Tired of learning languages from tame textbooks? Some musings on second (and third, and fourth...) language learning from a geeky linguaphile.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

More on reading

There are very few resources that tell you what you should read when you are studying X, either in the form of general principles, or a specific reading list. Both are important; you need the general principles because books go out of print, they can't be found in your library, or maybe because no one's bothered to make a list for Armenian or Tamil. Specific reading lists are good because as a foreign language learner, you're not familiar with genre classifications, popular authors, book reviews, and the like in the same way that native speakers are--and it's very time-consuming trying to determine, in a language you don't speak all that well, what a book's about. You can default to the authors everyone has heard of, but then you end up reading something by Natsume Soseki, or another of the famous Japanese authors from before the writing reforms, which still take an amazing amount of effort for me to read.

Japan-blogger ButterflyBlue posted a list of ways to tell if a book is readable in a foreign language. I think that these are a great starting point.

A list of my own would go something like this:

1) Choose a modern book, because language changes.
2) Don't choose fantasy or SF, because you'll spend all day looking up "entmoot" only to realize it's a made-up word. Or, in the case of magical realism, you may well look at the sentence you'vejust read with no idea whether you understood it rightly or not, because if you understood it rightly it would be weird.
3) Choose within your own limits for bleakness. What I mean by this is: in my senior year of high school, when I was having some personal issues, I began reading Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood. I got about 2/3 of the way through, and by then it had racked up enough bleakness and pessimism that I just could not go forward. Consider that you'll be spending several times as much time reading the book as you would in English, so you'll get through the depressing parts that much more slowly.
4) Corollary to 3: choose genre fiction or popular fiction over literary fiction. Not only is the prose easier, but they're also usually happier.
5) If it's a language with a lot of regional variation, pick a region and go with it. You can drive yourself crazy trying to pick up the peninsular Spanish dialect(s) plus the Cuban, Mexican, Chilean...etc... dialects.
6) In the bookstore/library, try reading a few paragraphs with a dictionary. That'll be enough to give you a good idea of the difficulty level. Why with a dictionary? I once brought home a book that looked easy in sentence structure, with a fair number of words I didn't know, but that was to be expected because I was just starting out. Turned out a lot of those words were some kind of slang that I couldn't find anywhere.
7) Interest trumps everything. Unless you have a burning desire to read The Tale of Genji in the original Japanese, then it's a lot better to read something you're interested in than something you aren't interested in.

I just finished reading my first novel in Spanish-- Like Water for Chocolate. It was far from my first attempt. It does break my rules, insofar as it's magical realism. Two books I'd attempted before, and not finished, were Isabel Allende's The City of Beasts (part of a Young Adult trilogy) and the Spanish translation of the first Harry Potter book. I know exactly why I didn't finish them, too. The City of Beasts had a mother who was dying of cancer, and I'm sick of YA books where the mother's dying of cancer--it seemed to pick up after a while, but it lost me because I read so slowly. As for Harry Potter, I'd read it in English. The 1/3 or so of it that I read taught me a lot, but I had no burning need to find out what happened next.

Let me mention, while I'm on the subject, the Leer en EspaƱol series. It's a series of graded readers, going from level 1 at "less than 400 words" to level 6 at "less than 2500 words." I'm not sure how much of a story you can tell in 400 words--I started at level 3--but they're reasonably authentic and interesting texts, either original or adapted from known literary works. Definitely not a bad choice if you're learning Spanish.

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