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Eek, I have already fallen behind on my (already postponed) December memeage! Lately all I've been doing is hiding in my room & knitting, idk.
Monday's topic, from![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
maat_seshat: reading in Chinese/Japanese & habits/opinions thereof!
My Chinese and Japanese are not actually that good -- I read somewhere that once you get to a certain point in language learning, you no longer have a language learning problem -- you have an adult literacy problem. And I think that's true, because I keep picking up novels in Chinese or Japanese and reading them for a bit and then going '...this is too hard' & going off to do something else, even though I know just pushing through and reading as much as possible is the one thing I can rely on to help me improve.
For Japanese novels (as opposed to manga) the one thing I can read with decent success is Murakami, because he favors short sentences and doesn't use that many difficult words, unlike most of the novels I really want to read (e.g. Twelve Kingdoms).
I actually find Chinese novels a bit easier to read, because Chinese sentences require you to hold fewer things in your head at once, so it doesn't matter as much if I miss a few words. Chinese YA novels can be HARD, though, because they do use a lot of difficult words & slang. On the other hand, they have titles like 'The Interdimensional Music Maniac Union', which make everything worth it. (And I will admit that a lot of them put the hard vocab up front, b/c they're explaining the backstory, which is cool but also a big hurdle to jump at the beginning of a novel.)
I will say that reading both comics and novels in Japanese & Chinese has made me much less sympathetic towards translators. It would be very easy to do a better job than most of them are doing! (Even professional translators -- just look at the huge botch job TokyoPop made of the Twelve Kingdoms novels.) However, it's also given me plenty of respect for Chinese translators of foreign works: I've found the Chinese version of Invisible Cities just as beautifully incomprehensible as I would expect, and Howl's Moving Castle is so far matching just the flavor I remember from the original.
(Sidenote: subway bookstores in Shanghai are AMAZING, particularly if you're feeling like some foreign philosophy/politics/literature in translation. Lots of good stuff; the one at Line One's South Shaanxi stop has a whole shelf of Italo Calvino, a bunch of Banana Yoshimoto, and I picked up a copy of Edward Said's Orienalism as well. I found it much better furnished than the nearby English-language bookstore, though of course everything was in Chinese.)
All of which is to say that I don't think I've been reading widely enough in either Japanese or Chinese to really develop different habits than in English, except for getting intermittent rage at bad translators when I'm reading something unrelated, and I'm really curious to see what habits I do develop.
--And that I should have bought more books when I had the chance, goddammit.
This post is part of the Delayed December Post Meme. Ask me to post about more things!
Monday's topic, from
maat_seshat: reading in Chinese/Japanese & habits/opinions thereof!My Chinese and Japanese are not actually that good -- I read somewhere that once you get to a certain point in language learning, you no longer have a language learning problem -- you have an adult literacy problem. And I think that's true, because I keep picking up novels in Chinese or Japanese and reading them for a bit and then going '...this is too hard' & going off to do something else, even though I know just pushing through and reading as much as possible is the one thing I can rely on to help me improve.
For Japanese novels (as opposed to manga) the one thing I can read with decent success is Murakami, because he favors short sentences and doesn't use that many difficult words, unlike most of the novels I really want to read (e.g. Twelve Kingdoms).
I actually find Chinese novels a bit easier to read, because Chinese sentences require you to hold fewer things in your head at once, so it doesn't matter as much if I miss a few words. Chinese YA novels can be HARD, though, because they do use a lot of difficult words & slang. On the other hand, they have titles like 'The Interdimensional Music Maniac Union', which make everything worth it. (And I will admit that a lot of them put the hard vocab up front, b/c they're explaining the backstory, which is cool but also a big hurdle to jump at the beginning of a novel.)
I will say that reading both comics and novels in Japanese & Chinese has made me much less sympathetic towards translators. It would be very easy to do a better job than most of them are doing! (Even professional translators -- just look at the huge botch job TokyoPop made of the Twelve Kingdoms novels.) However, it's also given me plenty of respect for Chinese translators of foreign works: I've found the Chinese version of Invisible Cities just as beautifully incomprehensible as I would expect, and Howl's Moving Castle is so far matching just the flavor I remember from the original.
(Sidenote: subway bookstores in Shanghai are AMAZING, particularly if you're feeling like some foreign philosophy/politics/literature in translation. Lots of good stuff; the one at Line One's South Shaanxi stop has a whole shelf of Italo Calvino, a bunch of Banana Yoshimoto, and I picked up a copy of Edward Said's Orienalism as well. I found it much better furnished than the nearby English-language bookstore, though of course everything was in Chinese.)
All of which is to say that I don't think I've been reading widely enough in either Japanese or Chinese to really develop different habits than in English, except for getting intermittent rage at bad translators when I'm reading something unrelated, and I'm really curious to see what habits I do develop.
--And that I should have bought more books when I had the chance, goddammit.
This post is part of the Delayed December Post Meme. Ask me to post about more things!