It took reading many articles and watching quite a few YouTube videos made by polyglots and language teachers before I started to accept the idea that it’s OK not to understand every word as you’re reading a book in another language. Two-three years ago I read Ollie Richards’s Short Stories in Swedish for Beginners, which encouraged this style of reading, but I never really internalized it.
But finally, I (metaphorically) shut my eyes and took the plunge with Ronja rövardotter by Astrid Lindgren. The compromise I made with myself is that I underlined the words I didn’t know. Y’know, so on the off chance I come back to the book someday, I can look those words up. Because I let go of needing to know everything, to read/understand the book “as the author intended,” I was able to read to the end in a weekend.
(Of course, now that I’m reading a play–Macbeth–in Swedish, I’ve reverted to looking up unfamiliar terms. But I don’t think that’s much different than having words or phrases defined every few lines in the original version because they’re incomprehensible to modern English speakers. Overall, I’d say reading/understanding Macbeth in Swedish is similarly challenging to reading it in the original.)
One of the reasons I pushed myself to finish Ronja is that there’s a recent Swedish Netflix adaptation of the book . . . though the more I watch the series, the more I find that they’ve added characters and subplots that didn’t appear in the book to pad it out to two parts and 12 episodes.
So I’ve been trying to focus on fun details instead of my frustration with their storytelling choices. For example, the onomatopoeia in the subtitles describing the sounds of the forest and city:
- [fågelkvitter] – bird chirping
- [en tupp gal] – a rooster crows
- [en uggla hoar] – an owl hoots
- [vingfladder] – wings flutter
- [en hackspett hackar] – a woodpecker pecks
- [en fluga surrar] – a fly buzzes
- [möss piper] – mice squeak
- [syrsor spelar] – crickets playing
- [en hund skäller] – a dog barks
- [ett får bräker] – a sheep bleats
- [dörren gnisslar] – the door squeaks
- [elden sprakar] – the fire crackles
- [spridda djurläten] – scattered animal sounds
- [en häst gnäggar] – a horse neighs
- [grisar grymtar] – pigs grunt
Yes, I am a word nerd. And yes, I am still enjoying the series, even though what I really wanted was some comfort viewing with no surprises. Sigh.
Though familiar isn’t always good. I’m a bit disappointed with Ollie Richards’s Short Stories series, as it appears that the books for beginners have the same stories with the same pictures, just in different languages and with culture-specific details changed. For example, the first story in the Swedish book is “Den galna köttbullen”–The crazy [Swedish] meatball. In French, it’s “La Ratatouille folle”–The crazy ratatouille, and in German, “Die verrückte Currywurst”–The crazy curry sausage. (These are the names of restaurants.) I read the Swedish book several years ago, and I recently bought the French version in hopes of having something to read when I’m ready for it. I guess it’ll be helpful to have a general grasp of the stories before I start?
In addition to all the conjugation, I believe there are 16 tenses (combinations of mood and tense) in French. I’ve just completed level A1 and have only been splashing around in the present so far. Time to go a little deeper! I’ve heard that it’s difficult to read before reaching the intermediate level (B1 or above) because many books use a tense not generally used in everyday communication. German may be similar, though it uses fewer tenses. I’d always wondered why we learned “I have run” before “I ran” in German, and it seems that’s because the former is more commonly used in speech and the latter is more commonly used in writing.
Anyway, these are the things I’ve been thinking about as I’m learning languages, of late. Currently moving on to A2 in French and attempting to polish my Swedish grammar with the Rivstart B1/B2 book, though I’ll be starting a new reading class on Monday with En helt vanlig familj. (I hope to finish Macbeth before then, but we’ll see.)
Allons-y! / Nu kör vi!
Numberless Dreams 