eskandar wrote:vijayjohn wrote:I've been reading at least one book in each of those languages
Cool, what are the books?
نابینا شہر میں آئینہ by Ahmad Faraz. My dad's roommate in grad school was a Muslim guy from Bihar who's really into poetry and has composed some poems in Urdu himself. He sent me this book and another book of poetry by his brother-in-law just before I left for Taiwan.
ألف ليلة وليلة (there seem to be multiple versions of this in Arabic, and I think the edition I have is missing some parts
)
Ourika (basically a novella by a 19
th-century French aristocratic woman questioning the morality of racism)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz
Kızlarıma Mektuplar, a set of letters by a Turkish professor to his daughters I think after they grew up and left to study abroad
Querschnitt: Dichter des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, basically a collection of 20
th-century German short stories
And a bunch of Uncle Scrooge stories in German (with somewhat detailed plot lines!) from the 90s
I actually also bought a novel in Hebrew last year, shortly after I came back from Taiwan. It's called גוף ראשון רבים and is by Nathan Shaham.
Toda! Studying Hebrew and Arabic together has been super fruitful for me. Pretty much whenever I learn a new root in one, I get curious to check and see if there are cognates in the other. Why not do both at once?
I kept doing this with Hebrew, but honestly, it really bogged me down because there often just aren't cognates.
vijayjohn wrote:Maybe I'll go back to Colloquial Hebrew and Colloquial Amharic.
Seems like that would be similarly fruitful, though I guess Amharic is not as close to Hebrew as Arabic is. I am sorely tempted to pick up another Semitic language, but I'll hold off until I'm where I want to be with Hebrew and Arabic.
Well, this is me we're talking about, so my plan is basically to just study every Semitic language I can get my hands on
(more like every language, period, but that's less relevant in context).