10 ms·

I'd love to see this sort of thing in many languages. I have no interest in conversational language learning or being able to write in any language. My primary

I'd love to see this sort of thing in many languages. I have no interest in conversational language learning or being able to write in any language. My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern).

Gravityloss 7y ago
English language literature has had characters like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication. Did this happen in other languages as well? I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.
- eurg 7y ago
  Newspapers and literature are quite distinct. Good authors do not require the smokescreen that typical journalists use. Whatever the language.
- Swizec 7y ago
  If you have nothing to say, you make it complicated to fill space. You see this in English, too.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Don't get me started about Crystalmark dumbed down English campaign. That's these folks: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html. They espouse short words that they then misapply, and the result isn't even easier to understand.
- LeonidasXIV 7y ago
  > I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language. That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands. Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
  - fwn 7y ago
    This is a cliche. There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
    - groovy2shoes 7y ago
      > This is a cliche. It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind). > There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register). In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error. > I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language. I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however). > ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I know this is difficult— Good luck! :) -- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
- leipert 7y ago
  Depends. Usually (German) news papers cater an audience which wants to read things in a "more complicated" way. I don't know your level of proficiency and which publications you looked it, usually magazines and news papers might try to be more playful with language as well, this could be what is making it more exhausting to read it. If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
- diego_moita 7y ago
  > English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles ????? Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
  - Gravityloss 7y ago
    You are right. I meant George Orwell!
    - machinecoffee 7y ago
      >who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it. A horrible example of state control.
      - Gravityloss 7y ago
        George Orwell - Politics and the English Language : https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
symplee 7y ago
(removed - since this reply was for a different comment)
- yorwba 7y ago
  Alternatively, for human-translated sentences (some with audio) check out https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org
melling 7y ago
I have an iOS app that helps people learn their first 100 words in several different languages. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.
- FabHK 7y ago
  That's sort of the opposite though. The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.
HuShifang 7y ago
American universities often have courses designed precisely for this purpose, intended for graduate students who need to be able to read scholarship in language X (often called "X for Reading Knowledge”). And the courses often stick pretty close to the textbooks, which are often written to support self-study. Off the top of my head, there are books intended for English speakers who want to read scholarly French (Sandberg), German (Jannach & Kolb, Sandberg again, and of course this site), and Russian (forget the author, but it was published a while back by Slavica). There are some similar books for Latin and Ancient Greek too, I think, that follow similar approaches. Most of the old ones are like this, obviously, but a few new ones also reject the trend of teaching them as if they were lively living languages. BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
- garmaine 7y ago
  There are no courses that focus on that approach for East Asian languages, but the material exists. Many polyglots are of the opinion that reading-first is the fastest way to mastery. Not to conversational skill, but full mastery. They’ve filled the gaps. There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    Is there a reference list of these resources?
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Isn’t that what you’re replying to?
Razengan 7y ago
> My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern). If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language. It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
- mike_hock 7y ago
  It's also literally like exploring entirely new words.
wrp 7y ago
These are the texts I used back in the day: Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese. Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician. Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e. Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.
jhedwards 7y ago
For classical Chinese that would be An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller. That will open you up to most pre-modern Chinese lit.
- HuShifang 7y ago
  Second this - I think it's the strongest textbook out there. Paul Kroll's dictionary (which is also available on the Pleco app) might be a good complement.
dorchadas 7y ago
For Latin you might like Lingua Latina per se illustrata. It teaches Latin solely through Latin itself, starting with simple sentences. As such, it's mostly focused on reading Latin. You can also look for the "Nature Method" books available in Italian and French (and there's supposedly a Russian one, but I haven't found a scan of it and only know of one copy hidden away in a university library in the US). It's my goal to be able to update these one day, but I believe they're still under copyright except in the US.
- novalis78 7y ago
  Lingua Latina seconded. It’s a tremendously powerful to acquire Latin on such an intuitive level that you will find yourself thinking in Latin after a while. A lot of fun!

