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My First 20 Books in Any Language | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6499 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 9 of 17 27 July 2011 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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The movie is...something else. I've seen Night Watch and Day Watch, and they're not horrible (to someone who hasn't read the books), but they're not great. I mostly watched them because they were Russian films that there was a buzz about. It's hard to find a movie that's really better than the book, because movies are usually glorified short stories; there just isn't the time to develop plots and characters.
At any rate, there was enough in the Night Watch movie that interested me to make me think about picking up the novels. I never did because they I've only seen them in trade paperbacks, and I wasn't willing to spend $20 on an author that I was uncertain about, especially considering the pile of books that I already have to read. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 10 of 17 27 July 2011 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I might watch the movie, now that you speak of it. I'll just try to not compare too much.
As you didn't know Strugatsky, you might be interested in seing The Inhabited Island, which is adaptation of one of their books. The critics at the internet quite disliked it (but I've read only czech articles) but I think it is perfect. And as you are interested in Russian, it is the original language of the movie. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5230 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 11 of 17 27 July 2011 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been thinking along similar lines, though 20 would be too much for me. I'm thinking more along the lines of 5-10.
One thing I noticed is that 4 of your picks are originally written in English while 4 of your hit list languages are not represented at all. If it were me, I'd try to have at least one book originally written in each of my hit list languages. If you chose 2 per language, that'd still give you 6 free spots for English works. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 17 27 July 2011 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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dmaddock1, are you responding to the whole thread or just the first post? Since the first post, there were ideas for books from another language of the list (Spanish) and for some great books from languages which are not on the list. If you have some particular ideas for books writen in those three asian languages, they would be surely welcome as noone came with those so far.
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| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5230 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 13 of 17 27 July 2011 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Primarily to the first post, though I did read the whole thread. You and Marc Frisch both have some great picks too. Most of my ideas don't fit my own suggestion and I'm not too familiar with the asian languages either so I didn't include any. :-)
For English books (which unfortunately is the only language I share with the OP), I also vote for The Hobbit and would suggest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Jack London's Call of the Wild and White Fang, Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as good short works. All of these are commonly taught in American schools around the ages of 12-14. (Well, not the Hobbit really, but it should be...) For Japanese, The Tale of Genji, Haruki Murakami and tons of manga (I like Osama Tezuka) should be easy to find widely translated. For inspiration, I tried googling for syllabuses (syllabi?) of literature courses to see what keeps popping up on reading lists. Really, you want reading lists for native kids at the high school age, but it is surprisingly hard to find that info when you don't know the language... Some I found: Japanese, Korean, Chinese d.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6499 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 14 of 17 29 July 2011 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
One of the factors playing into my list is that there are some titles that I've already collected in more than one language. I have the Little Prince in all of the languages I want to learn, Harry Potter in 4, the Stranger and the Christie books in 3 and the rest in 2. I just decided to use what I had as a starting point. And I agree that it would be nice to have something from each of my target languages, but I really don't know that much about Asian or Russian literature, which was one of the reasons I put this out here in search of comments. Especially with Chinese literature, I pretty much know about Lu Xun and his contemporaries, with some authors writing into the 60s. I don't know how applicable their language is to reading modern newspapers and books, and I don't know how widely available translations are. I think this would be even more of a problem with Indonesian. Other than being a political work rather than literature, one of the other nice things about the Communist Manifesto is that I can find it on the Internet in all my target languages. I also think that a couple of the titles (especially Ender's Game, though I like having a scifi title on the list) might actually be a bit long for what I was thinking. I would also dearly love to get some history book in multiple languages, but, again, length might be an issue. I'm always open to better ideas, and this is just a rough outline of what I want. Titles can be removed as well as added if I find something that fits better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4706 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 15 of 17 15 September 2011 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've noticed a lot of people mentioning reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on various threads. I'm sure it is readily available in many languages.
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| lindseylbb Bilingual Triglot Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4729 days ago 92 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 16 of 17 20 October 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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My chinese teacher mentioned "luo tuo xiang zi" today in the class, saying that it only contain 700s characters. Quite a small number but a great book. It might be easy. And, 巴金bajin, 老舍laoshe etc. are great authors, and modern enough. Luxun's novel contained a number of old fashioned expansions.
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