Learning Languages Through Translations

Reading through Harry Potter E La Camera Dei Segreti (Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone) gave me enough vocabulary to skip the first two semesters of Italian at Penn State and ace the intermediate-level course when I was a college student.  Similarly, Harry Potter Y El Prisionero de Azkaban replaced my first two semesters of college Spanish.


I should qualify that a bit--I speak French fluently, which makes other Romance languages relatively easy for me, and I'd had a few after-school Spanish tutoring sessions as an elementary-school student and listened to my parents' set of Italian-language records sometime during middle school or high school--but the principle holds true: reading English literature in translation and and classics in other languages that one has first read in English translation can be a cheap, enjoyable, and effective immersion experience.  It won't make you a fluent speaker of a language by itself, but it will expand your vocabulary and give you a feel for the grammar quickly and painlessly.


This obviously works best for languages that are related to English (or to whatever other languages you can speak or read).  With other languages a lot of tedious dictionary work will be needed, and that will be off-putting to all but the most patient and motivated language learners.


I also use literature in translation to help my children learn French and Spanish.  Many popular English-language picture books have been translated into these languages, and kids often find it easier to pick up vocabulary from a book whose story they already know than from an unfamiliar book.  My three-and-a-half year-old son will often bring me two versions of a story at bedtime and ask me to read them back-to-back.  Some even come with a CD, which may be particularly helpful to parents who don't know the target language or don't pronounce it well.


For very young children or those just beginning to learn a language, I recommend translations of Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Clement Hurd) and Bill Martin Jr.'s books Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? (illustrated by Eric Carle).  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar is available in French in many public libraries' foreign-language collections, although so far I haven't found a translation that I like; they tend to make the text long and awkward, destroying the charming simplicity of the original.


For somewhat older children, favorites include Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline books (as good in French as in the original English) and Jean de Brunhoff's Babar stories (which were originally written in French and contain some more or less offensive references to French colonialism and scenes that may be frightening to some children--use with caution), and the original Curious George books by H. A. & Margret Rey.


My son particularly enjoyed Deborah Guarino's more recent book Is Your Mama a Llama (illustrated by Steven Kellogg) in a Spanish translation by Aida E. Marcuse; our library copy also came with a delightfully-narrated audio tape, which Sebastian listened to at bedtime and in the car for several weeks before we had to return it.


There are many other children's classics and recent bestsellers available in French, Spanish, and other languages.  There are also what I call "corporate" books that are terrible as literature but may be useful for the purpose of learning a new language; these include English and Spanish versions of the Dora the Explorer books, based on the wildly-popular TV show of the same name.


Teenagers and other more advanced students may enjoy reading The Adventures of Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi's original Italian, and the truly ambitious fantasy fan may even want to tackle J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books in Russian or in his/her choice of dozens of other languages.