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No Spanish reading crisis?

commonreader.co.uk

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Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#121

Post by sillyfluke »

broken-kebab wrote: post #100
sebastiennight wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments: 1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted…

>Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.

Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#122

Post by elnatro »

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…

Do you think that Latin-American music is the pinnacle of the Spanish language? Have you read Borges, Cortázar, or Cervantes? I suppose you don’t even know who are they.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#123

Post by sebastiennight »

timthelion wrote: post #116
sebastiennight wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments: 1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted…

I guess I'm nobody then. I almost only read the internet.

You and I both, but come on. Do we really want to compare HN readership numbers to TikTok's viewership?

Walk around in the subway someday and count, out of 100 people, how many are reading on their phone vs scrolling. I have not seen a person read an article or book on their phone in ages.

Yes they exist but even Google is making it harder to find content to read by burying text-based pages below AI summaries and video results.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#124

Post by sebastiennight »

sillyfluke wrote: post #121
broken-kebab wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore Even as hyperbole it's too extreme.

Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?

This plus a text-to-speech/audiobook feature with autoscrolling would probably do a lot for book consumption (I mean I, for one, would sign up for that waitlist)

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#125

Post by KaiserPro »

world2vec wrote: post #18
KaiserPro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on the audiobook part? Im assuming that screens dont count because its not novels/literature but audio books are the same content but delivered by a different medium, I am genuinely curious as to your opinion on is not counting

I just think listening to a book is not the same as actually reading it. Just my personal preference, really, and I'm not knocking down on audiobooks. Listening to audiobooks, IMHO, is a more passive and less focused way of consuming literature.

Thank you for this.

You're not the first person to say this. I have some empathy for this view, even though its the opposite of mine.

For me, audiobooks offer, more space for imagination. More recently its also a more consistent way to get unbroken narrative into my head. However I strongly suspect that is down to how I process information.

I didn't really read properly until I was quite old, however talking radio was quite ubiquitous in my house. There were lots of audiobook-like content. so perhaps its training?

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#126

Post by larakerns »

sebastiennight wrote: post #124
sillyfluke wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I find phone book reading to be a very primitive experience without researching SOTA book apps. Is there an app that turns ebooks into a single infinite scroll longform article with intuitive bookmarking and easy book purchase/discovery?

This plus a text-to-speech/audiobook feature with autoscrolling would probably do a lot for book consumption (I mean I, for one, would sign up for that waitlist)

We have all these features and more. In private beta now, sign up for the waiting list at: https://noveltree.ca

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#127

Post by mpeg »

cherrylemonsoda wrote: post #61

Spanish is one of the smallest languages in the world at ~93k words. Most languages have hundreds of thousands, English has over a million. Spanish is also nearly phonetic. It's very simple, there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages. Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.

Spanish is certainly an easy language to learn, but it’s a very hard language to master.

I’m a native Spanish speaker and I find English poetry much easier to understand, English is more rigid and while technically it might have a larger vocabulary you can do less with it, while the flexibility of Spanish in terms of word order and suffixes makes it possible to craft some really labyrinthine verses

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#128

Post by xboxnolifes »

timthelion wrote: post #116
sebastiennight wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments: 1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted…

I guess I'm nobody then. I almost only read the internet.

Even so, you should be aware that you're outside the norm. Hell, it's a thing that HN complains all the damn time about. To not notice is to be intentionally ignorant. "Why make a video when you can scan an article quickly", "Why is everything on walled garden video platforms", "Everyone is just watching tiktok and instagram reels."

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#129

Post by solid_fuel »

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. - many books are pretty low quality.

I don't think it's really about the quality, I think the difference is that with a book there's no easy next tab to switch to when a sentence or passage gets too long and loses your interest. Even if a book is poorly written, it will still require you to either fully focus for the duration - or put it down. There's no convenient "leave the tab open in the background and switch to something else for 30 seconds" for books like there is with the internet.

Re: No Spanish reading crisis?

#130

Post by [deleted] »

otherme123 wrote: post #118
toolslive wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These guys are from Galicia. Maybe that makes a difference.

One of those links, the first, is from a Galicia school. Incidentaly, I am Galician, and I read "O príncipe, de Maquiavelo" when I was around 40. The difference in Galicia is that we also have "Literatura Galega", that requires us to read Castelao, Neira Vilas, Rosalía, Murguía, Otero Pedraio... I bet other Comunidades with their own language also recommend local writters. Unless they went to some kind of private sch…

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