Over-ambition

[fivemack]

I've decided to try reading a well-received thriller (Franz Schätzing's Der Schwarm) in German, to improve my German.

This may be a foolish exercise, since the list of words I've had to look up so far include

Verschwindet	disappears
Heerscharen	hosts (multitudes)
die Qualle	jellyfish
Unterdessen	meanwhile
gewaltig	immense (general adjective of amplification)
Zangenkiefern	not sure (fangs? Zangen are forceps, but Kiefern are pine-trees)
Hingezaubert	conjured forth
Ahnen	to suspect
der Vorfall	incident
die Bedrohung	threat
der Fortbestand	continuity
vermeintlich	alleged
die Werbeagentur	advertising agency
ausgebildeter	trained (selbstausgebildet = self-trained)
der Taucher	diver
erfüllen	to accomplish

and I have only just finished reading the blurb before page one. You probably get an idea of the theme of the book from this vocabulary alone, in much the same way as, trying to read the lead article in a German newspaper, I learned in succession 'Mut' (courage), 'Pflicht' (duty) and 'Mehrwertsteuer' (value-added tax).

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Ich kann ein bißchen vehstehn!

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Kiefern also means jaws. So Zangenkifern means jaws like pliers. So fangs would be an appropriate translation.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

The theory is sound, but I would try a book with a lower reading age first :-) Or make sure you've got a very good database... I did this with The Sword in the Stone, and got on a little faster. But I've forgotten all my German since...

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I assumed that Franz Schätzing was to a reasonable approximation a Teutonic Tom Clancy, whose vocab isn't unreasonably challenging; my father would have me read Thomas Mann instead, but my taste in books is not that high-brow, and struggle against hosts of poisonous jellyfish appeals more than tales of the emptiness of bourgeois life in inter-war Lubeck.

I'm using http://dict.leo.org/ which claims about half a million entries, and has (once I've got the stem right) all the words I've tried; there's a very large paper German dictionary on top of my bookcase, just in case. I thought I should read something in the language it was written in, rather than a translation into German of something I'd already read, and had heard Der Schwarm described as like the early, good Michael Crichton.

The really interesting contemporary alien-culture SF is unfortunately in Russian, which I can't dream of coping with; and very little of it is translated.

[(Anonymous)]

Any books in particular that you've heard of? All I - you know who I am - know of is exciting tomes about the resurrection of Stalin, which only qualifies as alien culture in certain specific definitions.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Here's something moderately alien-sounding that one of the Russians on one of the newsgroups I read recommended:

"It is one of my favorites: The Protopartorg's Red Aura by Yevgeny Lukin. It is set after Russia broke up into regions, and then the regions broke up, and so did their subdivisions. So we have two small towns ruled by Orthodox Communists (Orthodox as in religion) and Liberal Warlocks which predictably dislike each other. They both have quite... interesting politics, both internal and external. The external have to do with NATO and the fact that the US President is crawling over the map of Europe with a magnifying glass and trying to find some country as yet unbombed (can you guess when the book was written?)

So we have a domovoy (kind of a goblin), who is trying to emigrate from Lytsk to Bakluzhino, where he can escape holy water; we have the protopartorg from the title (a mix of the religious title "protopope" and the communist party title "partorg"), who has been exiled to Bakluzhino due to political intrigues; the leader of communist underground -- bandits -- a business -- secret agents of the government (all at the same time); an agent of secret services of the government; the leader of the government; and none of them qualify as Good Guys, though the domovoy comes closest.

If you can read Russian, here it is (http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/lukin_evgenii/lukin_evgenii_alaya_aura_protopartorga)"

НОЧНОІ ДОЗОР seems alien enough for many practical purposes, though that at least is available in translation; it may of course be comfortable and homely for those comfortably at home in contemporary Moscow.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ночной Дозор, I mean.

There Is No I In Cyrillic

[interlocuter: but sire, I can see two of them, look, either side of the Ls]

Why can I never remember и-краткий? и is only the second most famous Russian letter in the West, after я.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yikes; I actually remembered several words on that list (starting with the first, which made me feel all powerful; but the average went way down after that).

Back in the mid 1970s I read a couple of SF novels in german to try to keep mine up (I lived in Zurich the 1966-67 academic year, and then took 4 years of highschool german when I got back). And after that stopped trying, because, like, I live in the US and all that is far, far away.

Newspapers

[http://the.earth.li/~alex/halley/ (from livejournal.com)]

Now that need dictates I get all my news online I've taken to having a schedule of sources, a different outlet every day, with one day a week being a French newspaper. My thinking there is I've a good chance of guessing much of the news so the odd bit of linguistic confusion doesn't matter so much. Then again, there's little chance of hordes of jellyfish, nor of reading about them in the bath.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

cybersofa reckons the best way to learn a language is to buy comic books in it. I learned a lot from reading a book in German that I knew almost off by heart in English (When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr).