[What do you miss about where you grew up?]

I still live in the city I grew up in. But it's changed so much. I miss every single corner store and pizza parlor that's been swallowed up by a big chain. I miss those dusty little stores that sold odds and ends. I miss seeing people hanging out on their stoops (pre-COVID), I miss cheap Ukrainian food and diners and real street fairs and I miss being able to see a little more of the sky. I'm sure some of this is simple nostalgia for being younger, but the city really has changed. 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

15 hours ago, Dreamergal said:

 

I find when I read translations, it quite does not capture the voice of the original. It could be that the language does not have the vocabulary to handle it which I find often in English translations of Indian languages. But even in closest languages, I find in languages I can understand and not read, if I hear it read to me vs read a translation in the closest language, it does lose some of the original voice of the author 

 

This is very true. I had forgotten how different French is from English -- not only the vocabulary but the verb tense and the idioms. There's been at least one sentence where I really couldn't figure out the meaning even though I understood all the individual words. Thankfully it's getting easier now that I am past the early descriptive scenes and the action has started.

 

 

15 hours ago, Dreamergal said:

I am not quite sure if I vastly over estimated my knowledge of French reading comprehension because it seems to work better than I anticipated when I read newspapers and children's books. The Bible though is a whole different story. I am reading a English-French Bible with translation side by side and when I close the English side and read the French side and then look at the English translation I go woah, that's not quite what I thought it was. Now I am confused if I am reading the Bible correctly and my comprehension is really that bad or I am reading the news wrong even though it does not seem so. 😊

I know the feeling! It's a bit of a mind warp when you realize that you've misread something. I think it must be good for our brains, this act of searching for meaning, grasping at it, missing it, and finally discovering it.

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

I am still reading Le Pere Goriot and I won't be done with it for a while, probably. My French is not what it should be. I found an English translation of the book, free online, and  I look at it pretty often just to back myself up and to make sure that I'm not missing anything. I think the translator also tried to simplify the book a little bit -- they added paragraph breaks and spelled out the action here and there ("he took a vacation" as opposed to "during his vacation"). 

It's kind of a pleasure to read slowly like this. I feel silly saying that I love the writing, since I'm obviously missing a lot of it, but still, I really love the writing.

[Natural whole word readers]

It sounds like she's doing really well! That's awesome.

I didn't really do formal phonics lessons with my kids. I taught them the alphabet, and we had a lot of those "a is for apple" kinds of books, magnetic letters, etc around the house. Then, because they were interested, we played lots of rhyming games and pre-spelling games. We also read out loud a lot. Both ended up being early readers. 

[This thread will self-destruct in...]

I'm very late to this thread, but I think I can figure out vaguely what happened just by reading everyone's comments. I just wanted to say that I am so sorry!! OP, sending you lots and lots of sympathy. 

[All things spies]

6 hours ago, Junie said:

This is an interesting interview with the former CIA Chief of Disguise.

 

What a fascinating piece! Thank you.

[Learning Foreign Languages Thread - September]

1 hour ago, Penguin said:

I think you might like Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). She won the Nobel Prize in 1928, and her most read work is the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. A number of BaW posters have read it.  Undset converted to Catholicism at a time when there were very few Catholics in Norway, and an exploration of Christianity in 14th century Norway is at the core of the trilogy. The first book is The Wreath. The newer translation by Tiina Nunnally is the one I recommend.

I am over-the-moon excited that a new Nunnally translation of another Sigrid Undset trilogy (Vows, Volume 1) is about to be released. These books are still too hard for me to read in Danish, let alone Norwegian. Sigh. Someday. 

I also love The Alberta Trilogy by Coral Sandel (1880-1974). The first book is Alberta and Jacob (transl. Elizabeth Rokkan). I think these are underappreciated classics. 

These look so good! Thank you!

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

15 hours ago, Violet Crown said:

There's not a lot of Texas literature. That's why we all idolize Larry McMurtry. Mostly we were given the same books off the AP lists that everyone else had to read. Mostly Yankees and Californians. 🙂

Thinking it over, I wish that our high school English classes had been more about analysis ( I don't mean identifying symbols, I mean looking at how the book works) rather than about personal response to the literature. I think actually that approach would make it easier to read more broadly.

I've only read The Last Picture Show by McMurtry. Which I can see would be hard to teach to a class of high school kids...

 

[Learning Foreign Languages Thread - September]

In case any French language learners are interested -- we've been watching episodes of "Maigret," with Bruno Cremer. It's a show made in the 90s and set in the 50s,  based on the detective books by Georges Simenon. I love those books, so I am probably biased for the show, but it's also really good for practicing French -- there's lots and lots of dialogue, and the actors speak very very clearly.

