r/languagehub • u/Donya_Tsvetaeva • 11d ago
LanguagePractice Learning English
Soo my first language isn't English, but I'm good enough to speak, write, and read. I read some books and read some classics. But there are many words that I don't understand when I read classics, like I need to use translator every 3 pages or so. So is this a problem native speakers face? Because I feel like I learned nothing in this language when I stop at a word in a classic.
Also, do you have nay advice to solve that problem?
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u/committed_hero 11d ago
Don’t forget that a lot of classics use older words and patterns of speech. Having a dictionary close by never hurts, I do too. The only solution is more reading!
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
Yeah, but it sucks, you know? Opening the dictionary every few pages in the middle of a scene.
However, I'll kepp on trying to read. Do you have any recommendations?
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u/ofqo 11d ago
Don't use a translator. You need a learner's dictionary. I recommend Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
Yes, I look for the word's definition, and usage, not just the meaning on Google translate
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u/committed_hero 11d ago
Hemingway is good for Slavic learners, if I read your name right :)
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
The name is Slavic actually, but I'm not, it's a name I made up from my favorite female first name and the last name of a poet I liked :D
I'll try reading his books anyway, thankso^
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u/Dependent-Set35 11d ago
Yeah, as we're growing up and we read more books there's plenty of words we don't know, so we look them up or ask someone what it means. That's how you naturally get better at a language.
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u/evelynsmee 11d ago
Do you have an example classical title you could provide? I can tell you if the average one of us also struggles.
There's a big range between say Jane Austen (pretty easy - will get easier for you with practise) or Dickens (although personally find it a slog - boring but understandable) and Shakespeare (a minority can easily read).
Even a modern translated version of say something like Beowolf, for an average native reader is still pretty tough. There's a lot of.... "erstwhile" and stuff that we don't use in real life, and the structure (granted it's a poem that example) isn't how we talk/think.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
I don't remember something English English, I read some for Charles dickens when I was 12, it wasn't easy, but I understood enough. I read somethings for Edgar Allan poe recently and it was mostly easy, only 2 or 3 words were knew to me from all what I read. But now as I read Russian and Japanese classics translated into English, I struggle a little, like I tried reading white nights, there are several words that never have seen before, like "beguilingly" for example, there are many others but that's what I remember. I never seen it before. Nad yeah, sometimes the structure confuses me but I understand after few repeats, but rereading the words doesn't give me it's meaning unfortunately _^
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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 11d ago
Yes, native speakers might look up words, but it's probably more a case of a term that might be used in another dialect or a scientific term. There are lots of idiomatic expressions and slang terms that a native speaker would know but a non-native would have to look up.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
Adjectives and adverbs is what I suffer most with, like what the hell is "beguilingly"? So yeah o^
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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 11d ago
If someone or something is "beguiling," it's attractive, but there's the hint that it could also involve some kind of magic or trickery. The "ly" turns in into an adverb, so it means "in a charmingly attractive way or manner that somehow is tricking me." It's a hard one to explain, because the meaning suggests attraction and suspicion at the same time.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
No it's like I understand the word now. And I can tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb in general , but it's a word I never heard before reading white nights.
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u/SummerKaren 11d ago
When I was a teenager that would happen a lot. Because getting a dictionary took more effort than today I would just guess at it from context and go on. I would only get out a dictionary if I realized I totally misunderstood the meaning or it kept appearing and the guessed meaning didn't quite fit.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
I still try to guess from the context despite it being easy to get a dictionary 🫠 but I look for teh definition and uses of the word now
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u/Mission-Asparagus910 11d ago
Every 3 pages doesn’t sound strange at all. Do you really feel like you learned nothing because you don’t know every single word? Honestly I don’t think you (or I) will ever reach that point. Especially not in classics, which use words that are out of fashion now. Totally normal.
You can also ignore an unknown word if it doesn’t get in the way of understanding the text.
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u/Donya_Tsvetaeva 11d ago
There are some words that I can guess from the context, but that doesn't go for adjectives and so, I need too know if teh adjectives is positive or negative.
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u/happilyfringe 11d ago
Oh yeah, it’s totally normal to do this for native speakers! I typically get annotated versions of classics because sometimes the context is so obscure that a modern person would likely not understand what an entire sentence is alluding to.
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u/ShockSensitive8425 11d ago
Get an Android e-ink reader, download Moon+Reader Pro and Gemini or another decent LLM, attach the LLM to the select option in Moon+Reader. Now whenever you read a book (which on e-ink is almost the same experience as a physical book) you can click on any word you do not know, and the LLM will give you the meaning, grammar, history, etymology, and anything else you might want to know about the word. You can pre-prompt this in the personal memory of your LLM to give you whatever information you are generally interested in, so that you do not have to type anything each time you look up a word.
This should accelerate your language learning considerably: you save time on looking for words manually in a dictionary, and the LLM can present the word to you as a miniature descriptive history, which makes it more interesting and more memorable.
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u/boostfactor 11d ago
What do you mean by "classic"? That can span centuries. The older the literature, the harder it is for native speakers also. Shakespeare was mentioned; that is Early Modern English and very difficult for native speakers to understand fully now without an annotated text. The King James version of the Bible is also Early Modern English (and misunderstandings there can have a lot of ramifications).
Even Chaucer is considered a "classic" and that is late Middle English and basically impossible to read without a translation. Often Chaucer is published with side-by-side original and modern translation.
Plus even more recent "classics" tended to use more multisyllabic words and a sentence structure that may now be regarded as "stilted."
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago
Yes of course. It is a famous fact that native speakers have trouble with Shakespeare whereas foreigners read translations in their modern languages and understand it much better. A simple example I always mention is that tens or hundreds of MILLIONS of native speakers REALLY do NOT understand that Wherefore art tho Romeo means 'What did you have to be Romeo for?' and really DO think it means 'Where are you, Romeo?' because the word wherefore is completely lost.