AfrikaansFinally I finished reading my biology textbook! It took me 6 months to get through all 370 pages. I was able to infer the meaning of
most words from context, in fact all the more easily the further I progressed. Since I wanted to keep up the reading momentum I didn't stop to look up a single word. The book was written for grade 10 students (15 year-olds I guess). Here is a typical
page from the English version.
Now ideally I would have another text of comparable level to continue reading but I was not able to find anything sufficiently interesting. The books I do have are of the kind that would demand lots of dictionary lookups and cause me some frustration:
- Afrikaans translation of Tolkien's Hobbit. I've read the original a few times and vividly remember the main scenes. I might do a parallel reading alongside the original for a dictionary-free experience.
- New History of South Africa. 430 densely packed pages covering events and currents in SA history from the dawn of humanity to the turn of the century. It could easily take me a year and a half to read through.
I think I will start reading the history book and save the Hobbit as a reward for completing TY Afrikaans. Speaking of which: I am now doing the exercises at the end of chapter 26 of TYA (old edition, 1957) with a further 7 chapters remaining. Lately I've tended to take 2 weeks to complete a chapter. Although I could work faster if it weren't for those tough English-to-Afrikaans translation exercises.
FrenchIn the first half of the year I read 3 short non-fiction books of around 120 pages each, most recently
Epicure: sa vie, son œuvre by André Cresson (1940). For the rest of the year I will focus on improving my comprehension of the spoken language.
I found a fine
audiobook of Charles Dickens'
David Copperfield. I've never read it in English. Even though the book reader is excellent, my comprehension is so poor that I can hardly listen to 2 sentences in a row without mis-hearing something! So I keep the English book in hand to consult whenever that happens, or if I encounter an unknown word. I also listen to each chapter a second time after a week's interval, this time while looking at the French ebook. Going through the complete audio twice is going to take a total of 80 hours. I'm now at chapter 13 out of 64.
I noticed something funny in chapter 1. Dickens gives an oblique description of a familiar thing which I only recognised thanks to the French translation. See the underlined words: "he was strongly suspected ... of having once ... made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of
a two pair of stairs' window." A
what window? Voici la traduction: "on le soupçonnait ... d’avoir un jour ... pris quelques dispositions subites, mais violentes, pour la jeter par la fenêtre d’un second étage".