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CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

uage you usually read books in.

Hello, this is the thread for talking about reading books in different languages from the language you usually read books in. Reading books in different languages is a really good way to a) look smart to people; b) get around literary conundrums like "is a translated work even the same thing as the original; and c) learn new languages.

Please use this thread to ask for recommendations on what to read to get started in new languages, talk about books you are reading in new languages and other things that seem like things this thread might be about.

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CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

Penguin has some really good short story collections in foreign languages with en face translations in English, and I would recommend them if you would like to learn French or Spanish, but I don't know if any of their other ones are good.

military cervix
Dec 24, 2006

Hey guys
In general, I think it's smart to start of with something simple that you're already familiar with. I know a lot of people like to learn by reading stuff like Harry Potter in foreign languages, which is probably a good idea.

I started reading english books when I was about 14 or so, and started with Wheel of Time. I remember quickly learning that I couldn't possibly enjoy reading the book if I was checking every single word I didn't understand in the dictionary, so I had to limit myself to words that seemed vital to understanding the plot. Striking a good balance between understanding everything and getting good reading flow going is vital.

Walh Hara
May 11, 2012
I've already read plenty of books in English that it no longer is a challenge to me (ESL), but now I'm looking for French books to read. Obviously books that were written in French originally, not translations.

I already read The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo in English and consider these to be too long to read in French again. I also tried reading Madame Bovary in French but found it a bit too boring. A book I was considering is Les Liaisons dangereuses but since it's such an old book I fear the French might be a bit outdated (as in, maybe the expressions used are no longer common?) and honestly I'd rather read something more recently written than all these books I just mentioned anyway. Any suggestions?

Sally
Jan 9, 2007


Don't post Small Dash!
I like reading poetry in Middle Scots. It's really similar to Early Modern English, so it isn't difficult to learn once you pick up on the differences. It's also incredibly fun to pronounce words, so I have to read all Middle Scots poems aloud.

Here's a short one, "The Two Crows"--English Translation here:

The Twa Corbies

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies makin a mane;
The tane unto the ither say,
"Whar sall we gang and dine the-day?"

"In ahint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And nane do ken that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound an his lady fair."

"His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's tain anither mate,
So we may mak oor dinner swate."

"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike oot his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek oor nest whan it grows bare."

"Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane;
Oer his white banes, whan they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair."

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

Walh Hara posted:

I've already read plenty of books in English that it no longer is a challenge to me (ESL), but now I'm looking for French books to read. Obviously books that were written in French originally, not translations.

I already read The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo in English and consider these to be too long to read in French again. I also tried reading Madame Bovary in French but found it a bit too boring. A book I was considering is Les Liaisons dangereuses but since it's such an old book I fear the French might be a bit outdated (as in, maybe the expressions used are no longer common?) and honestly I'd rather read something more recently written than all these books I just mentioned anyway. Any suggestions?

I found L'etranger by Camus to be pretty nice to read in French, it's short and pretty simple in terms of what's happening at any given time. I'm working on La Peste now but it's a little longer and seems to occasionally launch into really abstract passages I find it difficult to wrap my head around, or starts a long conversation that uses every different word French has for coffin. Madame Bovary is also on the list of things to read, I'm trying to gradually ramp up the difficulty until I can tackle A la recherche de temps perdu.

Burning Rain
Jul 17, 2006

What's happening?!?!
I'm learning Catalan from The Little Prince now. I'm beginning to hate Saint Exupery and his precious stylings.

Also, I grew up bilingual in Latvian and Russian, but not having used Russian often for the last 15 years means that now reading in Russian is like entering a darkened forest of suffocating sentences where the branches of words keep falling on my head or something. Basically, I feel a strange sense of uneasiness like I'm not safe in this environment even if I seem to know everything around me. Or maybe I shouldn't have read Platonov and Zamyatin.

Stravinsky
May 31, 2011

I am slowly making my way through Mo Yan's 生死疲勞 (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out) in chinese. Slowly because I am looking up characters pretty frequently because I am very bad at Chinese.

Sulphagnist
Oct 10, 2006

WARNING! INTRUDERS DETECTED

This is going out on a limb but I'm looking for an author writing in Swedish who writes something like detective novels or thrillers (and I know there's a lot of those to pick from) who uses pretty simple language and whose plots are easy to follow. You know, like a Swedish Tom Clancy. Guillou's Hamilton series maybe?

Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Sep 17, 2014

Hedningen
May 4, 2013

Enough sideburns to last a lifetime.

