This book by Myrtis Smith and Thomas Alexander is a collection of five* short stories with Esperanto and Spanish translations included alongside. The stories themselves are of a shockingly diverse range in genre and tone, and were mildly entertaining, though I can't say I would have ever been prone to read them had they not been offering the opportunities to deepen my grasp on a pair of languages I'm trying to learn. Their uses of vocabulary and grammar are simple enough that a halfway competent student of Spanish or Esperanto can dig up a fair amount of new intuitions as to words and rules through reading these closely with regular comparison to the English translation, for which purpose I did find this a useful little book. And it's very cheap on Kindle, which is what prompted my buying of it. I do think though that I'm going to try to finish the Duolingo Esperanto course before I try to read any more actual fiction written in the language as then my confidence and comprehension will be greater. But as a halfway testing point for learners this was pretty solid.
* There is a sixth story included though this lacks translation, and was thus of much lesser utility in learning any new vocabulary.
No comments:
Post a Comment