I’m a dumb idiot American who only speaks 1 language fluently and doesn’t have the money to pay for foreign language classes at a university. What are some good ways to learn a new language from the absolute starting point

  • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    2 years ago

    Dictionaries, etc

    I only really use the built in dictionary in the Kindle app. Otherwise, I use Google translate or DeepL. Deep L gives examples and synonyms if you search individual words or click on one word in a longer translation.

    I have the hardcopy of the big Oxford bilingual Spanish dictionary, but I don’t use it often. It’s okay, but the internet is better, I think. There’s Spanishdict, the Cambridge Spanish-English dictionary for bilingual dictionaries, and (I’ll try to find a link) RAE (Real Academia Español – Royal Academy of Spanish, I think) for a monolingual dictionary.

    One book that I would recommend getting in physical copy is a common verb conjugation book. Mine only has 200 verbs in so you don’t need a big one. The problem with dictionaries is that they don’t list conjugations, only the infinitive (usually). So it’s really difficult to use a dictionary before you have mastered conjugations.

    I’ve had the most luck with novels that I’ve previously read in English (either translations or originally in English). The familiarity really helps. It’s not always enough, but it’s a good head start.

    Recommendations

    In no particular order (some of these I just read, some I just listened to, some I listened-read to): Roald Dahl, Charlie y la fábrica chocolate, Matilda, and Las brujas; Michael Bond, Un oso llamado Paddington; Sally Rooney, Dónde estás, mundo bello and Gente normal; Richard Osman, El club del crimen de los jueves; Ken Follett, Las tinieblas y el alba and Los pilares de la tierra; Mark Haddon, El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche; Philip Pullman, El libro de la oscuridad I: la bella salvaje; Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Aléxandros I; Juan Gómez-Jurado, Alex Colt: Cadete Espacial.

    Parallel texts are good, too. Penguin have published three decent volumes, in 1966, 1972, and the ‘new’ one in 1999.

    If you want theory, Engels is easier to read than Marx and Lenin, IMO. With Spanish, you’ve also made available Domenico Losurdo’s, Stalin: Historia y crítica de una leyenda negra.

    You’ll find almost all, if not all, the books I referred to above on the high seas.

    Does this help?

    (1) What do you read in English? (2) What’s your favourite novel? (3) What have you read and enjoyed in Spanish so far?

    Edit: typo Edit 2: deleted the text that wasn’t really relevant (I’ll post this separately).

    • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      I’ll look in to the books you recommended, I read Roald Dahl books when I was younger, so those might be a good start. I’ll look into the Spanish version of Anti-Duhring once I finish the English one. 1 theory/history, fantasy/sci-fi, historical graphic novels 2 idk, I haven’t read that much fiction recently, I’ve liked Perfume, a wrinkle in time (series), hunger games, and lots of graphic novels If those counts 3 nothing really, the most I’ve read is part of a multipolarista article

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        The Roald Dahl audiobook narrations are clear but the speaker does put on voices for the intended kids-audience. This might be off putting. It was okay in short bursts, for me.

        That’s a good idea about Anti-Duhring. You could even use the two versions as a kind of parallel text. This is a great way of rapidly increasing reading comprehension.

        In that case, you might also like the graphic novels, Maus I & II by Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. No spoilers, please! I’ve not finished either one, yet, but they’re well produced and they look promising.

        I recently learned that some Parenti books are translated into Spanish, which might be up your street.

        If you like the crossover of historical fiction (not quite history, not quite fantasy, not quite graphic novels), you might want to look up four Spanish writers:

        • Benito Pérez Galdós, Episodios nacionales (this is 46 novels about Spanish history between 1872 and 1912).
        • Almudena Grandes, Episodios de una guerra Interminable (this is an as yet unfinished series (six books so far) about Spanish history between 1939 and 1964, covering the civil war).
        • Ramón Del Valle-Inclán, El ruido Ibérico (several novels about Spanish history in a single volume).
        • Ildefonso Falcones, who’s written five books. I think they’re all Spanish historical fiction, mostly focusing on Catalonia and Barcelona. The most famous is La catedral del mar, which has also been made into a TV series.

        Now, I’ve not read these yet, so they could be reactionary af. But it’s a start for somewhere to look.

        Miguel Cervantes is problematic. His short stories can be okay for beginners, but I couldn’t get into them because the anti-Gypsy messaging pissed me right off. Maybe there’s a reception arc? I didn’t read for long enough to find out. I still plan to tackle Don Quixote one day, though.

