The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask

I don’t know about you, but I love, and have always loved, Project Gutenberg.

In fact, I have already expended a considerable portion of my life’s battery merely going over the savoury literary meals they have on offer there; poking and poring through the available texts, comparing between and pondering the stylistic choices of different writers, reading, reading, reading and then doing more of just that.

There’s so much to read (and you know you’d never be done with that anyway) that half the excitement comes from wondering, “Hmm, where does this little story lead to?” (Please read that using the Dee-Dee tone from Dexter’s Laboratory.)

And when you’re done with one language, there’s always more where that stuff came from.

Project Gutenberg has come to be of greater use to me ever since I begun my studies of French and Japanese. Classic literature, from different languages, made available to me with immediacy, at the ultra-sexy cost of nothing. Ooooh. (It also came to mean that I wouldn’t have to waste money on the purchase of foreign-language books anymore, seeing that I would not be able to attempt most of them without the assistance of a dictionary anyway. (Yes, the advent of internet dictionaries have made my page-flicking hands weary and resistant of paper dictionaries.))

There’s just one problem: the offerings on Project Gutenberg are mostly literature-based. Which is really beyond excellent if you’re only into reading and writing, but not really so if you’d like to reproduce the same thing in (geek-jargon alert) real-time speech.

Let us consider the implications: should I learn a language — say, Japanese, or French — entirely from literary sources — a possible feat too, by the way, and this has already been successfully attempted by many, so I would not consider myself a pioneer of any sort as regards this — and I then try to speak to a native speaker of the language using what I’ve learned, the first analogy that comes to mind is this: of someone speaking English to another whilst employing the Sherlockian/Victorian tenor.

Indeed, a pompous, though (of course) stylishly anachronistic affair.

But, what the hell.

So these days I’m getting off from trying to memorize Cyrano de Bergerac, and the Japanese translation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. (Specifically, A Scandal in Bohemia. I love that one.) If you’re wondering why, blame Heinrich Schliemann: I’m just applying his methods to my language studies. Anyway, I hope to have internalized sufficient sentences to be able to have improved my command of both languages (especially with regards to Japanese grammar, which I find rather difficult) by the end of the year.

And whenever I’m tired, I remind myself of Joseph Conrad. Woot.