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There are a couple of books I want to read (plan to read soon, in fact, as I've located free translations I can download for my PDA), that I can't help feeling I Really Ought to read in their original language, in this case Italian. I'm feeling, well, almost guilty for resorting to translations. Like I'm cheating ... no, not cheating, just taking shortcuts and not doing proper scholarship.
This is not reasonable when I stop to analyze it. How long would it take me to learn Italian well enough to read the originals, and how many more books would I wind up using that skill for? (Okay, The Divine Comedy comes to mind, but I think I'd need to do an additional round of language learning for that -- isn't it in something halfway between Latin and Italian, or have I misremembered?) And unless I became really fluent, would I really gain a better understanding from the original language than I will from a good translation? (Of course, there's the matter of how to determine whether the translations I've gotten my hand on are any good ...)
The same argument holds for a few works I'd like to read in German and Hebrew and Old English, of course. I'd be undertaking a huge amount of study just to read a handful of books. (Not that there wouldn't be significant beneficial side effects, of course, such as the ability to converse with living people who speak those languages -- but considered in light of my current motivation it'd be a pretty big effort as "groundwork".) If I were going to read more than a few works here and there, it would make sense; if I were an historian or a literary scholar or a global news analyst, a frequent traveller or even a translator. But just to read a couple of books in each language ...? (Okay, it does make sense for really deep study of even a single work. Special case.)
I pick up programming languages very quickly. I learn human languages very slowly and find it frustrating. Yes, I'm pretty damned good with my native tongue, even if I do say so myself[0], and have an appreciation for nuance, meter, tone, and the precision afforded by the huge vocabulary English has available[1] -- I'd go so far as to say that I truly love Modern English[2] -- so it's not a matter of being tone-deaf to language[3]. Nor is it simple provincialism, for I consider it a failing that I do so poorly in other languages, not some sort of, "English is good enough for everyone so why should I learn anything else," attitude; and I really do appreciate the beauty of French and Greek, the other two languages I know even a little bit of[4]. I'm just a) not talented in that direction, and b) not sufficiently motivated to put in the amount of effort required to overcome that lack of talent, when I've got so many other intellectual pursuits beckoning.
So part of this nagging feeling that I'm "not doing it right" by reading translations is feeling guilty about my own priorities. Which is kinda silly. If I'm not going to feel my priorities are wrong enough to actually rearrange them, then I shouldn't feel bad about what they are, right?
Still, I wish that more of my six years of French and three years of Greek had stuck, that I could do better than halting conversation in French with frequent pauses to grope for words and constant fear of mangling tenses, that I could to more than recognize some words and recite a few favourite passages in Greek, that I could read smoothly in those languages instead of translating with a dictionary at hand (yes, simply practicing would -- ["will", I should substitute hopefully] -- brush a lot of the rust off of those) ... and that I were one of those people for whom language acquisition is a smooth enough process that I could have picked up a few more languages in my youth.
I don't go quite so far as wishing that I had traded my time at mathematics, programming, guitar, and -- yes -- English for the time it would have taken for me to learn more languages with only an ordinary degree of talent[5], but I do go as far as wishing I could eat my cake and have it too.
All of which digression has distracted me enough to go read those translations now without the "academic shortcut" shame being quite so annoyingly fresh on my mind as to get in the way.
[0] Yes, I think I'm pretty good, but that
doesn't mean I fail to notice those who stand head and shoulders above
me, even here on LiveJournal. I am not ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
misia or
n0ire, I am not Vonnegut or Zelazny or Keillor ...
but I am not embarrassed to say, "I'm pretty good at expressing
myself." I'm not quite willing to say, "I am a writer" --
compare me to theferrett to see the difference a goal
and conscientious practice makes -- but I do think I'm better at
expressing myself than a fair percentage of the population. There's
a reason I was the programmer who got forced to play tech writer
when working for folks who didn't have a real tech writer.
