Le Baron's casual reading log

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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sun Aug 15, 2021 10:24 pm

On Friday/Saturday I visited (and stayed with) a Spanish friend in Amersfoort. He moved there about a year and a half ago with his wife (who is a German speaker) and I hadn't seen him since the proper onset of the pandemic. There is a really, really irritating thing which spoiled at a bit to do with the rip-off travelcard system, but I won't go into it. I'll just say that my description of it includes a lot of F-words.

They've moved into a fancy new house there, because the house prices are cheaper than in Utrecht. He is probably quite bored by now because he finds it difficult to get work due to his trouble mastering Dutch. Prior to this they were in Austria where he went through the same ('tedious' he says) rigmarole learning German and having people squinting with a half-tilted head, saying: Tut mir leid, aber ich verstehe Sie nicht. Was meinen Sie? I've actually heard him speak when I spoke to his wife in German and I understood him; I blame the Austrians. So when they moved here the whole thing started again and it doesn't help that his wife quickly learned Dutch, but also speaks fluent Spanish at home.

Some years ago now I was supposed to be learning Spanish, but I dilly-dallied. Then I had to take on a second temporary job during the pandemic. Prior to that he was assisting me greatly with materials and real-life exchanges and an introduction to a lot of Spanish-speaking people. Obviously the pandemic wiped this out. When we met in Amersfoort he greeted me in Spanish and had already sent me a Spanish text message telling me where he would be waiting. After about a minute of poor participation on my part I had to confess that I had not studied in equal measure to the period from when I had announced my intentions. So we...defaulted to English. :oops: His English is pretty good when listening, but can be somewhat broken in production. I never squint with a half-tilted head. Since he speaks more of it than I do Spanish I can hardly criticise. He also speaks Basque because he's from there.

During the evening after we'd been to a local brasserie we were on his back patio eating tapas and having a last beer. His wife is visiting Austria, so he was missing her. He started telling me about how he first met her when they both worked in a hotel in Spain, but had trouble expressing it. So I said 'do it Spanish'. He spoke slowly and deliberately and I can't say I understood everything, but I understood more-or-less! I'm re-constructing from memory, so forgive my errors, but at one moment he said:
Desde el momento en que toqué accidentalmente su dedo, supe que tenía una conexion con esta mujer...como dos almas en unión...

Which I thought was lovely. It reminded me of the Plato theory of love: two half-souls made from a divided whole, which then find each other and reunite. For the short remainder of the evening we split between English and Spanish sentences as we cleared up and I made my way to the guest bedroom. Next day there was some more exchange, but the gears didn't mesh quite so well as the previous evening, which was a pity. Nevertheless it's a good feeling and understanding a person in a language where they can express themselves more fully is a moment of clarity.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Fri Aug 20, 2021 11:04 pm

In between the other books I thought I would read an old favourite for pleasure and I wasn't bothered about it being in any language other than English. The book is Knulp by Hermann Hesse, which is of course originally in German. I didn't read it German initially though (wasn't good enough as a teenager), I read the good translation by Ralph Manheim. I searched high and low for this book, then I remembered I've lent it to a neighbour and she's probably not even read it.

I've had a French copy of it for some years. A charity shop find and I never really felt the need to read it. I got around to reading the German original around 2006*, so I thought after 15 years I could reacquaint myself with it through another medium. It's strange (though not strange really) that no matter what the language I see the same mental images when reading the story.

It's a short book and the language used is relatively simple, so I polished it off in a few sessions yesterday and today. I know many of Hesse's other works tower over this in reputation, but I've always loved this book.

After finishing it I shifted gear from the atmosphere of tranquillity (and poignancy at the end) it creates, by playing William Walton's inexplicably rejected score to the film The Battle of Britain.

* This is false. It was Hesse's Peter Camenzind, not Knulp.
Last edited by Le Baron on Tue Jan 03, 2023 3:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Aug 21, 2021 9:20 am

Le Baron wrote:His main emphasis is on mastering pronunciation, arguing FIGS and associated languages employ vowel sounds found in regional British English, rather than RP they are usually taught from.
I've been watching a dutch TV series recently (Klem, UK title: The Blood Pact), and I keep thinking there's a British accent that Dutch reminds me of, but I can't place it. :-)
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Aug 21, 2021 8:36 pm

DaveAgain wrote:I've been watching a dutch TV series recently (Klem, UK title: The Blood Pact), and I keep thinking there's a British accent that Dutch reminds me of, but I can't place it. :-)

Cockney perhaps? Okay that's a joke. I'd say a general similarity with flat-vowel areas between the top of the Midlands and the mid-to-lower northern areas. There are also lots of older cognate words. Where I grew up some people still said 'besom' which is a cognate with bezem, one of those twig brooms originally. Also the handle of one of these was called a 'steel'. In the hardware shop in our village they were advertised as a 'brush steel', which always perplexed me. Little did I know...

