The 2023 Advent Reading Club(s)! 🎄 ⛄ ❄

Perfect! Thanks!

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Well, if we’re going chaos route, I could add another language to mix – someone wants to recommend something for Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin/Serbian that would lend itself well for an advent challenge? :smiley: I never find anything in these languages anyway :sweat_smile: Can be in Cyrillic or Latin script. I could also go crazy and try a different slavic language every few days to see how much I understand haha

Buuuut

this sounds extremely fun! I would love to read this with a group.

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So I idly was looking for a Project Gutenberg equivalent for Swedish (for next year) and realized they actually have a decent number of other languages:

See here, that list is from the top of the Swedish page: Browse By Language: Swedish | Project Gutenberg

Slight :face_with_raised_eyebrow: at ‘North American Indian’ though as I imagine that is quite a few languages and also an outdated term

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At least they used “Serbian” and not Serbo-Croatian. :thinking: That usually is used wrongly so they must have at least some awareness of using correct terms.

But only 4 books in there. :cry: My partner (native Serbian/Croatian speaker) always tells me to not go for old-ish books because the language changed so much. But same for German, I suppose? He recently read a Sigmund Freud book in German and whenever he asked me what specific words meant I often didn’t know myself :laughing:

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Actually i think American Indian is an acceptable term. I know a few american indians around my hometown that generally used that term… but apparently preferences vary between tribes.

I was also taught in school though that ‘Native American’ was the proper term, but these things are always in flux I guess :sweat_smile:

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Ah, I can certainly see that being the case. There is a whole nation’s worth of room for regional (and tribal) differences in this case

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It kinda depends, imo. Spoken language has changed A LOT. Written language not nearly as much. It kinda depends why someone is learning German. I know people who are learning German just so they can read philosophy… which even for a native is a struggle. For those, reading some older literature on Gutenberg is actually a really good gateway into the very odd language of philosophers.

(Also, most of my favourite German-language literature is old enough to be on Gutenberg. :sweat_smile:)

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Extreme OT about Austrian German and how Austrian German relates to Ex-Yugoslavian languages haha

He is learning German because he is an immigrant in Austria :laughing: (Although I wouldn’t classify it as learning anymore, he’s fluent in German and even understands most dialects without issues and appropriately uses Austrian instead of German German terms (the horror when he was new here and asked for an “Eimer” instead of “Kübel” :roll_eyes: ))
But as you’re Austrian yourself, you probably know how much of Austrian German gets lost compared to “normal” German – that’s the specific problem we often have (even though I am Viennese myself and grew up with the dialect, it just changed so much and it’s not always official enough to look up words :D), old-ish Austrian German terms :smiley: (even current ones, sometimes. It’s just harder to find translations for those.
We had the same problem with Christine Nöstlinger books and now it’s the same with Sigmund Freud. (Although I would say Freud is easier then Nöstlinger haha) Like I could translate what “eine Hetz haben” means, but there were a few old Austrian things I didn’t knew myself. I also enjoy old books, like Stefan Zweig is great and his vocab is really not that hard to understand. Same with Kafka. I also don’t think there are many issues with authors like E.T.A Hoffman.
Regarding philosophy… Walter Benjamin still gives me cold sweat from when I had to read him in uni. But it’s not like the translated Foucault stuff was any easier for me :sweat_smile:

Also, as an Austrian, you probably will appreciate how many Austrian-isms got themselves into Serbian (and apparently it’s the same for Bosnian): Paradejz for example is Paradeiser :smiley: And “escajg” (esszeig → esszeug, but pronounced very austrian-y) means cutlery. My husband and I have a list whenever we notice something that exists in both our languages, there’s so much!

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Now I’m curious - what does Eimer mean in Austrian?


The Babel tower building is going well I see :grin:
Bring in more languages! :smiling_imp:

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OT

The most I laughed was about czech having hajzlpapír :rofl: and I am not sure how much is Austrian and how much is Yiddish in origin. :thinking:

It means the same, it’s just not used. :sweat_smile: and being the smaller sibling, we are a bit allergic to German German… :sweat_smile: but Eimer is less painful than stuff like “Schorle” or “Tunke”. :face_holding_back_tears:

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I updated the ideas post, and added an extra section compiling the free resources the community has found!

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Thank you! I’m impressed you even included the crazy ones (mine) like:

  • One story in a different Japanese dialect each day
  • Learning/becoming familiar with a different writing system each day
    :joy:

Here’s another one: Anyone interested in reading about a different yokai every day?
I’m thinking of getting this book, it’s supposed to have a 100 of them. :japanese_goblin:

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I haven’t seen a bad idea yet. :wink:

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There is also the 百人一首 and someone could set out to learn them all. :smiling_imp:

(incidentally I have this on my TBR :see_no_evil: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/4522429355)

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So I speak German German ( :joy: ) and I had to google “Tunke” :sweat_smile: never heard of this before.

I wanted to buy “ちょっと探偵してみませんか” on bookwalker today, but then I found out that I can not pay for it with Paypal :cry: does someone know why it is possible to buy most books on bookwalker with Paypal but a few selected are not possible? And is there a way to see this before I add them to my cart?

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It’s happened to me several times, and it’s very annoying. It may be a publisher thing, I don’t know. The way around it is to use paypal to buy coins, then use the coins to buy the book.

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Thank you! Somehow I never thought of this. I guess that’s what I’m going to do then.
But it’s really annoying :expressionless:

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I am sure most of this is an imaginary boogeyman Austrians made up in their head to blame poor Germans over nothing again and again :smiling_face_with_tear:

(Also I am actually really a bit annoyed with the “Funny anti German” stuff in Austria and I don’t really think it’s cute anymore haha)

Oh, is this maybe only available on bookwalker? Couldn’t find it anywhere else :thinking:

I was soooo lost in おばちゃんたちのいるところ-Where The Wild Ladies Are | L32 because I know next to nothing about Yokai and felt like I needed a lot more context to appreciate the stories in おばちゃんたちのいるところ. Do you think it’d be similar here? :thinking: Otherwise I’d love to learn more about Yokai :smiley:

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It’s definitely on Amazon too. In fact, it’s now added on Natively, and there’s several sources listed:
ちょっと探偵してみませんか | L30?? (learnnatively.com)

On the contrary, this is hopefully exactly the context we were missing :smiley:
It’s a book for kids that’s received good reviews from adults too, and it presents 100 yokai in a concise and simple manner. All entries look more or less this:

Edit to add: I got the bookwalker copy of this and the text is a picture, which means it looks nicer but you can’t use a dictionary or copy text. It looks like the Kindle version is actual text.

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Awesome! Thanks for the sample, I would really enjoy reading this! Now I can’t decide between the books you proposed tho :laughing:

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