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Do you read often in foreign languages? | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | Reading | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| pim Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 5196 days ago 5 posts - 7 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 25 of 75 20 February 2010 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | ||
It appears that even native speakers have a hard time comprehending Goethe's vocabulary, given the existence of the following work: Goethes merkwürdige Wörter Ein Lexikon von Martin Müller Dieses Lexikon ›übersetzt‹ und erklärt dem Goethe-Liebhaber mit Hilfe von Originalzitaten mehr als 1000 Wörter aus Goethes Wortschatz bis hin zu besonders eigentümlichen und unerwarteten Prägungen. Ein unentbehrliches Nachschlagewerk für alle, die Goethes klassische Texte richtig verstehen möchten oder einfach nur Lust auf einen Spaziergang durch ein vielschichtiges und zuweilen kurioses ›Wörter-Museum‹ des 18. Jh. haben. For the real enthusiast. As for me, when reading a book in a foreign language, I have the following strategy when encountering unknown words: 1: Try to guess whether the word is essential for understanding the message. 2: Check if the word is going to be used more often in the next paragraph. 3: Try to guess the meaning from multiple occurrences of the word, its occurence in comparisons, examples, etymology. 4: Recall whether this word has occurred more often in the past but was skipped then. 5: Recall whether I used to know the word, but somehow forgot its meaning. So this comes down to a kind of triage that limits the number of words actually looked up in the dictionary, at the expense of amount of words learned, but with the benefit of maintaining reading speed and pleasure. Of course, this doesn't work for every book. In non-fiction books on familiar subjects I may end up with about twenty unfamiliar words per page, of which maybe five are eventually looked up. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aleksey Groz Tetraglot Newbie Yugoslavia Joined 5170 days ago 14 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Serbo-Croatian*, English, Czech, FrenchB2 | Message 26 of 75 17 March 2010 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I have to say that (unfortunately) I haven't been reading any serious literature for a
wail. But, on the other hand, I read in foreign languages a lot on daily basis. Being a political commentator for Balkans, I read newspapers in all South Slavic languages (except Bulgarian, thought) everyday. Beside that, I always have some small texts in French, Czech and English to read. All in all, I daily read in 6 languages. Edited by Aleksey Groz on 17 March 2010 at 2:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5567 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 27 of 75 17 March 2010 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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No. Wait, maybe. Which one is 'foreign'?
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| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5307 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 75 17 March 2010 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Reading in foreign languages is quite possibly my favorite method of study, but I
really haven't done much of it this year outside of a few short stories. (So reading this topic was a great reminder to me that I should start again soon!) When I do read in foreign languages, I generally use a process similar to the one described by Pim at the head of this page, and I find that it works quite well. I choose to read foreign language books for two main reasons. One, a lot of the literature I want to read simply hasn't been translated or translated well into English yet. Two, no translation is a perfect rendering. To translate inevitably is to interpret, analyze, rewrite. Now, I'm not some sort of a silly strawman literature purist - "You have to read Proust in French or it doesn't count!!" - but we have to acknowledge that a novel and its translation are on some level two different works, and you may indeed glean one thing from Season of Migration to the North and another from Mawsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal. I'm not going to go out and read every book in its original language, but there are some books that I'd like to approach the way their authors intended. As an obvious example, I'm glad that I read Ulysses in English. (Full disclosure: I tried it in Chinese earlier this year just for craps and giggles, and I haven't picked up another substantive foreign language text since. Connected? Coincidence? I don't know...) Edited by annette on 17 March 2010 at 7:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| starst Triglot Senior Member China Joined 5315 days ago 113 posts - 133 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, EnglishC2 Studies: FrenchC1, German, Norwegian | Message 29 of 75 17 March 2010 at 11:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Do technical papers count? They are almost all what I read recently...
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6504 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 75 17 March 2010 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Technical (and scientific) papers certainly count. Otherwise I would also be in trouble.
I mainly read stuff on the internet, science or travel magazines and non fiction books. However right now I am actually reading a literary text, Satyricon, but only because there s little else preserved from the Antiquity in something faintly ressembling actual spoken Latin. But I find all my prejudices against literature confirmed by this book. Edited by Iversen on 17 March 2010 at 1:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tiberius Diglot Groupie Moldova lawinmoldova.blogspoRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6089 days ago 70 posts - 85 votes Studies: Romanian, Russian*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 31 of 75 17 March 2010 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
Hmm, That's interesting. Could you please expand on your prejudices about literature? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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