Has anyone read a work of literature in a foreign language?

Has anyone read a work of literature in a foreign language?

I'm reading novels in English and my imagination isn't as vivid as when I read in French. I only see glimpses of the scenes as if I'm an old man with cataracts.

How do I deal with this?

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Strive towards complete proficiency. Consume more foreign media and train yourself to reliably think in another language.

Watch movies?

I'm reading Blood Meridian in german. I found it in the bargain bin. Mmmm. It's okay.

Although I live in germany, I never really got into german novels. German poems and even wanderlieder, sure, but I just can't enjoy books as much. I'm determined to stick with it, and it is entertaining, but I can't help but imagine how much more I'd be enjoying it if I were reading it in english.

yeah a book like that you need to read in english. I can't imagine the translation holding up at all to the original.

Yes. Consume all kinds of media. Most importantly though find a way to have conversations in language and learn to express yourself precisely and quickly. As I said your goal should be the ability to actually think in another language, so that you actually bind objects and concepts directly to it instead of having to go through the lens of translation to your native tongue.

Thanks, that actually makes me feel better. I feel kind of guilty about it. I'm sure it would be better for someone who grew up with the language, but I just lack the eh- feingefühl to feel those emotional nuances in the words.

I can already think in English. My vocab isn't bad. But expressions like "I'm reeling away" "I'm floored" stump me. I feel like I should have grown up in the US for these expressions to come naturally to me.

Well you should get yourself to the level where you develop an almost-native sense of language, that's what I mean by being able to think. Missing some specific vocab is natural even for natives, but the expressions you brought up can be well understood intuitively in my opinion.

My guess

I'm reeling away - I lost my focus
I'm floored - I'm frustrated?

I mostly read in English even though it's not my native tongue. I think it's because I spent most of my time online, and because I started out with sci-fi/fantasy which isn't popular here and so rarely gets translated.

I do read in my native tongue, though. There's a lot of books I find translated here that aren't available in English
at all (especially Turkish, Hungarian, Polish, and Japanese ones). They're pretty great.

Having said that, if I spend more than two weeks away from reading in English, coming back to it feels miserable. It's just such a simplistic and brutish tongue. Poetry in English apart from a few masterful ones like Paradise Lost is garbage.

>I'm floored
No- it depends on the context but it usually means something like shocked or stunned. "He said he used to be a ninja and I was floored."

I don't know about reeling away. I always saw reeling as a shocked thing, again. Not so much losing focus as being dazed. "She was reeling from shock." I never saw reeling away being used.

What's your native tongue?

Measure your vocab here and post results testyourvocab.com

My mistake. It was reeling around.

She can’t stop! Her face is being swarmed by happiness. Oh, I’m reeling around in here.

English in particular is extremely lossy. Just about any language translated into it comes out crippled, and google translating english into any language with declension is such a joke. If it's your native language, you should want to learn another one all the more.

Even without it, this is a really important thing to do in general. Imagine there are people who learned a language by reading a book about it, and talking to people and reading books in it.

Romanian.

Also, wew, this made me feel insecure. There were words so crazy I started wondering if they're made-up and put there just to deceive faggots into clicking on them out of pride.

Your total vocabulary size is estimated to be:
36,000
words

In any case, retaining the meaning of words has never been my strong suit. As far as English goes, I'm more likely to know some word that has a Latin origin and is used in philosophical texts than some tool one might find around the garage. And in Romanian it's the opposite--great with basic day-to-day shit, but terrible with those Slavic loanwords that are barely ever used.

Reeling is stepping/walking slowly and unfirmly. To reel away would be to slowly remove yourself from somewhere. Also has a certain undertone of absent-mindedness of the moving person.

Floored denotes exhaustion emotional or physical. Comes from 'to floor' as in knock someone to the floor either by punching or through shocking actions.

Average education native speaker has around 30,000 words. I score at 22,000 maybe that's why you can enjoy literature in English and I can't. Feels bad. Please share your secret. At some point in your life you only knew Romanian. Now you are better versed than native English speakers.

>education
educated

What does lurching mean, exactly? I'm not that guy but I've always wondered about this. Everywhere I look it up it's defined as a sudden movement, but then it's often used with reference to cars that are already speeding on the road, like, say, "The car lurched to the other side." So can it also mean a sudden jump in intensity?

I'm a very fast reader in my native tongue (English) so I often find when I'm reading in foreign languages (mainly Italian, since that's the foreign language I've studied in the greatest depth) I get somewhat frustrated at my slower progress. Sometimes I get around that by just reading the work out loud, since I'm then forced to read slower anyway. Also Italian is a nice language to hear spoken so it works on that level too.

When I read reel all I was thinking of was the fishing reel or the filmmaking reel. Feels bad.

I'm the dumb OP but lurching is easy. It's like a jerk but to a wider extent.

My stomach lurched - My stomach spasmed

My car lurched to the other side - My car swerved to the other side?

It means exactly what you said. Imagine a car suddenly changing lanes or making a swift U-turn. That's the sudden movement.

I'm portuguese and have been reading consistently in english for a handful of years, mostly because I'm into fantasy and only the mainstream shit gets translated. It was hard at first, I would get lost in the middle of long sentences and completely miss subtle use of dialects and metaphors. With time I got much better at it and nowadays feel almost as confortable reading in english as in my mother tongue. I get most cultural references, can spot regionalisms and dialects and other uses of words to convey additional meaning. Just stick with it and you'll improve eith time.

Also not all books are the same, some use much simpler language than others. Mainstream stuff is easy as fuck to me but currently I'm reading Lovecraft and his long, convoluted sentences and archaic terms are posing a challenge.

