18.01.2023
How do you pick your first book in a foreign language?
Back when I was learning German, my prof at university recommended this method: you take a book and try to read it without a dictionary. And then again, and again. At some point enlightenment is supposed to strike and you'll understand something.
It's supposed to work especially well somewhere you can't easily reach for a translator: on a bus at rush hour, for example. That's when your brain suffers and suffers and starts guessing the words.
And of course, the book has to be interesting.
Sounds good? It does. But there are nuances — I've had two fails.
The first time, I was off to Karelia for a slow, lazy hiking trip built around eating blueberries (a week with no internet — perfect for reading, right?), popped into a bookstore looking for a not-too-thick German book, and walked out with Hoffmann's fairy tales (had wanted to read them for ages!). Fairy tales are for kids, so they must be easy, right? Nooope! Hoffmann writes in these gorgeous, long, shimmering sentences with a billion beautiful epithets. But when you're waiting out the rain under a fir tree, the mosquitoes aren't going to help you translate all of that, alas. There was a lot of rain — on that trip we broke tic-tac-toe. So yeah, anything fantasy, magical realism, or Harry Potter — I don't recommend it.
The second time I didn't go hiking, and I remembered another piece of advice from that teacher: pick the trashiest book possible, like some romance novel. The novel turned out to be really interesting, and somewhere around page ten I switched back to a language I actually understand (what conclusion to draw from this — no idea!)
Anyway, today I'm hunting for a book in Spanish. For now I'm pinning my hopes on something from young adult lit (I love it) and diligently not downloading Cortázar.
#spanish 😁3