It’s Time for New Reading Material
February 9th, 2009 | View Comments
Let us review the sage words of Khatzumoto:
Most learners of a foreign language – any foreign language – remain, like a novice skater to the wall of the rink, glued to their textbooks: a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of their target language.
Speaking of boring, check out these scintillating passages from Lesson 15 of Beginning Chinese Reader:
離上海不遠有一個很大的湖, 是太湖. 湖的四邊水田很多, 湖裏頭還有很多魚, 所以湖邊的人家都說太湖太好了.
Translation, de-mutant-ized for easier reading: Not far from Shanghai, there’s a lake: Tai Lake. Around the lake there are many irrigated fields; inside the lake there are many fish. That’s why those near the lake all say that Tai Lake is very nice.
Are you asleep yet? No? How about this?
中國的湖南是在一個大湖的南邊. 湖北是在這個大湖的北邊.
Translation: China’s Hunan Province is located on the south side of a large lake. Hupeh Province is on the north side of this large lake.
It’s actually even more boring than it sounds in English. “Hunan” and “Hupeh” literally mean “south of lake” and “north of lake”, respectively.
One more for the road:
我要念中文. 西東大學離我家很近, 可是我是一個中學生, 不能在大學念書, 要不然我就在西東念中文了.
Translation: I want to study Chinese. Seton Hall University is very close to my house, but I’m a middle school student and can’t take classes at the university. Otherwise I would study Chinese at Seton Hall.
Fantastic!
I remember we had some Chinese board books at home, but once I outgrew those the only readily-available Chinese text was the 世界日報 newspaper. I didn’t even like reading news in English as a kid, why would I want to attempt it in Chinese? The lack of fun Chinese reading material while growing up is probably a big reason why I’m now illiterate.
I wonder if I could get my grandma to send me some Chinese picture books. And then I could work my way up to say, Chinese Harry Potter. Beats reading about Hunan Province and Seton Hall University ad nauseum.
Yvonne posted this on February 9th, 2009 @ 1:06am in Books, Chinese, Reading | Permalink to "It’s Time for New Reading Material"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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Yeah… language passages suck. Especially when they introduce characters with creative “names”, such as the ever famous 王大中. The name roughly translates as “Big Medium Wong” (with Wong as the surname).
Sadly, German passages weren’t much better. In German class, from the passages we got, I learned that Flori doesn’t eat vegetables: “Flori isst keine Gemϋse.”
In other news, I read all the passages without having to look at the translation first! It was about as fluent as a second grader’s reading, but I’m not completely illiterate! Yay!
Maybe you’d have liked Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar (English and Dutch translations within) better? That was one of my first reading passages in German, and I’m still torn between horror and amusement at the whole thing (my textbook included the most vivid line drawings as illustrations).
May I point out that Amazon has books in Chinese? I’m especially interested in how they translated Dr. Seuss books, though you seem to be beyond that level now.
Also check out Chinese Tapes, China Sprout, or Yes Asia. Not that I’ve used any of them myself, but I hear they have good reputations.