for I'm a grump [hebrew, english, languages, writing, public post]
I am boycotting English.
No, wait, that came out wrong; I am boycotting prose in English for a while, because obviously if you read this it means I wrote it in the first place. In English. I also suppose I should add poetry to that, even though I don't read a lot of it.
It started like this: I started getting annoyed by everything I read. It started small -- nitpick here, nitpick there. I tried reading the berserker!verse, and you know that something is wrong when you laugh in the face of angsty prose. So I tried Chash! . . . and got even grouchier.
That was clues number one and two that something wasn't right.
Clue number three was when I tried reading Diana Wynne Jones, one of my most favourite authors ever -- and failed.
Clue number four was when I thought of rereading Warchild in English, and felt nothing but dread.
I keep forgetting that English doesn't come naturally to me. That it takes special effort that Hebrew never does. I usually don't notice the strain when everything is fine, but when something is off {like, say, my sleep patterns -- I slept 3.5 hours at night and an extra 5 in the afternoon, and I'm feeling that}, or when I'm grouchy or grumpy or ill, trying to read in English breaks my brain. Then I keep translating things directly that shouldn't be, such as idioms, or tenses {Hebrew only has about three and a very slippery conditional -- try converting those to English's, uh, at-least-9-tenses-that-I-can't-be-bothered-to-count-right-now}, or prepositions, pronouns -- hell, I slipped the other day and referred to water as plural. "The water are warm", self? Really?
Strangely, writing is easier than reading at those phases. I know what I mean to say, after all, so it's easier for me to understand my own thought process. Reading others is far tricker -- I pass anything of substance. You could write the most fascinating thing and unless it's cracky, I won't be able to follow it.
Long paragraphs are exhausting, unfamiliar words take time and energy, and right now all I want to do is curl in bed with a book and read until whatever happens {the most likely is that I'll fall asleep}. Reading in English makes me grouchy.
The obvious solution is to go back to my native tongue for a while and revel in it -- something I haven't done in a long, long, time.
Far too long.
|Meduza|
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comments on Dreamwidth.
No, wait, that came out wrong; I am boycotting prose in English for a while, because obviously if you read this it means I wrote it in the first place. In English. I also suppose I should add poetry to that, even though I don't read a lot of it.
It started like this: I started getting annoyed by everything I read. It started small -- nitpick here, nitpick there. I tried reading the berserker!verse, and you know that something is wrong when you laugh in the face of angsty prose. So I tried Chash! . . . and got even grouchier.
That was clues number one and two that something wasn't right.
Clue number three was when I tried reading Diana Wynne Jones, one of my most favourite authors ever -- and failed.
Clue number four was when I thought of rereading Warchild in English, and felt nothing but dread.
I keep forgetting that English doesn't come naturally to me. That it takes special effort that Hebrew never does. I usually don't notice the strain when everything is fine, but when something is off {like, say, my sleep patterns -- I slept 3.5 hours at night and an extra 5 in the afternoon, and I'm feeling that}, or when I'm grouchy or grumpy or ill, trying to read in English breaks my brain. Then I keep translating things directly that shouldn't be, such as idioms, or tenses {Hebrew only has about three and a very slippery conditional -- try converting those to English's, uh, at-least-9-tenses-that-I-can't-be-bothered-to-count-right-now}, or prepositions, pronouns -- hell, I slipped the other day and referred to water as plural. "The water are warm", self? Really?
Strangely, writing is easier than reading at those phases. I know what I mean to say, after all, so it's easier for me to understand my own thought process. Reading others is far tricker -- I pass anything of substance. You could write the most fascinating thing and unless it's cracky, I won't be able to follow it.
Long paragraphs are exhausting, unfamiliar words take time and energy, and right now all I want to do is curl in bed with a book and read until whatever happens {the most likely is that I'll fall asleep}. Reading in English makes me grouchy.
The obvious solution is to go back to my native tongue for a while and revel in it -- something I haven't done in a long, long, time.
Far too long.
|Meduza|
This post has
comments on Dreamwidth.