        Susan Abulawha’s novel about Palestine is translated and recorded as an audiobook: Amaneceres en Jenin (Mornings in Jenin). But I have not found a text copy of that book in Spanish. I don’t think it exists. But then it’s very hard to find in English, being pro-Palestinian. The major bookshop near me had a copy in English, but it wasn’t on the shelves – it was hidden in the storage room! They got it out on request, but it’s not one that the Western bourgeoisie want people to read or know exists. Maybe the Spanish translation has faced a similar fate, but more thoroughly.

        I’ve not read them yet, but William Gaddis’ novels that criticise neoliberalism are translated into Spanish. These are entirely dialogue-based, too, so I’m hoping they’ll help me with my own conversation skills when I get to them.

        Many of Elif Shafak’s books on Turkey/Cyprus are translated into Spanish.

        If you like Perfume you might like El chico de las bobinas by Pere Cervantes. I’ve seen the two being compared before. I could be wrong – but there’s a clue for you to start with :D (Edit: it could’ve been Papel y tinta by María Reig.)

        I found the translation of The Eye of the World, the first one in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (La rueda del tiempo I: El ojo del mundo) a bit too difficult when I tried it over a year ago (about a year in to my studies).

        But the translations of David Gemmell’s books were readable even sooner than that. Other things came up, so I did not get far with his works and forgot that I even started them till now, but they may be worth a look. He was one of the greatest fantasy writers.

        Santiago Posteguillo is always in the Spanish bestseller lists. He writes about Ancient Rome, including about the Romans on the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain). (Similar kind of thing to Valerio Massimo Manfredi, who writes originally in Italian, I think.)

        Pat Barker’s feminist versions of the Homeric epics are translated into Spanish. I started El silencio de las mujeres bit I couldn’t follow the story as the tenses jumped around too much. Or maybe they didn’t. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, either way. But you might have more luck.

        The translation of Tolkien’s El Hobbit is easier to read than you might expect, and you’re probably familiar with the story, which will help.

        I wasn’t a huge fan of the ‘Castellano’ narration of Suzanne Collins, Los juegos del hambre, but I did understand most of the story without looking at the text after about 250 hours of other listening-reading. If you like that story, you might want to give it a go. There’s a LatAm Spanish narrated version, too, if that’s the accent you’re focusing on.

        If you are focusing on that accent, you might like the audio version of The autobiography of Malcolm X. Personally, I felt the Spanish translation is not very close to the original English. This annoyed me. I’m not sure if I was upset politically or because I couldn’t deal with the nuances of translations at that time (word for word or author’s general meaning? – it’s always a balance). The narrator has a good voice (Gerardo Vázquez).

        The narrations if Isabel Allende’s books are good. I think she uses too many words for beginners, though. Very descriptive. It’s great, but when you don’t know multiple synonyms for everyday objects, you get completely lost. I did, anyway.

        Paul Preston is an English(?) academic who looks at Spain. His La guerra civil española was translated into Spanish, to wide acclaim. It’s a bit anti-communist, as you might expect, but it’s otherwise well narrated and does give some fair treatment of the left involved in that war.

        On that topic, there’s Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, a novel. He’s a liberal, but the theme is of interest to us.

        (Vaguely left) Hispanic writers who should be good if their reputations are anything up go by are: Carlos Ruiz Zafón (you could start with his YA work and then go for his adult books), Jorge Luis Borges (too complicated for me around one-year in and I haven’t checked since), Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes.

        LatAm writers of theory, etc, include Álvaro García Linera, Hugo Moldiz, and Che, of course.

        Personally, I hate spoilers so much that once a story had been spoiled I have to wait several years to forget what I knew before I’ll look at it again. But if you don’t mind spoilers, you could search for some of the above names and read reviews in newspapers, magazines, etc. This would help you to front-load some of the vocab, concepts, and themes, making it easier to read the actual books afterwards.

        A good trick for finding reviews, etc, is to change your search engine language or use the .es site, for example. The duckduckgo browser makes it very easy to switch languages and countries. You get better results if you search in-country, but some browsers and engines (I’ll let you guess which ones) are very resistant (the point of returning results is to get you to buy stuff, and you aren’t going to buy much in a foreign country).

        That’s a longer annotated list than I thought I’d be able to write but it should touch on your interests so I’m hoping you can have some fun with it.