Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

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  Fiction, English

Listening: Swords in the Mist, Fritz Leiber. Third in the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections.

Reading: The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin.

  Fiction, Spanish

I’m trying to learn Spanish. I’ve picked up a few Spanish language fiction books, presently starting on Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. I’ve tried reading other books, like Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, but I’ve found it to be above my present level. I’ve restarted four or five times and made it further each time, but always stalled out.

  Non-fiction

The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman.

I have other books started lying around the house, but these are the ones I’ve been actively engaged with in the last couple weeks. When I can type properly again (two to three weeks) I’ll resume Lisp in Small Pieces, Christian Queinnec. And at the office I have The Pragmatic Programmer, I’ll be back there next week and bring it home so I can continue with it.

Good luck with reading Spanish! Please be easy on yourself, it took me 4 years of reading off and on to get to the point of reading books like “1491: Una nueva historia de las Américas antes de Colón“. Also, factual based books are much, much easier to understand than novels. The problem with reading Gabriel García Márquez is that reality and un-reality are blended together using sophisticated grammatical constructs that you have no idea what is going on. Remember, language can express things that are abstract. Abstraction in a second language is hard!

If I have one piece of advice for you, please try to completely avoid reaching for the dictionary (app or physical) while reading your books. Not only will avoiding the dictionary make the reading faster, your pattern matching will improve because your mind will be forced to “fill in the blanks” where there is insufficient understanding. I know there are polyglots out there that advise the opposite of “don’t go to the next page until you know everything”. Bah humbug, reading should not be a homework assignment.

Finally, buying the audiobook and reading along with the book will help train your ear for faster pattern recognition and signal/noise differentiation. Be advised though that audio books may not be one to one exact with the printed text.

I also recommend “Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate”.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I selected Harry Potter because I know the stories decently (read the books whenever book 7 came out, saw all the movies at least once each, maybe twice for a couple). But I’m not familiar enough to be able to read the Spanish version and really just be recalling the English version (why I’m avoiding translations of my favorite authors, I know the books too well).

And yeah, I’m skipping the dictionary while reading. I tried that, it was awful. I’m identifying words (sometimes asking my wife) and looking them up after finishing a chapter. I plan to reread the book (possibly restart before completing) to see how much of what’s new has stuck. I already have homework since I’m working through a college Spanish textbook and have signed up for online courses (weekly, but it’s practice and I’m getting to hear the Argentine accent which is the one I need to understand most, my wife is from there).

After this book, I’ll probably continue picking up the rest of the series (we want a bilingual library anyways for when we have kids), and then some non-fiction. Ideally I want to find some non-fiction histories or technical content in Spanish by native Spanish writers. I’m also trying to read Spanish-language news, but I haven’t made it a regular habit yet.

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