einzelne wrote:I would say it's a rather bad advice, given the average length of sentences in Dostoevsky and the differences in syntax among English and German, which are quite substantial, so deconstructing sentences in L1, finding the corresponding parts in L2, connecting all the dots on the fly would be quite a challenge even for a seasoned learner.
I have to say I agree with this.
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In general I have serious misgivings about the passive cross-use of languages in this way for learning. It isn't for nothing that successful immigration language courses teach you entirely in the target language. Whilst I wouldn't say that this represents the scenario for every learner in a different situation the principle surely remains the same? In reading when you transliterate (and even translate) you don't necessarily learn how to 'think' or interpret in the TL. You might become a translator, but that's different.
I'm not against the use of the translation for familiarising oneself with the TL of the same text because it clearly helps, but I think there's a limit to the usefulness regarding different sentence structures (including length and form einzelne mentions). At some point the translation tells you nothing and you just have to learn the structures of the TL. And re-reading these parallel texts hoping for enlightenment seems to me a vain hope.
It's marginally related, but when I was at the Archive yesterday I came across a copy of Gide's
La Symphonie Pastorale and the person who had been reading it made pencil notes over certain words. I'll put an image of page one below and you can see that most of them are wrong notes. The words are contextually wrongly translated and it likely was of no help to the reader. This isn't about L-R, but I think at some point when reading you have to stop making comparisons and just read. Even if you you look up words, forget notes and markings, just keep reading. If you need to reread the book at the end that's fine. If the book is too hard or long or impossible to read that way, you're reading the wrong book and it's too hard for you.