Editing to say that I wouldn't watch the show with kids. It's got a lot of adult material -- presented in a very restrained way, but still.

@PenguinI would love to hear more about Norwegian literature. I love Knut Hamsun but beyond him and Ibsen, I don't know anyone. So interesting to see the discussion here about how the language changed over time.

[What does"learn through play" mean to you?]

13 minutes ago, xahm said:

All this is interesting. My kids are little, eight and under, and are fantastic about playing. They play deep, immersive, complicated games, they mess with stuff, they invent things (that generally don't work very well, but that's part of it). I've been focusing on getting school done quickly and well to give them lots of time for this play. I feel like adding in "fun" elements that slow down the process would generally lead to less overall fun as well as less overall learning. It's been interesting to me that as we've gone through BFSU (Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding), almost all the demonstrations are old news to them, things they'd already discovered through their own play. Our brief lessons help give them vocabulary to describe what they already knew.

When I was in college taking education classes(middle and high school level), we were encouraged to make things "project based" and gamified, while also being told we'd need to make sure to hit a whole list of standards, do test prep, stay on top of paperwork, etc. To me, this sounded essentially impossible to do in the time constraints, and I'd seen young teachers at my middle and high schools try that sort of thing with us and completely burn out. I think that's part of why I'm suspicious about "gamified lessons."

I'm confident with how things are working with my children, but I don't know that what is typical for them is typical for all children, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences and what they've learned by reading and studying. I'd hate to advise a new homeschooler at the park, for example, based only on my experience if it turns out my experience is particularly unusual.

I think all kids are really different. My kids play all the time, but they are not discovering scientific principles. They're making up languages and creating imaginary worlds, that kind of thing. Sometimes I hear them using math in their games.

I would have totally agreed with you about not introducing "fun" stuff to slow down lesson times. But it turns out that playful stuff can be really helpful for my kids when they're a little leery about a subject, for example. But yeah, I guess the main thing is that everyone is different!

[What does"learn through play" mean to you?]

I always thought "learning through play" meant when kids play games that imitate what they see adults doing -- like when they play house, or pretend to be teachers, etc etc.

My kids are small, and we give them lots and lots of time for free play. I have really good memories of playing with my own brother, and it's fun for me to see my kids developing these elaborate imaginative worlds together. I don't know if they're building skills or learning, but I love to see it.

I do, also, sometimes play "games" with them as part of their school work. I'm putting "games" in quotes because they're not necessarily going to be anyone's favorite games. It's more like I try to find playful ways for them to practice skills, but I'm in control the whole time; this is a formal "game" with rules. Sometimes this goes really well, and sometimes it backfires -- it really depends on how I present it. I used to say "we're going to play a fun game!" and then they'd see through me and feel disappointed. Now I just plow ahead with my plan and they are pleasantly surprised by the playful stuff.

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

21 hours ago, Violet Crown said:

We would have been well served in high school to have been given some sort of map. As it is, I constructed a hazy geography of a kind of suburban New York City, shaped somehow like a double egg, that featured at least one dock and several ash 

It's strange to realize that we (NYC kids) didnt read a single book set in Texas all the way through high school. And I think most of what we read was set in the north east, unless it was British. I'm sure we missed out on a lot. I'd love to know what kids read in other parts of the country. 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

16 minutes ago, Violet Crown said:

I didn't catch that at all! I thought maybe that was just what they called Long Island back in the early 20th. Of course, when we read it in high school in Texas, most of us weren't all that clear where New York was in the first place. Why are these people acting this way? Is that what New Yorkers are like? Huh.

 

Long Island City is the part of Queens just across the river from Manhattan. Queens is part of the same land mass as Long Island, where Gatsby and the others all live, but Queens is part of NYC while Long Island is not.... 

When Fitzgerald wrote, the Queensboro Bridge between Queens and Manhattan was relatively new, which might be why he is so rhapsodic about it.

[Book a Week 2020 - BW38: September Equinox]

Inspired by the language learning thread, I've started reading Le Pere Goriot, by Balzac. It's been sitting on my shelf for a looooong time so I'm happy to finally get to it.

@Violet CrownI love The Great Gatsby -- I also appreciate that Fitzgerald has his characters visit Long Island City, not a part of NY that usually gets a lot of play in literature.

 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

20 hours ago, Matryoshka said:

Okay, that is totally fascinating.  Interesting that in the imperative it ends up being the same as the tú form - as you likely know, in Argentinian vos, the imperative is the vosotros infinitive, minus the 'd', and keeps the accent on the final syllable, as it would if the 'd' were still there.

