Your first book in a foreign language...

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Prowler
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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby Prowler » 2019-06-27, 19:08

Hmm... good question. It must have been a book for English class. Pretty sure it was The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It was about a statue and a bird. I remember finding it bizarre that both end up kissing each other near the end. I don't remember anything else from it. This was like... back in 5th grade already?

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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby Osias » 2019-06-27, 19:51

linguoboy wrote:It's ironic. More or less the equivalent of "That sounds like fun. Not."


:y: Thanks
Last edited by Osias on 2019-06-27, 19:54, edited 1 time in total.
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-06-29, 14:03

Well, if we don't count English or Malayalam as "foreign languages," I guess the first book in a foreign language I read cover to cover would be a Hindi alphabet book...It's called अ आ इ और सामान्य ज्ञान (A Aa I Aur Saamaanya Gyaan), published by विकास रंगबिरंगी (Vikaas Rangbirangi), and illustrated by John Fernandes (presumably a Goan). If that doesn't count, then I guess it would be Astèrix i el calderó in Catalan. If that doesn't count, either, then Le Petit Prince in French.

These are all really boring. :P The most interesting books I have are probably a couple of cookbooks in Thai, wrapped in a paper covering (apparently from a fabric store called Thai Silks) illustrated with a tapestry of rural Thai life.
linguoboy wrote:I'm surprised I missed out on responding to this thread earlier.

Well, the post just before you wrote this one was from six years ago. UniLang was a lot more active and harder to keep up with six years ago!
We read very little in my high-school Spanish classes, mostly just short texts in our textbooks.

I took Spanish literature, so of course, I had to read a lot in Spanish. :) But before that, we didn't have much to read, either. We did occasionally have to read something outside the textbook, though.
When I took German in college, we started reading literature the very first day. Our reader was a graded collection of short stories called Der Weg zum Lesen.

We used this exact same book in my high-school German classes, too. (My German teacher in middle school gave me permission to skip second year, so the first German class I took in high school was third-year. The next year was a college-level (AP) course. We did not have any books with dialogue in them in either course, only grammar and literature books/readers, though we did perform little skits every year for a language competition regardless of whether we were still taking German or not).
Osias wrote:The Bible in English. My father is a pastor.

So was my mom's, although I don't think that led to her ever reading it in a language other than Malayalam. :hmm:

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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby Osias » 2019-06-29, 15:40

vijayjohn wrote:
Osias wrote:The Bible in English. My father is a pastor.

So was my mom's, although I don't think that led to her ever reading it in a language other than Malayalam. :hmm:

So what does the apostrophe-plus-s is doing there?
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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-06-29, 16:02

Osias wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:
Osias wrote:The Bible in English. My father is a pastor.

So was my mom's, although I don't think that led to her ever reading it in a language other than Malayalam. :hmm:

So what does the apostrophe-plus-s is doing there?

So was my mom's
= So was my mom's father
(= My mom's father was also a pastor)

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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby Osias » 2019-06-29, 16:15

Duh!

I am slow today.
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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-06-29, 19:04

Also btw
Osias wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:
Osias wrote:The Bible in English. My father is a pastor.

So was my mom's, although I don't think that led to her ever reading it in a language other than Malayalam. :hmm:

So what does is the apostrophe-plus-s is doing there?

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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby Osias » 2019-06-30, 13:50

Very slow indeed.
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Re: Your first book in a foreign language...

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-07-04, 19:10

That's okay, I'm slow at learning languages, too, including Portuguese. :P Well, and at learning to do pretty much anything else. Or at least it feels like that sometimes.


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