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Learning Only To Read | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Striver Newbie United States Joined 3149 days ago 8 posts - 15 votes Studies: French | Message 1 of 20 09 September 2015 at 4:50am | IP Logged |
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I've decided to dedicate myself to polyliteracy from a desire to read great books in their original tongue. I am starting with French, but plan to move to Spanish next.
I'm curious if there are any especially useful hints for somebody in my position, i.e. somebody who only wishes to read a foreign language. I'm especially curious about how I can use the time I spend driving to hone my language skills. Reading isn't an option obviously, but would it be worthwhile to do some sort audio study? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5157 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 20 09 September 2015 at 1:09pm | IP Logged |
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French for Reading by Sandberg. Spanish for Reading by Sandberg. There are a couple good threads on this site about learning a language just for reading/passive.
In your drive time do something like Paul Noble's course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| obsculta Newbie United States Joined 5602 days ago 36 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 20 09 September 2015 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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I also learn languages primarily to read. Following are a few modest observations:
1. While it's certainly possible to learn to read in isolation from the other skills, it feels sort of lifeless. Listening practice, pronunciation, and internalization of common grammatical structures makes reading feel more musical, as it were. 2. I usually spend a year on Assimil or other conversation-based audio courses with parallel texts, FSI, etc., before I start reading extensively in a language. 3. While great literature or other difficult texts is my goal (for me, the Christian theological tradition primarily), I often find that genre literature is often the best place to start: detective novels, fantasy, vampire novels, fairy tales, etc. The more clichés, the better. I only move on to more serious works when I can't stand to read another Twilight knock-off, or whatever. 4. E-reading devices with pop-up dictionaries can be a great help. You can underline vocabulary words you want to remember and put them into a spaced-repetition flashcard program like Anki. 5. I tend to read backward-- that is, for modern languages, I start with contemporary literature, and work my way back. 6. There's a special pleasure in classical languages-- for me, that's Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac. Someone said (Whitehead?) that the history of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. As much as I love modern and contemporary literature, I often feel like it's a long footnote to antiquity. 7. Bookdepository.com is a great multilingual bookstore with free global shipping. You probably already know of www.litteratureaudio.com from your French studies. Happy reading! 14 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Mork the Fiddle Senior Member United States Joined 3751 days ago 86 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 20 10 September 2015 at 1:42am | IP Logged |
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Welcome to HTLAL.
Listening to English audiobooks of your target books will familiarize you with their content and make them a tad easier to read in French later on. The more professionally done the audio the better, though that will depend on the thickness of your wallet. Consider the "voice in your head" when you read French (or any other language). For poetry, I think that "voice" should sound French. Listening to at least some spoken French will help with that, though there is no point in listening to French until you understand it (but there are some who would disagree with me about this). As Obsculta notes, simpler is better. Stories with well defined plots and history probably work better at the beginning. For threads about passive reading, go to Search, then go to the third subset of topics ("Other Tags"), then go to Passive. Here is a start: Learning languages only passively Finally a question for you: what great books in French do you plan to read? 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6379 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 20 10 September 2015 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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See this wikia article and the links there :)
4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4420 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 20 10 September 2015 at 8:36am | IP Logged |
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Learning just to read is great. In the beginning, focus on reading a course with interesting content (the Sandberg books meet
the bill, as do Assimil). Try to move into native materials some time before you finish your first course, but don't abandon the course. When you move onto native materials, parallel translations are your friend! Just because you only care about reading doesn't mean you shouldn't be using audio. Audio resources are just too much of an opportunity. A car based audio course would be great, and if you find that too distracting/gruelling, listen to music in the target language. In addition, the vast majority of people spend a whopping proportion of their time consuming audio in their native language. Movies, TV Shows, news reports, sports commentary, video games, music. Just keep doing what you were already doing but do it in the L2. Use whatever aids (eg subtitles) are necessary to make it equally as enjoyable as it would have been in your native language. By the way, you might want to consider asking future questions at forum.language-learners.org/, it's more active than this forum, and most of the users who post here post there as well. Edited by AlexTG on 10 September 2015 at 8:49am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 7 of 20 10 September 2015 at 10:45am | IP Logged |
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I do not learn languages just in order to read, but with my study methods and environment reading skills will in practice always come before speaking or writing skills. Furthermore I'm more interested in non fiction than I am in literature, even literature by the most renowned authors - but in practice that doesn't mean much for the methods I use.
I have made a few observations along the way. The first is that you may want to read the greatest works by the greatest authors, but if you want to read Latin then don't start with the Eneid, and if you want to read Anglosaxon then don't start with Beowulf. In both cases you should try to find easier texts so that you relatively fast can get to the stage where you can read fluently instead of solving riddles. Bilingual texts is another way of getting there fast - but you should obviously only use the translation to understand the original, not to replace it. To get to the stage where I can read at least the easy texts I have always found it necessary to study vocabulary and grammar - you may find that you can depend on guesswork for languages which are related to something you already know, but in the long run you need some exact knowledge AND a large vocabulary - larger than the one you need to buy apples in a store in a holiday destination. 'Getting the gist' of a French poem is like learning about Paris by looking at a postcard stand. If your goal just is to be able to read you are not quite as dependent on active vocabulary and grammatical savvy as somebody who wants to use a language actively. But there is a limit. I learned Latin (in two rounds) as a passive language through the grammar-translation method. But after the courses I didn't use the language apart from a few visits in churches and museums, where I tried to read inscriptions - but I quickly lost even that skill. On the other hand I took up Latin many years later and discovered that my knowledge about grammar and my vocabulary could be revived very quickly, which tells me that the grammar-translation method in itself did what it was supposed to do. But it didn't give me the ability to think and write in Latin. The missing element in my Latin upbringing was activation. If a language is purely passive then you can only train it by reading or listening, and that makes it fragile. An active language can also be trained by thinking in the language, and that makes it more robust - so try to turn phrases around in your head or invent small discussions in the language while you read. Everything you do in that direction will serve to strengthen the language - and that will also make your passive activities more entertaining. Right now I have a number of languages which I can read without any problems (like Norwegian, Low German, Scots, Old French, Old Occitan and several Slavic languages), but which I never have used in conversations with native speakers. But even though I need a dictionary and sometimes a grammar to formulate messages in those languages I do try to think and write in them, and this gives me the feeling that they are MY languages and not just something in a book. Even though that feeling can be hard to quantify I'm sure that it helps me to retain them. Edited by Iversen on 10 September 2015 at 6:26pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Striver Newbie United States Joined 3149 days ago 8 posts - 15 votes Studies: French | Message 8 of 20 13 September 2015 at 7:12am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for all the great replies. I am already using the Sandberg book,
and it has been a tremendous help. I've also been using Duolingo and Memrise. The later actually has several courses based on vocabulary taken from Proust. Reading La Recherche du Temps Perdu is my ultimate goal with French, but I hope to read at least a little from several great francophone authors. I'm a novice at language study, but I am a life long book worm. Ultimately, I'd like to pursue a temporal/familial course of study so I can read all the great literature that I've read in translation. Start with French to read Prost et al. then work my way through Spanish for Marques and Cervante, Italian for Dante, then Latin for Tacitus, Caesar. Then go through the Germanic languages for Kafka and Kierkegaard. Then Slavic for all the great Russian lit. The ultimate goal being Koine and classical Greek and ancient Hebrew for the Bible and Plato, Aeschylus, etc. I'm not sure if it's realistic or how long it will take, but it seems like an excellent life's work. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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