And now I'm curious about the Argentinan vos conjugations past the present and imperative, as those are the only two I've really noticed in my reading - I'd kind of been assuming it reverted to the same as tú conjugations in, say, either of the past tenses or the subjunctive.  I hadn't noticed any difference in my reading.

Wonder if the fact that I haven't seen it in Chilean lit is due to the efforts of that grammarian to rub it out, or to its associations with the 'lower classes'?

and PS, have you read Inés del alma mía?  Allende's version of the founding of Chile - Latauro from your link is in it, of course.  I hadn't known anything about Chile's (colonial) start, so found it very interesting.

I know, I find this absurdly fascinating. I've never seen the "vos" in Chilean literature although I'm sure writers have used it in dialogue. And it definitely shows up in folk songs and pop songs.

I can't say about Argentinian conjugations. I really only know their vos from hearing them speak, and for the life of me I can't remember what the past tense sounds like except that I think they tend to add an extra s to endings? The Argentinian lit I've read is mostly Borges and Cortazar which is super low on dialogue.

And you know, I've never read Allende. I should try. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

19 hours ago, Violet Crown said:

I'm convinced that Hardy wrote it that way to make it obvious that he didn't consider it to be the real ending. 

Under duress...

[Learning Foreign Languages Thread - September]

15 hours ago, KungFuPanda said:

The only time I ever needed to use my very low level French was when I was working in Southern France for a month. Not one person was rude about it. I didn’t encounter a ton of English speakers, so most people were patient and kind while I communicated with them. 

It’s the language of poetry!  I would love for someone to come up with an Arabic course centered around music; specifically Oum Kalthoum songs. She’s SO clear. 

Oum Kalthoum is amazing. Thank you for reminding me about her...I found a version of Enta Omri with subtitles. 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

I finished Return of the Native. Big thanks to @Violet Crownfor mentioning that it has two endings, because my edition didn't include Hardy's footnote and I'd never have known otherwise. His original ending (without the wedding) is better -- his version of a happy ending is also not super convincing in my opinion.

I loved this book. I love Hardy's descriptions, the way he follows each idea through to its end; I was hooked from the first paragraph. As a novel, the book is strange and gave me the feeling of one of those ancient Greek dramas, where the outcome is inevitable and the figures are just struggling against the backdrop. I don't know how to put it better. The characters are complex but also doomed. Not like in Wuthering Heights, though. The characters here are more machine-like, with buttons that can be pressed to provoke things. Oh, I don't know. Probably I'll buy my own copy and reread this book later.

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

17 hours ago, Matryoshka said:

Oh, man, I thought I had all the combinations down! Sigh, lol.  I have a Spanish textbook from somewhere in Europe that is under the very wrong assumption that all Latin American speakers consistently use vos for tú and even include the conjugations (a la Argentina) to learn.

Although I could swear I have heard como estai... 

I've read a lot of Chilean literature (okay, mostly Allende but also at least a few others), and I can't remember that variation coming up in the written word the way vos does in Argentinian lit... I learned vos first by reading lots of Mafalda. 😁

I found this on the Chilean vos:

https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/chiler.htm

I love Mafalda too!

[Learning Foreign Languages Thread - September]

I speak pretty good French and Spanish, so my goal there is to maintain and improve. At various times in my life I've tried learning Arabic -- I think Arabic is a gorgeous language -- but I have never gotten past the early stages. One day I'd like to spend more time on it.

I listen to French radio (rfi.fr) and sometimes watch old French TV shows; I'd like to read more also. I speak to my parents in French sometimes. My husband also speaks French and Spanish, so we use both languages when we want to talk about something without the kids understanding. But I don't know if that really counts as practice, since we also know each other well enough to figure out meaning through a thicket of mistakes!

 

 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

24 minutes ago, Matryoshka said:

2nd person plural in Spanish (informal) is vosotros; in Galician it's vos (apparently also like Portuguese!), but in Latin America they've dropped the 2nd person plural informal and only use ustedes, and then in some parts (but not all) of Latin America they use vos as the 2nd person informal singular (instead of tú) like everywhere else. Usted/es is used exclusively in the plural and to varying amounts in the singular in LatinAm, and pretty much not at all (singlular or plural) in Spain anymore - like in super-super-formal occasions only.  2nd person in Spanish is a mess! Lol.

Vuestra merced (origin of usted and ustedes) literally meant 'your mercy'. 

PS. Accents should be easy on your phone? On mine, if I press and hold a letter, all the accented variations pop up, just choose the right one. 

I love this.

In Chile they use both tu and vos, but the vos is only used for very informal moments. They kind of swallow the s at the end and they don't conjugate the verb the same way that Argentinians and Uruguayans do.

