Have you ever tried learning a new language...

detective instinct says platonov

even when you haven't advanced so far as to pick up all the nuances, it's not that hard to be aware of points where a translator has made some decisions that don't jibe with the original, so at least you can study them more carefully and then put some nuance BACK that was left out.

An example to us all

I read the Recherche when I was working as a legal intern at an American law firm in Paris. I was trying to learn French, so I read all seven volumes in French. Every night I drew up vocabulary index cards with lists of the new words that I’d learned from Proust. But luckily I found that the lists became shorter and shorter as I made my way deeper into the book! In any case, it was with Proust’s work that I first began to read authors in the original French. And that was something I continued with other French authors.

ugh

what's wrong with Muzzy

Ha

Tbh thought that would be link to an M. White post.

For french I think all the scandalous 19th C poets (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nerval, Verlaine), are good for improving language skills. In an edition with facing page translations you don't have to keep looking stuff up all the time, plus the subject matter (booze, sex, corpses, drugs, depression) is invariably enough to keep you awake. And plus plus some of the mid-20th C artistic translations, particularly of Baudelaire, are pretty amazing.

Proust... I don't think I'm ready to even read it in english yet

I am thinking of improving my dismal spanish via borges and don quixote. An hour a night attempting this couldn't hurt...

what about learning a new language (Spanish) in order to write (poetry) in it? because I have totally done that, with middling results

I am thinking of improving my dismal spanish via borges and don quixote. An hour a night attempting this couldn't hurt...

It could make your conversations in Spanish very interesting.

i tried mandarin chinese last year. it was fun for a bit but after a while i found i just couldn't retain any more of it.

Jean Hyppolite learned German by translating Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, he must've been a blast to talk to in German.

I may give some of those 19th C French poets a go, presumably a more fun language-building exercise than the untranslated minor phenomenologists I'm dealing with now...

So US still wait until middle school to teach kids a foreign language???? Wtf. Or is this just an Illinois thing? So dumb.

The reverse makes more sense: you read so that you can train and understand the language. Then it becomes a loop between learning and reading. Books are not such a bad choice - handy, self-sufficient - if you don't have people available to torture with your slow monstrous sentences.
Russian and Japanese seem daunting / near-impossible though - you'd need additional motivation than just being able to read Tolstoi in the original.