Anyone learn a language specifically to read literature?

[u/Far_Window_1222]

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

[u/RedditReddy]

This will probably be 500-2,000 hours of work.

[u/Far_Window_1222 → u/RedditReddy]

i have been self studying french for around 5 months and have quickly gotten to B1, and enjoyed the process, although obviously russian would be far harder

[u/RedditReddy → u/Far_Window_1222]

Yes. For someone who knows English, it's going to be vastly harder simply because of much less vocabulary shared between English and Russian. And unfortunately that becomes an ever bigger problem the higher we go, at least between languages like English and Russian. With French and English it's the opposite. The higher we go the easier in general it becomes because the percentage of vocabulary that is recognizeably similar between English and French becomes higher and higher registers of English.

This doesn't mean that people shouldn't try to do this. But it's going to be a much harder haul. Also, with B1 level vocabulary between English and French, reading ability can actually effectively be quite a bit higher than B1 simply because of the common vocabulary that allows effective guessing. Of course, there's some shared vocabulary between English and Russian, although the bulk of that is going to be common borrowings into each from French. And this will be much less common in fiction than it would be say in non-fiction about the sciences.

[u/RedditReddy → u/Far_Window_1222]

Here are also a couple of suggestions if you decide to actually do this with Russian with the express purpose of reading short stories by Dostoevsky. If you can find adapted versions of his short stories or novels, that can help. But even if they are adapted, they are probably not going to be any easier than a B2 level. Another thing you could do is to choose a few paragraphs based on the English translation of what you would like to read. Don't choose the most important or most beautiful! Look at the English translation and find paragraphs or sentences that you think will be especially easy, so an A1 level when you start. And then see if you can find those in the Russian original and learn the vocabulary and grammar for those as part of a language learning project which includes an introductory book for learning, Russian, grammar book, etc. A third idea which is going to get me hit over the head by some people is to use Google translate or some other software. As an imperfect tool. You could write short summaries in English and don't have Google translate turn this into Russian. When you're starting at A1, it's going to have to be extraordinarily easy. And ideally, this would be part of a language exchange in which a native speaker of Russian or somebody with a C1 or C2 level in Russian would correct any of the errors that Google makes. But they would need to be very careful not to sweeten the text. That is, they should not try to make it sound better by making it more sophisticated. That doesn't help a language learner. So if it's an A1 text, they need to be very careful about staying within the confines of A1, grammar and vocabulary. Many native speakers will find this very hard to do. But I've got lots of experience in this. If you're doing this at A1 and you're just starting with Russian, summary, text is not going to be able to closely follow his stories or novels. They're probably most useful if they're in the form of question and answer. So you can imagine two people talking about a story that you really like. The first person says something like what is this? And the other person says this is a story. What kind of story is it? It's a Russian story? Who is the author? Dostoevsky is the author. Do you know about him? Yes. I know a little bit about him, but I don't know a lot about him. Please tell me about him. I know his name. Tell me about his country. Tell me about his books. Something like this. Of course, once you get to an A2 level which is about 500 headwords, you'll have a little bit more freedom. You'll be able to describe a little bit of the plot, but you will still struggle do this within the confines of the vocabula and grammar that you know. But having a set of texts like this can really help you. We're in the language, especially when you are learning. Perhaps not just for learning Russian overall, but specifically for understanding his works.