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What language do you read in? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago by penquin@lemm.ee to c/books@lemmy.world

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I read in both Arabic and English. Some books are very hard for me to grasp, so I find a translated copy and read it in Arabic. For example, I'm currently reading "the Count of Monte Cristo". It Has some old English that gets me confused a lot, even though I have a Kobo where I can just press and hold on a word to translate it, but still, the storyline as a whole got confusing, so I read it in Arabic. Much better. I'd love to hear from folks here :)

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If the original is in Portuguese, Italian or English, I'm probably reading the book in the original.

If it's in Latin or German, I try to read it in the original, and then if I feel like I'm not up to the task I revert back to one of the first three. (For example: I can read Caesar in Latin just fine, but I'm not reading Cicero.)

If it's in any other language, I'll read it in whichever language I found a good translation for.

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Holy moly, how many languages do you know? 😂

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 2 months ago

From three to seven, depending on how proficient one needs to be in a language to "speak" it. (The other two that I didn't mention are Venetian and Spanish. Counting either feels like cheating though - I'm mostly transposing knowledge from Portuguese and Italian into those two, although I did have some exposure to Venetian as a kid.)