderful site:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html Edited by screamadelics on 29 December 2005 at 7:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6912 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 8 of 12 30 December 2005 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Any good recommendations for easy Russian books to read?
Also you can find The Little Prince (the first and only authentic French book I've read in the original. I even have a copy) in lots of languages here: http://www.geocities.com/athens/rhodes/1916/online.html Edited by TDC on 30 December 2005 at 12:52am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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