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Comment by chrstphrknwtn | Hacker News Reader

Reading the bible to learn English does not seem like a good idea. The English of the bible is not common everyday English that will be most useful for communicating with others today.

Watching films or television in English, with subtitles in your native language is good advice.

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> Reading the bible to learn English does not seem like a good idea. The English of the bible is not common everyday English

The degree to which that is true depends on the translation. The KJV is someone arcane, many others are not. And it's one of the easiest large written corpuses to get your hands on parallel (even if separately published) versions of the same source material in English and whatever language you are coming from, and having a large written parallel corpus to study is probably a very good tool for self-study.

Even if you learn old English from that (rather than using a modern English translation), it'd still give you a good base (grammar etc.) for then understanding modern English. It might lead to learning a slightly odd/old variation of English, and might not be the most efficient route, but I can see it being effective for being able to understand English.

For someone not from a Western culture, it will also help them understand a lot of cultural references that won't make much sense otherwise, like "seeing the handwriting on the wall."

> "seeing the handwriting on the wall."

I've known that phrase for...I don't even know how long. But I only learned yesterday that its origin was Biblical. I love how Dan Carlin says "mene mene tekel upharsin" and wanted to read more about it, and made that happy discovery.

Ahh, but actually the 'u' at the start of the 4th word is how they wrote 'and' so it's not clear it would've been written on the wall :)

Yeah, there are a lot of things like that which people have forgotten the origins of...

Most people use modern English translations of the Bible.

If anything, you might learn a _cooler_ English by reading the Bible! :-)

Interesting feedback, but the deed is already done.

Also it worked well for him. Thus, I assume any method would be met with your derision.

Not to mention there are natural english versions of the Bible, so you are casting that one.

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