How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

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Iversen
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Iversen » Thu Jul 14, 2022 4:27 pm

I hardly ever read fiction, and because most books in foreign languages (apart from English) in Danish libraries are fiction I don't read nearly as many full books as I did before I rebooted my language learning around 2006. Instead I read a lot of stuff on the internet, and here I try to get through all my languages on a regular basis - although it can be be hard to find something worthwhile to read in several of them (apart from good ol' Wikipedia). I can read most of the Germanic and Romance languages plus Esperanto without having a translation at hand and with minimal use of dictionaries, but with Latin, Modern Greek, Albanian, Indonesian and the Slavic languages I do prefer to have a translation ready for easy problem solving assistance, and luckily that's also something you can have for free on the internet. But if need be, I can spell my way through Greek and at least some of the Slavic languages without assistance, and sometimes I do that just to get some training under adverse conditions. I have a lot of old popular science mags in half a dozen languages where I can do that kind of exercise.

As for reading speed (which isn't part of the question, but still relevant since it dictates the time you can spend on one book in one language). I'm a fairly fast reader, and in those cases where I have read full paper books (novels and that kind of stuff) I'll mostly try to get through them in one go. It took me something like three hours net to get through A.C.Clarke's 2010 in Portuguese in a library in Tomar and the same for Harry Potter III in Italian on Sardegna, and long ago when I still read Agatha Christie one murder story in English would just set me back by an hour or so. It took a couple of days to get through the Mastero de la Ringoj by Tolkien in Esperanto, whereas the Hobbito in the same language could be defeated in one session - much faster than the film trilogy. So it's not the time expenditure that keeps me from reading fiction - it's the plot and the characters and the obvious intent by the evil authors to manipulate my poor innocent mind into things which I don't want to know about, and which they only have invented to torment their gullible readers.

But but but .... the last month or so I have been involved in a zoological nomenclature project, and the last two weeks I have added a wee bit of tourism on top of that, and the immediate effect is that I read less in general, but especially in my weaker languages -so I know that I'll have to do something to compensate for this, but I'm not panick stricken yet. I'm more worried about my active skills in those languages than I am about my passive ones.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jul 14, 2022 4:43 pm

I laugh at the words "organize" and "reading" being put into the same sentence :-D

With my limited time nowadays, I would love to get more of any reading done. In any language :-(

But back when I had time, the "organisation" was pretty simple. Whatever happens to lie nearby, gets read. :-D
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Jul 14, 2022 6:15 pm

My Virgil prof, who read several languages (exact number forgotten), when I asked him that very question, told me he read a page a day in each language. I used to try that with French, Spanish and Ancient Greek, but concentrating on Ancient Greek. Last couple of years, not so much, but I find French and Spanish are solid enough that they fade very little. I do try to keep a book in both going, just not necessarily the same day or even week.
Trying to keep more than three languages going at the same time is beyond my power. I would like to read more Latin, but very seldom am I able.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jul 14, 2022 9:45 pm

No system.
I read books.
Sometimes they are in language a,b,c,d, or e.
Right now the books in my pile of active books are in 5 languages.
One book I have in 2 languages because I know the author and want to see his original words.

Only when I'm actively learning do I really try to get time specifically with a language.
70-80% of my reading is in English.

This is also why I'm not doing well in the Super Challenge. :lol: Maybe I need a system?
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby IronMike » Thu Jul 14, 2022 10:21 pm

While I don't have a system, your post/question gave me time to reflect.

I read a book in an L2 almost always. And when I do, I don't also read anything "big" in any other L2. For instance, if I'm in the middle of an Esperanto novel, I don't also read a book in Russian or BCS. But what I do do (haha) is read my Twitter feed (cf iguanamon's comment above) and read short articles in the other languages. Again, no system; I don't require myself to read 1 x Russian article and 1 x BCS tweet when I'm reading the Eo novel. But as I'm scrolling through Twitter (couple times a week), I'll stop at Russian and BCS tweets and read them, and when a friend sends me an interesting article in Russia or a tweet links to one, I'll click on it and read it.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby AroAro » Fri Jul 15, 2022 7:11 am

Yes, I have a system in which I rotate my languages and try to make sure I have some exposure to all of them. Here's the principle (each language code corresponds to a book in that language):

EN-EN-PL-PL-FR-FR-PL-PL-IT-DE-PL-PL-RO-RU-PL-PL

It takes me about 7 months to complete the full cycle (reading 16 books). I read only one book at a time, I never read simultaneously multiple books. I have completed the cycle only twice so far and I already need to make some amendments because I'd like to read more in English and French (these are the literary traditions I'd like to immerse myself the most). I think no system is perfect, it naturally changes over time and even sticking to a system can be really hard and discouraging, sometimes I just need to give myself a little bit of freedom and read something on a whim without thinking if it complies with my system or not.

And I also read magazines and news articles in my languages (as a result I basically stopped following the news in my native Polish, but that's for the better lol).
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Sprachprofi » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:36 am

Cavesa wrote:But back when I had time, the "organisation" was pretty simple. Whatever happens to lie nearby, gets read. :-D


Sounds like me. I read whatever interests me and I could never imagine reading "a page a day" of each language because that interrupts any narrative arc and makes reading a chore. So my reading is pretty wild and unsystematic. A lot of English because I need to read the latest books on politics/economics as soon as they come out. A lot of target language reading because it feels more productive - I can file that time under "reading time" AND "foreign language time".

I have a fancy spreadsheet to track my time spent on foreign languages, so when I notice that I'm not dedicating as much time to a language as I had intended, I make an effort to find something interesting to read in that language. I also signed up for the Super Challenge with Serbocroatian because I know that I would not randomly come across much reading material in Serbocroatian otherwise. Randomly coming across interesting stuff in French or Spanish is much easier.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby rdearman » Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:50 am

I seem to be an outlier... I just collect tons of books in various languages, then when my wife gets sick of the clutter I pick a language (last time French, this time Italian, next time English) and I try to read all the books and give them away to a charity shop. While this purge sounds productive, I'm currently hoarding books in Mandarin and Korean, and the number of French books which were purged to zero has started to creep back up. :?

This makes me sound like a book bulimic, just gorging and purging. :(
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby Inge » Fri Jul 15, 2022 10:31 am

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Last edited by Inge on Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:52 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: How do you organize your reading if you happen to read in 3+ foreign languages?

Postby jimmy » Fri Jul 15, 2022 1:51 pm

these days, I read the books only from my desktop in .pdf forms. :) :)
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