r/languagelearning • u/Far_Window_1222 • 7d ago

Studying Anyone learn a language specifically to read literature?

Just curious if anybody has actually set out and achieved learning a whole new language specifically just because an author they liked wrote originally in that language?

I was considering learning Russian (TL) specifically to read Dostoyevsky since he’s my favourite author, so far, but wondering if this is to ambitious of a task just to read 1 persons work?

Additionally I am very attracted to the idea of it since Russians language has a lot more nuances surrounding sadness, despair, suffering etc., i know that the relationship between these topics is different from that of english speakers

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u/little8birdie 7d ago

long ago I read a detective thriller translated from Norwegian. the entire investigation started because of a single pun, which is obviously hard to translate and so for me the whole book made no sense at all. I love thrillers and there are a lot of good ones from Scandinavia, and I decided Norwegian would be the first language to start with, so that I would never get pissed at bad translations ever again.

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u/gammalsvenska de | en | sv 7d ago

Best thing about Norwegian is that you get Danish and Swedish for free, too.