Gradually morphing the tale of Pinocchio from English to Italian

jamez.it

3 points·jamez··2 comments

Cool! This- a book that gradually morphs from one language to another as a way to learn a new language- is something I though about since I was a kid.

Pinocchio isn't a great choice though- its Italian is richer than that of most contemporary books, with words hardly in use today. And the progressive mixing of languages must be very careful to avoid awkward conflicts between the sentence construction in the two languages, and privilege the most common words (probably nouns and adjectives only, leaving other more structural parts for later).

Some sentences in the pages shown seem completely mangled and hardly understandable (though Italian is my first language). For example:

Senza saying yes or non, he che from the citta' e riprese fuori on della road che doveva to la him back to alla house of the lovely Fairy.

Hi Udik - thanks for your thoughts. To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to mix languages at the word level without creating conflicts. In part, that's the challenge and the fun of a project like this. But mostly, it's a proof of concept, an idea that can easily be applied to any book that has been translated.

If you are more interested in a practical application of this idea that could _actually_ be useful to learn a language, please check this blog-post - https://www.jamez.it/blog/2016/12/28/idea-for-a-frictionless... I think the perfect bilingual reader is still waiting to be created.

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