Antti posted:

This is going out on a limb but I'm looking for an author writing in Swedish who writes something like detective novels or thrillers (and I know there's a lot of those to pick from) who uses pretty simple language and whose plots are easy to follow. You know, like a Swedish Tom Clancy. Guillou's Hamilton series maybe?

Guillou is fairly good, although having read little of his work, I can't comment definitively. Karin Alvtegen is another good author for this - I've seen "Skuld" and "Svek" used in intermediate classes for learners, as they've got relatively conventional plots and fairly easy language to understand.

Sulphagnist
Oct 10, 2006

WARNING! INTRUDERS DETECTED

Hedningen posted:

Guillou is fairly good, although having read little of his work, I can't comment definitively. Karin Alvtegen is another good author for this - I've seen "Skuld" and "Svek" used in intermediate classes for learners, as they've got relatively conventional plots and fairly easy language to understand.

That sounds exactly like what I was looking for and there's a copy of Svek in a library near me. Tack!

inverts
Jul 6, 2014
When I was studying French in school, my teacher would have us read plays instead of novels. Since it's mostly dialogue, it was more useful for our conversation skills, and probably easier than a novel which might have fancier language. I remember really enjoying Le Roi se meurt (translated as Exit the King) by Ionesco. And of course, we read Le Petit Prince. I love that book. It's great for learning, and a great story too, if you ask me.

The Erland posted:

In general, I think it's smart to start of with something simple that you're already familiar with. I know a lot of people like to learn by reading stuff like Harry Potter in foreign languages, which is probably a good idea.

That is a good idea and I'm now thinking I'd like to get a copy of Harry Potter in French.

Pompous Rhombus
Mar 11, 2007
Back when my Thai was a lot more fresh, I read มองตะวันตกจากสายตาคนตะวันออก (~"View the West from the Eyes of an Eastern Person"), which was written by a Thai monk who spent five years living in Canada (this is relatively modern), then returned to Thailand and wrote a book about his experiences.

Some of his insights were a bit superficial, like, I could see how he could get that impression, but I think most Westerners would agree that he didn't quite get the whole picture (sorry not to have any specific examples; I have the book right here but I read it about six years ago and my memory is a little hazy). Other stuff I did find genuinely interesting and insightful, like his shock that people put their parents in an old folks home.

I also got more than half of the way through a book about ancient Thailand while I was traveling, but it got pretty boring, I had to put it down.

I had a much harder time with fiction since the language used differs a fair bit from what I learned in class (Thai for professional/academic usage), unless of course it's dialog heavy and not super colloquial. This sounds really lovely, but in the case of Thai I don't know that it's really worth it to invest the time in upping my fiction-reading game: there's not a huge literary corpus, and what there is isn't really that amazing (this coming from well-educated Thai people I asked, and my own dippings of toe in the few recommendations I was able to pry out of them). :smith:

I do want to get back into it (I miss being good at another language, and I might be able to find a way to work some fieldwork in Thailand into my Master's), fortunately have some other non-fiction books I brought home when I left Thailand, including the intriguingly-named "Dhammic Socialism".

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Probably not exactly what the thread is for but the first book I read in English (and convinced me I'm capable of reading in English) was The Hobbit. I needed a dictionary but by the end I really appareciated the prose; the translation to my language (Czech) is actually really good but Tolkien's got a kind of poetry that simply doesn't carry over; the songs and poems in particular and even little bits like the riddles work that much better in original. I proceeded to read Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion in English and it really made me rediscover what I originally considered just influential fantasy.

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Psykmoe
Oct 28, 2008
I read all my lovely sci-fi schlock books in English instead of my native language, because local translations are often pretty low effort and occasionally even internally inconsistent in the same series when translators were switched around.

Higher profile and more respected works tend to have better translations. I've read many Terry Pratchet books and Tolkien works in German because they belong to my father who doesn't speak English and they've got pretty solid translations, although I've got one Pratchet book sitting around somewhere in which the translator worked very heavily with on-page footnotes to explain some examples of word play jokes that were difficult to translate. This is not normally something a publisher will accept from a translator peon so in this case the translator must have had an especially apathetic publisher or a good relationship with them.

Once you get into real high literature canon stuff, things are different because they often date from a period where translating stuff wasn't something you could just hire out to some peon for 3 cents on the word online, so I'm less qualified to comment on that :v: Also I've never felt compelled to seek out a German translation to Thoreau or Emerson or something from that period. (My first degree was a useless Literature degree).

I'm studying to be a translator so I even though I prefer to read English works in the original language (and most of my university literature was in English anyway) it's still very interesting to look at German translations, not just in books but in other mediums too.

Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Dec 16, 2014

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