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Interesting. Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers. I had a hard time with Shakespeare, but enjoyed equivalent German poets a lot (

by netrus 12y ago

Interesting. Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers. I had a hard time with Shakespeare, but enjoyed equivalent German poets a lot (though Goethe etc. worked more than a hundred years later ... no plain text translation is needed). Their language is plain beautiful, and getting their wit is like solving a riddle.

iamthepieman 12y ago
I'm a native English speaker and I find Goethe easier to read and understand than Shakespeare. In fact, although I love Shakespeare, it takes less mental energy to read Faust than it does to watch a performance of Hamlet.
collyw 12y ago
Boring and pointless. See my comment with multiple down-votes above. (To be fair a lot of school seems like that when you are a teenager, but Shakespeare has stuck in my memory as being particularly boring, and particularly pointless).
ghostDancer 12y ago
In Spanish you can consider Cervantes and his work "Don Quijote" , as the top of the literature, more or less the Shakespeare in Spanish, not same style, Cervantes was novelist, and i can tell you that it was a PITA to read in our literature class in school because the language had little to do with modern Spanish and it was at the same time so rich in vocabulary that you had to read it with a dictionary next to you, and ended reading one of the "translations" to modern Spanish. As a curiosity Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same date but different days , Gregorian and Julian calendars were used in Spain and England at that time.
leephillips 12y ago
"Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers" I wasn't going to chime in, but I think you need another data point. Also, I had assumed that collyw was pulling our legs - his original comment seemed so much like satire. But now it seems that he's probably serious. Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, which is a somewhat archaic form of Modern English. It is immediately comprehensible to any native reader with normal language skills, who can read English at a high school level. Not fully comprehensible, but there is no obstacle to getting the gist, and much more. I studied Hamlet with Frank McCourt. We had no "translation" and didn't need any. It is helpful when starting out to have a glossary of the archaic meanings of some words used by Shakespeare in a different sense from their most common meaning today. McCourt needed to explain almost nothing - he confined his teaching to sharing his love of the work and simply insisting that we pay attention to the words on the page and think about what the author was getting at. He mostly refused to explicate the frequent sexual innuendo, preferring that we figure it out ourselves. Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week. And I discovered the inner genius of Shakespeare: a blending of his characters' states of mind with the texture of language. This is why the idea of "translation" of this kind of literature is problematic. Don't close yourself off from these potential joys because it takes a little effort.
- collyw 12y ago
  "Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week." Interesting, that seems like satire to me! I studied more than enough Shakespeare to know I didn't like it and didn't gain anything from it. I don't see how you can describe a "texture to the language" when most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page. I guess that much of the modern comedy that I see as being very smart and political may be lost on others.
  - leephillips 12y ago
    Maybe not your fault. A bad teacher can make anything seem dull. I've heard some students even find math unexciting. (I love the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the teacher is actually copulating on the desk in front of the class, but his students are just bored). "most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page" As I said, it did not. And much of the class came from households where English was not spoken.

by netrus 12y ago

iamthepieman 12y ago

I'm a native English speaker and I find Goethe easier to read and understand than Shakespeare. In fact, although I love Shakespeare, it takes less mental energy to read Faust than it does to watch a performance of Hamlet.

collyw 12y ago

Boring and pointless. See my comment with multiple down-votes above. (To be fair a lot of school seems like that when you are a teenager, but Shakespeare has stuck in my memory as being particularly boring, and particularly pointless).

ghostDancer 12y ago

In Spanish you can consider Cervantes and his work "Don Quijote" , as the top of the literature, more or less the Shakespeare in Spanish, not same style, Cervantes was novelist, and i can tell you that it was a PITA to read in our literature class in school because the language had little to do with modern Spanish and it was at the same time so rich in vocabulary that you had to read it with a dictionary next to you, and ended reading one of the "translations" to modern Spanish. As a curiosity Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same date but different days , Gregorian and Julian calendars were used in Spain and England at that time.

leephillips 12y ago

"Always wondered how studying Shakespeare feels for native speakers" I wasn't going to chime in, but I think you need another data point. Also, I had assumed that collyw was pulling our legs - his original comment seemed so much like satire. But now it seems that he's probably serious. Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, which is a somewhat archaic form of Modern English. It is immediately comprehensible to any native reader with normal language skills, who can read English at a high school level. Not fully comprehensible, but there is no obstacle to getting the gist, and much more. I studied Hamlet with Frank McCourt. We had no "translation" and didn't need any. It is helpful when starting out to have a glossary of the archaic meanings of some words used by Shakespeare in a different sense from their most common meaning today. McCourt needed to explain almost nothing - he confined his teaching to sharing his love of the work and simply insisting that we pay attention to the words on the page and think about what the author was getting at. He mostly refused to explicate the frequent sexual innuendo, preferring that we figure it out ourselves. Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week. And I discovered the inner genius of Shakespeare: a blending of his characters' states of mind with the texture of language. This is why the idea of "translation" of this kind of literature is problematic. Don't close yourself off from these potential joys because it takes a little effort.

collyw 12y ago
"Studying Hamlet was such an immensely powerful experience of aesthetic bliss that I can remember sitting in that classroom 40 years ago better than most things that happened last week." Interesting, that seems like satire to me! I studied more than enough Shakespeare to know I didn't like it and didn't gain anything from it. I don't see how you can describe a "texture to the language" when most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page. I guess that much of the modern comedy that I see as being very smart and political may be lost on others.
- leephillips 12y ago
  Maybe not your fault. A bad teacher can make anything seem dull. I've heard some students even find math unexciting. (I love the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the teacher is actually copulating on the desk in front of the class, but his students are just bored). "most of it required reading a translation of it on the opposite page" As I said, it did not. And much of the class came from households where English was not spoken.