Gravityloss 7y ago

English language literature has had characters like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication. Did this happen in other languages as well? I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.

eurg 7y ago
Newspapers and literature are quite distinct. Good authors do not require the smokescreen that typical journalists use. Whatever the language.
Swizec 7y ago
If you have nothing to say, you make it complicated to fill space. You see this in English, too.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Don't get me started about Crystalmark dumbed down English campaign. That's these folks: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html. They espouse short words that they then misapply, and the result isn't even easier to understand.
LeonidasXIV 7y ago
> I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language. That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands. Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
- fwn 7y ago
  This is a cliche. There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
  - groovy2shoes 7y ago
    > This is a cliche. It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind). > There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words. Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register). In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error. > I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice. This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language. I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however). > ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!) I know this is difficult— Good luck! :) -- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
leipert 7y ago
Depends. Usually (German) news papers cater an audience which wants to read things in a "more complicated" way. I don't know your level of proficiency and which publications you looked it, usually magazines and news papers might try to be more playful with language as well, this could be what is making it more exhausting to read it. If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
diego_moita 7y ago
> English language literature has had [...] Orson Welles ????? Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  You are right. I meant George Orwell!
  - machinecoffee 7y ago
    >who had an effect that writing lost a lot of overcomplication I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it. A horrible example of state control.
    - Gravityloss 7y ago
      George Orwell - Politics and the English Language : https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

symplee 7y ago

(removed - since this reply was for a different comment)

yorwba 7y ago
Alternatively, for human-translated sentences (some with audio) check out https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org

melling 7y ago

I have an iOS app that helps people learn their first 100 words in several different languages. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237 I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.

FabHK 7y ago
That's sort of the opposite though. The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.

HuShifang 7y ago

American universities often have courses designed precisely for this purpose, intended for graduate students who need to be able to read scholarship in language X (often called "X for Reading Knowledge”). And the courses often stick pretty close to the textbooks, which are often written to support self-study. Off the top of my head, there are books intended for English speakers who want to read scholarly French (Sandberg), German (Jannach & Kolb, Sandberg again, and of course this site), and Russian (forget the author, but it was published a while back by Slavica). There are some similar books for Latin and Ancient Greek too, I think, that follow similar approaches. Most of the old ones are like this, obviously, but a few new ones also reject the trend of teaching them as if they were lively living languages. BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.

garmaine 7y ago
There are no courses that focus on that approach for East Asian languages, but the material exists. Many polyglots are of the opinion that reading-first is the fastest way to mastery. Not to conversational skill, but full mastery. They’ve filled the gaps. There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
- mcguire 7y ago
  Is there a reference list of these resources?
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Isn’t that what you’re replying to?

Razengan 7y ago

> My primary interest in any foreign language is to be able to read and comprehend literature in that language (both ancient and modern). If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language. It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.

mike_hock 7y ago
It's also literally like exploring entirely new words.

wrp 7y ago

These are the texts I used back in the day: Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese. Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician. Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e. Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.

jhedwards 7y ago

For classical Chinese that would be An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller. That will open you up to most pre-modern Chinese lit.

HuShifang 7y ago
Second this - I think it's the strongest textbook out there. Paul Kroll's dictionary (which is also available on the Pleco app) might be a good complement.

dorchadas 7y ago

For Latin you might like Lingua Latina per se illustrata. It teaches Latin solely through Latin itself, starting with simple sentences. As such, it's mostly focused on reading Latin. You can also look for the "Nature Method" books available in Italian and French (and there's supposedly a Russian one, but I haven't found a scan of it and only know of one copy hidden away in a university library in the US). It's my goal to be able to update these one day, but I believe they're still under copyright except in the US.

novalis78 7y ago
Lingua Latina seconded. It’s a tremendously powerful to acquire Latin on such an intuitive level that you will find yourself thinking in Latin after a while. A lot of fun!