[1] Admittedly a large part of the reason English has such a huge number of words is that English speakers tend to consider any subset of any other language that looks useful at the moment to be fair game for inclusion in the English lexicon. Yeah, y'all know the relevant (and oh so catchy) James D. Nicoll quotation, right?
[2] The more I look at it, the more nifty Middle English seems, but I can't say I really know it well enough yet. And Old English still looks more German than familiar, so far. Of course, I mean "Modern English" in the technical sense, including Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
[3] Actually, I'm almost halfway decent at identifying languages that I don't know when overhearing them, and got a surprising-to-me score on an online test for identifying sample sentences in obscure languages (though in the latter case, alphabets were a big clue).
[4] Knowing how to say "Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas," and "Cogito ergo oblivio," do not constitute enough for me to claim "a little bit" of Latin any more than counting to ten in Spanish or saying good night in Russian counts for those languages. That's "knowing a few phrases."
[5] Of course, being American, I've had less everyday exposure to other languages than some other folks. I'm guessing that constant exposure helps even people with merely ordinary language-learning ability pick up languages faster than I have. Still, many people just seem to be able to focus on learning a language better than I do, many seem to "just absorb it" better than I do whether they're trying to or not, and some do both.
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Talk to me after that first novel, baby.
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Me, I'm mostly just blurting. (Okay, blurting and then editing a little...) And, like far too many other people, thinking, "Gee, I'd like to be a writer. Maybe I should start doing something about it someday instead of just daydreaming about it."
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What everyday exposure in adulthood is good for, in my experience, is maintaining a language. This is, I think, why I still have useful Spanish, and don't have useful Greek. But I haven't picked up Mandarin or Cantonese, or Haitian Creole, or Russian, or any of the other languages that are common around here. Of course, this is New York, where the Spanish is interlarded with English and Yiddish (and the Yiddish, for all I know, is picking up bits of Spanish, though the Yiddish-speaking community is more insular than some).
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I have to think a bit more about the language exposure thing .. and figure out what questions to ask my polyglot European friends to test my vague hypotheses.
Regarding note 2
For the record, that was enough German to comfortably read the last half of a popular novel at the time (the first half was read with the aid of a dictionary) and to use a German mathematical text as part of my B.A. thesis research.
Re: Regarding note 2
In my last year of French, the class was reading novels. Since the rest of my class seemed to have a much easier time of that than I did, I figure that with that much instruction and practice in French, I should have been able to keep up. That I struggled then is evidence that some people, at least those likely to choose to keep studying a foreign language as an elective after their academic requirement is fulfilled, are better at learning languages than I am.
But my description of my current skill level includes the accumulation of a fair amount of rust, as well. Other than the odd conversation with French Canadians at Pennsic and occasional French email from strangers (usually asking for information about chastity belts), I'm not called upon to use it much.
Re: Regarding note 2
Re: Regarding note 2
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brisingamen/568421.html
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I would love to have the time to learn several other languages, but given the time strictures I have, I read the translations of things. However, I also looked at the question of learning languages to read things in the original. For me the choice came down to the time it would take me to learn them, as evidenced above, against possibly getting a warped sense of what the writer wanted to express. On the other hand, I know enough well-educated folks (and have enough access to libraries) that I can read the commentary on almost any work I would want to read.
That sometimes feels less satisfactory than I would like, but given that humans have limited life spans it seemed to make the most sense to me.
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Conversational ability and reading ability don't completely map onto each other. (This is particularly true for languages like Chinese and Hebrew and Russian, which would entail learning a new symbol set to read, and in the case of Chinese a new way of reading.)
Hm, that makes me wonder - kids who know more than one language during the critical language acquisition phase end up with permanent changes in their brains that make it easier to learn more languages later. Does it affect the brain if a kid learns to read in more than one alphabet, or more than one writing system, during the same time?
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(I'm very slowly learning Biblical Hebrew because I've decided it's really really important. But I've never learned Italian or German or Greek, nor do I expect to.)
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