BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
There are good approaches to learning both Chinese and Japanese, but especially Japanese through reading. Start with Heisig to learn the characters, then a source of sentence forms like Kanji.Odessey.2001, then a couple of different textbooks to transition into longer form writing. Then read, read, read for hours a day and never stop.
It's more app- and website-oriented, but the Tofugu website has quasi-monthly roundups of new Japanese learning tools.
I feel like Chinese - for a variety of reasons - doesn't have the same high level of pedagogical curation. But the Fuller book is good for learning classical, and Pleco is a great platform for dictionaries, flashcards, etc -- some paid, some free.
Isn't this book skipping the most important part of learning kanji, ie their readings? If yes, it's a total waste of time.
Basically learning the meaning and writing of all characters first, then their pronunciation is faster than learning each character fully, one at a time. Experience bears this out.
It is super interesting, as I want to learn to read Russian in order to learn more about the various languages of the region, many of which have only had monographs published in Russian. Now to see if I can find a used/cheap copy anywhere.
So, I can either learn how to read, hear, speak, and write a a single language or I can expend the same effort and learn to read many languages. For me, the later is much more appealing. But then, I'm a voracious reader and too introverted to be interested in talking or writing to actual living people.
Daub. 1975. Comprehending Technical Japanese.
Gould. 1972. Russian for the Mathematician.
Stack. 1986. Reading French in Arts and Sciences, 4/e.
Franco & Sandberg. 1998. Spanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course.
If I could choose to have any one superpower I'd pick the ability to instantly comprehend any language.
It's literally like exploring entire new worlds.
I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.
You see this in English, too.
That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands.
Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.
There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words.
...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!)
I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice.
Of course that doesn't mean that people don't use language consciously. It's just not that one way of talking can be assumed to be the default for everyone.
It's not, really. At least, not in the sense that it doesn't actually happen. What GP describes is part of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of “register” [1], wherein people have different little context-dependent “dialects” or “styles” that they use in different situations: for example, you might use a different sublanguage when speaking at home than you'd use at work, and even that one might be different from one you'd use in a job interview, or giving a TED talk, or writing a paper for CACM, vel sim. A particularly well-known, if extreme, example would be “babytalk”. The obverse of babytalk,—uh—“smartypantstalk”, seems to be a perennial literary criticism throughout history, sometimes famously so (Mark Twain (v. James Fenimore Cooper) and Ernest Hemingway (v. William Faulkner) come to mind).
> There are speakers that just have a vocabulary perceived as complex and it's not any easier for those people to switch to "easier" words than it is for others to switch to more complex words.
Although registers and register-switching are a natural part of language (and people switch between registers all the time without even being aware of it), I think it also true that different people have different registers for the same situations. So, perhaps your casual register seems to many of your speech partners more like their own formal register, or otherwise more like what they expect a formal register to seem like. Or maybe you were raised in an environment where the formal register was perfectly appropriate for use in casual contexts, and so it actually is your formal register (which just so happens to also be your casual register).
In fact, I think it might be harder to reduce your vocabulary than to build it, since in adding words you need not consider any particular speech partner or their understanding, but in removing words you must consider many possible speech partners and whatever you might know of their vocabularies, to make effective decisions about which words need removed. I imagine it involves a lot of trial and error.
> I think all speakers of non-standard traditions (complex, simple, dialect, etc.) have to deal with a lot of prejudice.
This is certainly true, and one of the main topics of sociolinguistics. The particulars of our speech as perceived by our listeners are used to infer a deal of paralinguistic (and usually social) information, right or wrong (factually or morally). This is one of the reasons for register-switching: if I'd written this comment in the same register I'd use to talk to my 8-year-old nephew, I suspect you'd come away feeling rather confused and put-off (or you might infer that I'm mentally handicapped); on the other hand, I doubt my nephew would understand much of this comment as-is. By register-switching, I'm able to optimize my language not only for an appropriate level of linguistic competence, but also for an appropriate social setting, depending on how I want to be perceived, and how I want my listeners to judge my own perceptions of themselves. In some sense it's tactical, but it's a mostly subconscious and automatic operation, instinctive and reflexive, a natural part of language.
I think, however, there's something worth keeping in mind: depending on the situation or context, speakers of even standard dialects can be subject to prejudices. This is more seldom and, in most cases, less consequential (I think) than what speakers of non-standard dialects have to deal with, but, myself being a native speaker of “General American”, it's something I've experienced first-hand. I think that, perhaps, it has less to do with “standardness” per se than with the prestige associated with the dialect—it just happens that standard dialects are also usually prestigious. At the same time, I think the prejudices come from usual in-group vs. out-group dynamics, where your dialect can be a pretty distinct marker of your membership status. (I'm not much of a sociologist, however).
> ...and for some anecdote: For some reason the way my family talks is rather formal and I often have to deal with people assuming that I'm very pretentious, which really isn't ideal in most cases. (I'm working on it!)
I know this is difficult— Good luck! :)
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
Thanks for the amazing reply!
If I am perfectly honest, reading articles and things written by non-native English speakers is easier for me. If I read articles in WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. it is harder to comprehend and takes more time to understand, compared to a Medium article or blog post written by a non-journalist.
?????
Orson Welles was a movie director. Did you misspell Oscar Wilde?
I hope you're not referring to NewSpeak from 1984 which was an invention by the party to limit people's expression so that they could not verbalize disloyalty, and therefore not even think it.
A horrible example of state control.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237
I have several other apps but they don’t have a progression for working with a small group of words at a time. At some point, I’ll revise them to be like the 100 Word app.
The article here is not about words (which you can look up in a dictionary), but everything else, namely how the words are put together and what typical grammatical constructs mean.