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No Spanish reading crisis?

commonreader.co.uk

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Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#101

Post by anthk »

otherme123 wrote: post #92
Muromec wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it not? Divine Comedy and Jack London were both required reading in my Ukrainian school (in translation of course). So was tolstoevsky unfortunately.

Because we have a lot of authors from what we call "golden years", and "Spanish Literature" teachers tend to be extra proud of them. Why would they recommend Dante, when they have "Cantar del Mío Cid"? A Shakespeare translation or original Cervantes? Mark Twain or Benito Pérez Galdós? I don't mean that non spanish authors are worse (I dislike many of them because they were forced to me too early, when I preferred Dah…

As a Spaniard I wish we had Mark Twain instead of the drowsy village dramas from the so-called Golden Age.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#102

Post by anthk »

limecherrysoda wrote: post #96
ctoa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners. The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard: 93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's di…

Using your figures: 93k (Spanish) to 171k English or 300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English the original point still stands. > "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other…

You know very little about Spanish them. The thesaurus grew in a huge way over more than 1000 years of dialects, subdialects, borrowings from:

- Galician (easy mode, a Romance)

- Basque (they lived nearby the Castillans influenced Latin enough for Spanish, so that's a given)

- Catalan (another Romance)

- maybe Iberian, I'm not sure, through Basque

- Celtic, a common word like perro (dog) it's Celtic

- Gothic -yes, Goths, such as sala (living room), casa, (house) guardia...

- Arabic (most words with al- )

- French (carnét/garage...)

- Italian (most of the artsy stuff from the Enlightenment, such as piano)

and whatnot.

If you just pick up with the huge lyrics set from Spain you will find tons of different poetic registers. Just listen to Triana and Medina Azahara and any folk-rock English composer pales against these, because Triana and Medina Azahara it's the American progressive folk-rock from the 60s/70s mixed with Flamenco, and Flamenco itself it's a remix of music genres from several backgrounds. So the amount of feelings spoken and written in lyrics from that really complex tunes (from Triana more than Mediana Azahara) can't be subpar at all.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#103

Post by aeturnum »

brainwad wrote: post #34
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many of these types of articles, and usually they are taking about long form reading, meaning books.

What's a book, though? I suppose people would at least count a traditional e-book. Does long-form fanfic count? How about a book-length website? What about one that was originally published as a book and then republished online?

All your examples could be printed and read as books - whatever form they are consumed in. What differences are you seeking to highlight with these examples?

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#104

Post by ctoa »

limecherrysoda wrote: post #96
ctoa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you're right about here is that Spanish is "nearly phonetic" by which you mean that the writing system is orthographically transparent and very standardized. That's true and a huge benefit for learners. The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard: 93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's di…

Using your figures: 93k (Spanish) to 171k English or 300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English the original point still stands. > "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other…

You are mixing numbers that don't go together.

OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED.

The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very comprehensive legit Spanish dictionary with technical and historical words. Those two numbers aren't comparable.

"which you admit is a far lower figure in Spanish vs other languages." no you just misunderstood, the numbers are very comparable.

Looking to your perceptions of ngrams in pop lyrics is not a great way of doing linguistics, there are in fact many alternatives in Spanish for expressing emotions about love, whether you are aware of them or not, or whether song writers over use certain words. English lyrics repeat an awful lot of "love" "heart" and "baby".

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#105

Post by anthk »

ctoa wrote: post #104
limecherrysoda wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using your figures: 93k (Spanish) to 171k English or 300k+ (Spanish) to 1M+ English the original point still stands. > "there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English I remain unconvinced here. Spanish love song lyrics have no choice but to invoke "corazon" and "amor" so often because there are so few other…

You are mixing numbers that don't go together. OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED. The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very…

Any record from Triana or Medina Azahara would make any argument void because the deepness it's almost unmatched.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#106

Post by ctoa »

anthk wrote: post #105
ctoa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mixing numbers that don't go together. OED (171k) is comparable in content to RAE + RAE Americanisms (93k + 70k = 163k) because OED is pan dialect. RAE core dictionary by itself is not the same type of coverage as OED. The 1M+ English number is essentially a garbage number from a media tracking company called Global Language Monitor and includes things no serious dictionary would include. 300k+ is for a very…

Any record from Triana or Medina Azahara would make any argument void because the deepness it's almost unmatched.

Or any love poetry by Lorca, Neruda, Benedetti. The idea that Spanish has to resort to "corazon" and "amor" because it... has fewer words than other languages?? People believe some really crazy stuff.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#107

Post by broken-kebab »

ghusto wrote: post #73
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #45

It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since. That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality. And if we look at stuff like the PISA…

> That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit. Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's…

You are describing monetization quality, not content quality.

Printing has its moat, yes, which better protects it from copying, and process of consuming from interruptions, and creates payment in advance situation. Printing houses produce enormous amounts of cliche-by-cliche semi-porn "romantic novels", and various sensationalist garbage, and earn money without suffocating dependency on Google, FB and such. Good for them.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#108

Post by bojan »

pessimizer wrote: post #87
bojan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is the reason Spain resisted the advent of far right for so long, compared to its European counterparts.

The Spanish Civil War would like to have a word with you, but maybe Franco is part of "the resistance" now.

What an odd comment. I'd think it's obvious I referred to the current wave that started 15* years ago.

* give or take some years

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#109

Post by Glandalf »

The reading crisis is overblown, women dominate publishing and much of the output is geared toward female readers. Smut and photo-filled recipe books, Wiccan tween fiction. Men are happy reading classics and technical books.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#110

Post by Daishiman »

Glandalf wrote: post #109

The reading crisis is overblown, women dominate publishing and much of the output is geared toward female readers. Smut and photo-filled recipe books, Wiccan tween fiction. Men are happy reading classics and technical books.

Take this incel garbage back to 4chan.
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