I've never seen Klem. It seems to have been a hit. I don't have a telly though and I have to confess to hardly watching Dutch TV apart from the news now and again and the odd documentary.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Aug 21, 2021 8:39 pm

The missus just said 'get off the computer!' We're going to a cottage tomorrow and I've only put a toilet bag into the suitcase. It's the butler's night off.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Thu Sep 02, 2021 11:12 pm

I had an interesting ten days. In the cottage I went to the boiler packed up, so there was no hot water for 2.5 days. Then I fell from a ladder, which was inconvenient.

On the language front I made a radical change. I mothballed Swahili because I don't feel I am dedicated enough to it right at the moment or that I have enough opportunity to nurture it. You have to really want to do a language to make progress. What happened is that I resurrected Indonesian instead. It's stupid for me not to be doing it because the other half is a Javanese/Malayan speaker (natively from her mother) and speaks Bahasa Indonesian. I've had casual input from this language for many years. Originally I started studying it because her mother speaks no English and the relationship with her parents, though mainly the mother, was distant through Dutch. So I started learning standard Indonesian to make some connection, which actually worked. I actually learned loads, but got cheesed-off with it when her difficult parents kept cutting us off.

However the missus was reading a novel called Pulang by Leila S. Chudori. She left it lying about and I flipped through it and saw that I could still read quite a bit, so I thought that since it's actually a language that can be used here in NL and among her wider family and in the many restaurants and toko, I probably ought not to squander that opportunity. So I've started again and it's enjoyable.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Oct 02, 2021 1:22 am

I had an official Covid test yesterday. Had to drag my aching body all across the countryside to the university hospital and wandered about like a twit until I realised they were doing it in the multi-storey car park...

Been sick as a dog for two weeks and acute back pain. Anyway, the test was negative, which is good...but a pity it doesn't tell me what I do have!

On the sort of good side I have finished three books from all that lying in bed.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Thu Oct 14, 2021 10:44 pm

I learned an interesting fact today. I often complain that I don't have enough time in the world to read hundreds of books, yet Mr William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister and four times chancellor of the exchequer among other cabinet positions, read at least 23,000 books in his lifetime.

We know because his library contained these books and they have his notes written in the margins. There were many in classical languages too. Now he did live to be almost 90, but he was also otherwise quite busy. So learning this I feel quite lazy and unaccomplished in comparison and that perhaps the internet has interfered with my ploughing through my more modest (yet sizeable) library. Or that Gladstone benefited from not having the interruptions of a phone and had the luxury of staff in his household?

I'm going to ponder this.
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby einzelne » Fri Oct 15, 2021 1:43 pm

"And yet what best defines this extraordinary man is the way in which he spent his last day as the leader of what was then the greatest power on earth. He recorded that he had been to church, written half a dozen letters, seen half a dozen people, "Read I. Hen. VI. And finished my version of the Odes of Horace." Reading a Shakespeare play might seem unlikely enough in the circumstances, let alone completing a classical translation. But then, as Gladstone recorded in the breathtaking human document that is his Diaries, he read during the course of his life at least 20,000 books in at least six languages, and he was an indefatigable writer, translator, and controversialist."

20k books in 6 languages! 6 languages, Karl! And it's not like he was reading YA fiction. I definitely feel humiliated.
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Le Baron
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Re: Le Baron's casual reading log

Postby Le Baron » Wed Nov 03, 2021 12:46 am

I just finished my 20th book for the year. Las Hermanas Coloradas (Francisco García Pavón). This was a level C 'Easy Reader' text. So that means I have two months of surplus time I do not have to give to targeted reading.

Does these mean my aim of 20 books was a bit low? Or perhaps I just read them more rapidly than I expected. I don't feel guilty. I really feel like reading an English novel now and not even thinking about Spanish or Indonesian for a whole month (though I know I probably will).
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