On Reading in a Second Language
I’ve been reading novels in Spanish for about a year—successfully, at least. One of my main motivations to become fluent was so I could read Marquez in Spanish, and as a chronically impatient human, I made an aborted attempt at Cien años de solidad a few years ago, well before I had the skills to navigate it. I had to stop multiple times every sentence to look up words I didn’t know, making it impossible to just sink into the story; I set it aside after about a page.
That brief experience didn’t make me want to stop trying, though. If anything, it made it clear why I needed to keep learning. Even only knowing half the words, the rhythm and sound of the language was enchanting, in a different way than reading the same passage in English. Each language has its own unique quirks, its own syntax and typical sentence structures, its own set of words that don’t exist in other tongues. Even in the hands of a masterful translator, something is always lost in translation.
I haven’t yet circled back to Marquez. But I have read three other books in Spanish, ones I’ve never read in English, and the reading process has gotten smoother with each. I definitely still encounter words and phrases I don’t know but I’ve gotten to the point that, in most cases, I can glean the meaning from context, or at least don’t need to stop and consult a dictionary right away to make sense of what’s going on. The first time I was able to simply read an entire paragraph—just words to meaning, without the step of translating it to English in my head, or being jarred out of the story by unfamiliar vocabulary—gave me a giddy sense of accomplishment.
Maybe my favorite thing about reading in Spanish, though, is the way it forces me to slow down and enjoy the writing. I grew up as one of those kids who would devour books, sometimes in a single night—not a speed-reader, by any means, but I tend to read quickly, especially if I’m into a book and really want to know what happens next. I’m not quite a strong enough Spanish reader yet to pull that off, though, and while that can sometimes be frustrating, it’s a blessing in disguise. Slowing down gives me space to savor the language. I’m forced to think about how it’s constructed and how the words sound and flow together. And sometimes I’ll come across sentences that use imagery or turns of phrase I’ve never encountered before, or words I know but in a new way, and it’s like having a little puzzle to solve. It’s a delight to unlock those moments, and the experience of thinking through them leads me to think about language in a way I normally never would for a book in English.
Or at least, a way I never would have before I started reading books in a second language. I find I read fiction in English differently than I did before—more thoughtfully, spending more time thinking about the word choices and sentence structures and how those influence the meaning of the words and the feelings they evoke. Your native language is comfortable, but that also makes it easy to take it for granted.
Reading in Spanish has informed the way I write in English, too, and the way I think about the conlangs I use in my main sci-fi work-in-progress. Spanish and English are very similar languages in many respects—they share a root language in Latin, even aside from the significant vocab sharing that’s happened since. Yet even so, there are significant differences in how these languages construct sentences and express ideas.
A simple example to explain what I’m getting at: something you learn in Spanish 101 is that most adjectives come after their nouns. Because of this, multiple adjectives that describe the same noun create a different energy in Spanish than in English. In English, they all get stacked up in front of the noun—the more adjectives there are, the longer the reader has to wait to find out what’s being described. Yet phrases that describe the noun usually come after it. When both are used, the noun gets surrounded by descriptions, and it can get a bit lost in the mix.
In Spanish, the noun comes first, and both the adjectives and phrases that describe it follow. In lyrical descriptive passages, this anchors the object first in the reader’s mind, then fleshes it out with its details in an uninterrupted flow. Spanish also has gender agreement, which means that often the noun and the adjectives all end with the same letter. This creates a lovely forward momentum in descriptive passages that’s very difficult to achieve in English.
Spanish is also a pro-drop language, and makes broader use of nominalized adjectives, where adjectives are used as stand-ins for noun. English does this to some extent, too, like if you say “The blonde over there”, but most adjectives require a noun or pronoun after them—“the thin woman” or “the thin one”, not just “ the thin”. But you could refer to someone as la flaca en Spanish, a language which allows for pretty much any adjective to stand in for a noun. This adds another dimension to the relationship between nouns and their descriptions that’s not as available in the English writer’s toolbox.
The language someone speaks provides the framework for how they structure their thoughts, and that has implications beyond the words themselves. The same descriptive passage in English and Spanish can conjure a different feeling and image, even if the words are technically conveying the same information. Thinking about how the structure of a language would influence the thought process of people who speak it adds more depth and realism to a conlang. You can also use that to structure their dialogue or narrative voice, conveying the feel of someone speaking a foreign language while still using words the reader will understand. That was something I’d considered conceptually before but don’t think I fully understood until I’d experienced reading an entire book in a second language.
While I don’t think you necessarily need to be bilingual or multilingual to write an effective conlang, it definitely helps, if for no other reason than it exposes you to another example of how language can operate beyond the rules you’re familiar with. And I think any writer can benefit from reading poetry or fiction in a second language, especially those who write in more lyrical styles.
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