43.
Catherine die Kleine Tänzerin by Patrick Modiano and Jean-Jaques Sempé
This is a children's book (french title: Catherine Certitude). I bought the German text after seeing it advertised in the back of my copy of Der Kleine Nick, which was also illustrated by Mr Sempé.
I read through the text once without looking up unknown words, I started to go through a second time looking up all unknown words, didn't get very far with it.
I hadn't heard of Mr Modiano before reading this, but I looked him up, and he's a biggish cheese in the French book world, having been awarded a Nobel Prize for literature.
La grand librairie: spéciale ModianoUne vie, une oeuvre: ModianoCulturetheque.com have two of Mr Modiano's books.
44. Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant.
I read each chapter first in
German, then in
French, then again in German.
Arletty, (real name Léonie Bathiat) decided she needed a professional name when she started working as a painter's model, she took the name Arlette from Mont Oriol (Arlette is the baby daughter of Christiane). When she took to the stage she was encouraged to change it to Arletty. I think she said in the past this sounded more English, and the English were in fashion at the time (the piece she auditioned with was It's a long way to Tipperary).
There seem to be two biographies of Arletty, one by
David Alliot, and one by
Denis Demonpion.
NB The heroine of Mary Norton's The Borrowers is Arietty!
45. Der Verdacht by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
This was mentioned in the
German: Improving Reading Skills thread, and included in the Krimi Forum's classic Krimi list which was mentioned in the
German Resources thread.
The text I used (ISBN: 9780174398080) was intended for language learners, there's a 'skeleten vocabulary' at the back of the book, and some notes about the text, indicated by asterisk in the body of the text, these are usually translations of words/phrases.
I read each chapter first without looking up any unknown words, and then again looking up all unknown words. I used dict.leo.org and deepl.com as dictionaries.
The text I used was in a series called Modern world literature series published by Nelson / Harrap. A web search produced an archived search on worldcat.org giving the following book list:
Sansibar oder der letzte Grund by Andersch
Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum by Böll
Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen and other stories by Böll
Draussen vor der tür by Borchert
Der richter und sein henker by Dürrenmatt
Der Verdacht by Dürrenmatt
Das Versprechen : Requiem auf den Kriminalroman by Dürrenmatt
Nun singen sie wieder : Versuch eines Requiems by Max Frisch
Irrlicht und Feuer by M von der Grun
Was dir nicht angehört by Hausmann
Das heilige Experiment : Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen by Hochwälder
Italienische Nacht. by Horvath
Jugend ohne Gott by Horvath
Der letze sommer by Huch
Die DDR erzählt nine stories from the German Democratic Republic by Hutchinson
Als ich ein kleiner Junge war by Kästner
Zeit der Schuldlosen. by Siegfried Lenz
Die neuen Leiden des Jungen W. by Plenzdorf
Litauische Geschichten : Die Reise nach Tilsit, Miks Bumbullis by Sudermann
Des Teufels General by Zuckmayer
Vier Novellen by Zweig
French
Some films I've watched recently are:
Les grands manoeuvres,
trois jours à vivre,
une parisienne and
Maxime.
===========
I hit my pages target so I retook the Dialang test. Dialang says my reading is still A2
I'm doing a mixture of intensive and extensive reading so I'm not sure what to change. Perhaps I just need more time at it?
EDIT
There was a talk at the polyglot gathering 2017 called 'the way of the peaceful bookworm', given by a man called Ivan Kupka. He described what he called 'sandwich reading', he reads one chapter in the target language, then the same chapter in a known language. If I recall correctly he said he read the same book 5 or 6 times, and after having read 5 or 6 books, he knew the target language.
When I was learning french, I read around 35 books, targeting 10,000 words. The first few books I read in french, I read as parallel texts. When I started German I found I mapping English/French to German when reading parallel texts very difficult to do, perhaps due to word order, so I thought I might try sandwich reading, and map chapters instead.
I'm making the assumption that the common factor of 10,000 words is the magic ingredient, and that I can read 35 different books, rather that the repeated 5 or 6 books Mr Kupka recommended.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 30#p147496My assumption that repeated reading was unimportant, that the amount of reading all, was wrong.