41–50 of 59 posts
The effort and ingenuity he put into the translation is wonderful. I can't speak any Greek, so having the translations and logic laid out is a wonderful insight into translation as a process.
Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
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The word for wand is always "baguette"... Why is that the best part? I guess I must be missing some reference.
Well, to me wands are sticks of wood that are used for magic and baguettes are loaves of bread.
Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…
I am a firm believer that one should spend at least 10 or 20 years learning French and then read Les Miserables and Le Compte de Monte-Cristo. The same could be said about La sombra del viento, 100 años de soledad or Neruda's poems in Spanish. In English, only Virginia Woolf inspires the same awe for language that these other books impregnated in me. In some sense, these authors don't use words. They let words use th…
That's a surprising choice. Most Spanish readers would say that La sombra del viento is nowhere near an undisputable masterpiece such as 100 años de soledad, or even Neruda's poems (the literary stature of which is perhaps more contested).
From the Amazon product page: > Age Range: 12 - 17 years This might be more relevant if HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE had a code for Ancient Greek.
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This is an amazing way to improve your knowledge of a foreign language. When I started reading French novels, I could mostly understand maybe 60% and guess another 30%. But after 10,000 pages, I was only running into unknown words every few pages, and my understanding of idioms was vastly better. The same thing works for listening comprehension: Find a DVD box set of easy TV series, one where you can understand maybe…
There is a technique called "Listening-Reading" that's fairly well known within the language-learning community. The idea is straight-forward: Get a novel-length text in your target language, a high-quality recording of that text and a literal translation of the text in your native language. Alternate between reading the original text and the translation while simultaneously listening to the recording. The method is…
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The best part about Harry Potter in French is that the word for wand is "baguette".
The word for wand is always "baguette"... Why is that the best part? I guess I must be missing some reference.
Main reason I found myself ultimately disengaged with Greek was the subject material... that and the ultimately limited tolerance of a 9 year old's mind for endless declensions and beatings.
"IMPERFECT INDICATIVE, BOY! FUTURE PERFECT INDICATIVE INDEED! COME HERE. HOLD OUT YOUR HANDS."
Shudder.
"The Greeks ate a simple healthy diet, involving bread, vegetables and fruit - none which (except potatoes - γεώμηλα -in every guise) are available at Hogwarts." Wait, Ancient Greeks didn't eat potatoes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato )!
Yeah, I'm not sure where this reference comes from. γεώμηλα is a Modern Greek word for potato (literally 'earth apple', presumably a calque from French pomme de terre ). It might be a sensible way to refer to potatoes in Ancient Greek too, but it wouldn't be sensible to suggest they were eaten in Ancient Greece!
Off topic: I have been reading Harry Potter in French as my gateway to French literature. My love for French actually started with The Count of Monte Cristo which made want to learn French just so as to read the original Le Comte de Monte-Cristo . Obviously, my French (starting from zero) a mere year or so later isn't good enough to read something like Alexandre Dumas' masterpiece, but I figured if I started with a b…