I recently read a book in Portuguese. There is always a great sense of achievement in finishing a book in a foreign tongue and even more so when it the first one you have read in the language.
Studying foreign languages has been one of my favourite pursuits for some years now so I suppose I’ve learned from experience what kind of material is best read by a relative novice. By that I mean someone who has spent a year or two getting to grips with the basics and can get the gist of newspaper articles and so on. Here are a couple of observations:
Read things of interest. That’s why I read about history, politics, current affairs, sport and travel rather than IT or car maintenance. I just read 150 pages of sparse text in Portuguese outlining the Renaissance. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but I am already familiar with the subject, its typical terminology and can anticipate key events, names and places that are likely to appear. In that way, I already know the main outline of the “story” and am not jumping into totally unknown territory.
Don’t start with anything too complicated. I could have added literature or poetry to the above list but it can be difficult enough to read and understand in my own language at times. I’m not at the stage where I feel able to cope with the subtleties of metaphors, symbolism and humour in Portuguese. If you are brave enough to give literature a go then make sure the plot is not complex or the writing too sophisticated. In other words, I didn’t start with Saramago in Portuguese in the same way that my first English reader wasn’t the works of Shakespeare.