So instead of saying "vos tenés," like in Argentina, they say "vos tení".

Instead of como estás, como estai...

 

 

 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

1 hour ago, Matryoshka said:

I guess that's why I was having a hard time remembering which it was, lol! Guess I was listening well, though!

In Spanish the posessive adjectives agree in number but not gender - except for nuestro/a/s and vuestro/a/s.  But it's just su or sus in third person.

I think Galician also uses something like filo/a insted of hijo/a for son/daughter.  Have no idea of spelling!

So cool that you are learning Galician. I love hearing these tidbits.

 

There is some weird linguistic closeness between f and h, right? In Romance languages I mean. Your examples of "filo" vs "hijo" make me think of it. Like in Spanish both "fierro" and "hierro" mean iron. And I think there are other examples which I can't rembember... 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

27 minutes ago, Matryoshka said:

What is 2nd person formal in Portuguese? In Spanish it's Usted, and which is a mispronounced contraction of the medieval 'vuestra merced' which is also conjugated in the third person.

It is voce,and I know it's also a contraction of a much longer honorific but I forget what.

 

@Penguina language thread sounds wonderful. 

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

On 9/15/2020 at 12:45 PM, Penguin said:

I finished a Miss Read book (Thrush Green #8), which was a lovely palate cleanser. 

The book I really want to talk about is Lisbon Poets (bilingual edition). It profiles five Lisbon poets. Two have big, international reputations: Luis de Camoes wrote Portugal's big epic poem, The Luciads, in the 1500s. My understanding is that nearly everyone in Portugal reads this in high school. Fernando Pessoa is a Modernist poet. What is interesting to me about him is that he wrote under well-developed, alternative personalities (heteronyms). It is easy to find English translations of both Luis de Camoes and Fernando Pessoa, and I hope to read more of each.

The other three (Cesario Verde, Mario De Sa-Carneiro, and Florabela Espanca) do not seem to have much translated into English. Florabela Espanca is the one and only female in the book. She was not taken very seriously in her lifetime, but is being revisited. She was dismissed as too emotive. Too concerned with love from the POV of a young woman to be considered IMPORTANT. And she used exclamation points! Oh the horror! I am not shocked that a young woman writer who died in 1930 was deemed trivial. She committed suicide on her 36th birthday.

Even though I do not know Portuguese, it is pretty obvious that the translations did not attempt to keep the rhyme schemes that I see on the Portuguese side of the pages. So I had a grand time listening to some of these poems being read in Portuguese on YouTube. I've added a version of "Amar!" by Florabela Espanca. Maybe, like me, you will just enjoy listening to a bit of Portuguese poetry even if you do not understand it. 

Here's my book's translation of the first stanza of "Amar!" :

To Love!

I want to love - love madly!

Love just to love - here...there...and beyond...

Him over there, and him right there, and everybody...

Love! Love! And not love anyone!

 

I did not know any of these poets before! I had fun reading about Pessoa and his heteronyms. It feels like something out of a Borges story. It gave me a lot to think about.

[Book a Week 2020 - BW37: In the Grass by Hamlin Garland]

15 hours ago, Dreamergal said:

Finished Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner 

Reading this book was like how I feel sometimes during exercise. I grit my teeth and get on with it, looking forward to finishing. This was my second Faulkner and I was determined to finish when I abandoned The Sound and the Fury. It was certainly not because of the content or I should say what I understood of it. It seemed quite timely and relevant given current circumstances. 

I found myself with a lot of questions. Like, did the author really give out what seemed like the entire book summary in the beginning ? Was he on something when he wrote this ? Why is he lurching from event to person and back ? Is this what he is saying or did I understand it wrong ? Why can't I understand a book written in English as a middle aged woman when I read and understood Dickens and Austen even as teen though English is not my first language ? 

I've had the privilege of reading in it's original language some works that are from BC and first written on palm leaves. Some are just oral traditions handed down through the generations which are later written down  and published. I have also read works in translation by great poets and a noble laureate in the closest possible language that sounded like it I know and made me want to learn the original languages so I could read them in that.

Faulkner though is not like that for me. I liken it to Opera. I found even the singing a bit exaggerated and could not enjoy it appalling people. I lack something that I just do not get his writing which is a pity because what little I got was beautiful. 

I'm so glad you posted about this! You're making me want to read Faulkner again. I remember being so excited by the language -- so dense and deliberate! I would not have compared him to opera but I can see what you mean.

I guess all of us have some writers we can't get into. I really didnt like Nabokov. I know people praise Nabokov's writing, but for me, it felt so flat and distant that I couldn't admire it...one day I'll try it again.