Watch Your Language Blog

More on reading foreign literature

The Catcher in the Rye was the first complete book I read in English, and I remember getting through it not knowing what rye was. It's funny, because rye is actually similar (and possibly related) to the Croatian raž. My English was then of the advanced-high-school-knowledge kind, so I think I also missed the whole metaphor associated with the book's title, as well as the relevant paragraphs in the book.

I found all this out some time later when I reread the novel with more years of English study under my belt. My rough estimate is that I understood only around 50-60% of the text, which included so much impenetrable slang and idiomatic language. (I did manage to get the meaning of the word phony, which, I'm sure, has something to do with how often it comes up.)

Still, I ended up loving the book, in whatever interpretation I might have assigned to it then. It must be all the universal between-the-lines stuff that has nothing to do with particular languages and everything to do with great literature...

Anyway, one of the greatest pleasures of learning a second language is reading books in it, rather than in translation. It's usually also the thing we push off for a long time fearing it will be too hard... but we shouldn't. As my example shows, for better or for worse, you can get a lot out of a book in the original, even when you miss as much I did.

If you want to be methodical, you could start by reading plays rather than novels, and read novels before you tackle poetry in any major way. Plays are shorter and they also usually involve simpler, everyday language, which you're likely to have been studying anyway. Poetry normally has the advantage of shortness, but the language is metaphorical, the vocabulary literary, often archaic, and the sentence structure often purposefully twists the rules of standard, everyday usage.

Novels usually combine dialogue and narrative, so you're likely to understand a good chunk of what you read. Also, they're long enough to contain redundancy -- and things you can skim or not get at all and just skip. And going for modern titles first, rather than older classics, will make things even more manageable.

The thing you want to avoid when you read in a second language is frustration -- it could lead you to drop the whole project, and that would be a pity. So, even if my high school teacher might have recommended reading with the dictionary in hand, stopping every sentence or two, checking each unfamiliar word and then writing it down in a notebook, that was clearly not what I thought should be done when I was seventeen, and I still don't.

You need to pick your battles. Certain words are just not that important; they may come up only rarely, for instance. The meaning of many other words can be guessed from the context, some words look similar to those in other languages you know, and then a few every now and then will seem important enough for you to look them up in the dictionary.

So, rely on your ability to derive meaning from the context and getting the gist of the text. We don't really know exact definitions of most words in our own native language either, do we? We usually think of words and their meanings in an approximate and flexible way, in terms of typical contexts of use and their relationships to other words.

As you know from our tip in the June newsletter, another good thing to do is to pick up a bilingual edition of a book, especially if you're intent on reading poetry. This is not so you read each sentence twice, in both languages (or just give up on the original and read the translation, for instance), but so you can have a quick and easy source of help if you get stuck and frustrated.

In fact, it is even better than going to the dictionary to look up individual words, because the exercise will also make you realize some finer points of language: what you get in a literary translation is contextual equivalents between the second language and your native language, not exact word-by-word mapping. This will eventually teach you to stop looking for literal translations yourself when you speak or write in your second language.

Tags: bilingual books, foreign literature, newsletter
July 25, 2008