With paper books, you are pretty much stuck. On the other hand, e-books - with the right combination of software and open formats - may soon prove to be just the solution to keep you reading and learning in the new language. And, with the language learning market attracting billions of dollars, you can be sure somebody will find a way to make the best of the possibilities offered by e-books.
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I could not avoid noticing the differences in phrases I am learning in Spanish as compared to the ones I was learning in French.
Both language classes spent a first couple of weeks with Name, Surname, Workplace, Street address, Phone number and suchlike. No surprise there, even though I don’t normally rattle out my full details at the first meeting with a stranger.
However, I distinctly remember also having to divulge my marital and parenthood status in the early French classes (e.
I always feel impressed by translators. Recently, I have finished reading the english translation of NightWatch and it was very well done. I have read the russian original a number of times and could not see how a translation could make it justice. Yet it did and did it well. Congratulations to Andrew Bromfield on that one.
Today (30th of September) is an International Translation Day. I want to say a delayed thank-you to those people who allowed me to read Pippi Longstocking, The Three Musketeers and Don Quixote de la Mancha in my native Russian by translating those works from Swedish, French and Spanish correspondingly.
When I was studying French, my teacher liked to measure out the knowledge at her own pace. If you asked about something that in her study plan was a couple of weeks later, she would pretty much tell you to learn what you are supposed to know first.
Being the kind of person who likes to connect the dots and figure out what’s important and what’s not himself, I was somewhat annoyed at this spoon-fed method.
French and Esperanto are taking a bit of a long break. I am learning Spanish now. I heard that it was easier to start learning than the French (though of course not as easy as Esperanto). I was looking forward to it.
So, the first lesson was a bit of a shock. Turns out that when the language book talks about Spanish being phonetically regular and pronounced as written, they meant the regularity within one particular Spanish-speaking group.