I'm reading young adult and it's giving me a hard time. I feel suicidal.

Nah, I never only knew Romanian. That's the thing, you guys are seriously fucked by the fact that you grow up with your TV programs being dubbed (which they've started doing here now too for whatever reason). The new generation of Romanian kids, like my cousins, can't speak English for shit. Since Romania is becoming le civilized country they're begun localizing everything... But when I was little all the cartoon channels were in English. And then I started fucking around on my computer and playing games, which were also in English. So, yeah.
Maybe in a sense it's disingenuous of me to say that it's my "second" tongue. I've probably known English for as long as I can remember, the same as I've known Romanian. I just don't use it in real life.

Could it be that you're reading the wrong sort of stuff in English? For example, I can't imagine reading a fantasy novel in Romanian. Maybe German, but never a Romance language. On the other hand, the idea of reading anything like Camus, Dostoevsky, or Dumas in English is physically triggering. English just isn't built to handle translations from Slavic and Romance languages.

Try reading some novels where the use of English blends in better with the setting, I'd say. Maybe some fantasy or Victorian shit? I have no idea. I'd honestly recommend you read A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin doesn't use a lot of fancy words, and you could get a handle on idioms and vague action verbs (which is probably what throws you off the most, as it was for me).

I played video games in English too... I watched Disney in English with French subs.

I'm reading I'll Give You the Sun which is mainstream YA and it's hard. I feel very dumb.

I'm trying to read in English because as you said only popular YA novels get translated into French.

English is weird because it has 20 different words for "walk" but it has no equivalent of "sortir" or "dépasser" so they have to say "get out" or "go beyond."

To elaborate, in French only JohnGreen tier YA gets translated, with the archetypical handsome jock who acts like a nerd and a nervous girl protagonist. Not authentic. I really like "the diary of a part time Indian" and I really like "I'll give you the sun" but I can't get into them. It really sucks.

Yeah, that's just generally a problem when translating though. Like German doesn't have a word for frown, but it has a lot of other useful words like heimweh or dämmerung. But if you want to translate "he frowned", you have to say "seine mundwinkel zogen nach unten."

But german is a great language because you spell all words like they're spoken, and you can just mash words together to make new ones and its great. But fuck noun genders, man.

What I wanted to say is that English has unnecessarily many words to denote slight nuances of a same action while lacking essential vocabularies like leaving the place.

Well, here's the thing. A lot of the time the YA stuff might prove more difficult than a normal fantasy novel, because they're catering to American teens (or just teens in general).

I remember meeting this Californian girl a few years ago, and I could barely understand a fucking thing that left her mouth. It wasn't that she was using highbrow vocab or that her accent was unintelligible... But her entire way of speaking consisted of hip idioms that are half-references and won't even exist by the time the next generation comes along, and I just couldn't understand what the fuck she was trying to communicate. Same thing happened when I tried reading Southern American lit like McCarthy. You get used to it after a while, though. You just need to suffer through it until you get the hang of the slang.

I've never read YA, but I have played games like Life is Strange and watched shows for teenage girls, and I assume it's sort of like that. I would still advise that you read something legit mainstream. Try reading some Martin. He's simple and clear (perhaps akin to a sledgehammer for some), and he's clearly writing for a global English-speaking audience. Or maybe Sanderson or Rothfuss, since they're more YA friendly.

And ,yeah, English doesn't have a lot of the words we have in our Romance tongues. The only saving grace of English is the fact that you can make up any kind of compound word you want. I love that about it.

I'm reading a Mishima Yukio novel in the original. It is difficult but more or less steady going, I chose a pulpier novel of his.

>leaving the place

Wouldn't depart work for that?

>go beyond

Maybe overtake?

Leaving a confined space like a room

I departed out of the room doesn't sound right

Sortir is one word and get out is a generic tasteless verb "get" modified by a adverb "out"

Going beyond as in going beyond the horizon

That's just the way analytical languages are. You can append several prefixes/suffixes or even glue roots together in synthetics like German to express finer meaning, but English completely relies on vocabulary. That's why 'English has the largest amount of words' always sounds funny when monolingual plebs try to use it as an argument for superiority, whereas it's exactly the opposite.

If they're written in english i read them in english, otherwise translation to my first language.
Just keep reading in english, it'll get better eventually, but it depends on the difficulty, obviously. When I read Brave new world I "saw" vivid images like I would in my first language, but now that I'm reading Portrait of the artist I hardly get that.
Imo it's beneficial either way because even if its hard and you don't understand as much it'll still help you improve your english.

What's stopping you from saying "I left the room"? Or just "I took off"?
And in that sense of go beyond you could conceivably use "surpass."
These just don't seem like real issues to me. There's a clear way of replacing them in English, even if they aren't one word. The only reason you're seeing it as a big tragedy is because you're coming in with the expectation of it working precisely like what you're used too. English will also have words that you won't be able to find in French. To take an easy example, philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition take issue with the fact that French doesn't differentiate between "mind" and "brain." At least, not in the same way it works in English. Professors that teach philosophy of mind courses always get triggered by this.

nah

>to exit

Okay, write "I exited the room" in your novel and expect no one to find that jarring.

Mind - esprit
Brain - cerveau

It's not jarring at all, what the fuck. Granted, it's usually used in a large space.

>i exited the mall
>i exited the city

But it's by no means jarring.

I read most of the literature I read in English which isn't my native tongue. I also read German sometimes, but I need some more fluency. In French I'll understand the text but I won't 'feel' it so I avoid that for now.

Like someone already said, dubbing is a huge problem here. Growing up hearing different languages help open up to learning them later on.

>here
Here as in 'regarding this issue' not here in my country, we don't do that.