A recommenndation
- Thread starter BaldJean
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Just wanted to say "Hi" again too. We started reading " The Well of Lost Plots" in bed yesterday. We have the habit of reading books together, lying side by side on our bellies; since we both have about the same reading speed this works very well, but managed to read a few pages only because we decided we had other things to do, which I won't go into details about (collective "Oh, too bad!" from the members of the forum).
That's interesting too, I agree, especially if you have a good reader. Unfortunately most people are not; even many authors aren't. They read in a monotonous voice, often with the obnoxious habit of dropping the voice at the end of each sentence (not in volume, but in tune).
When Jean and I joined a local literature club (which interestingly consisted mostly of women; there was only one man in it), in which the members read passages from books they liked to each other, none of the other members knew how to read; they all read in the way I described. Then Jean and I started to read (Jean had chosen a passage from "Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Alfred Döblin, I had picked "Der Sandmann" by E.T.A. Hoffmann). Our way of reading seemed to have made a lasting impression on the other members, because the next time the club met everybody started to imitate us.
In case someone is not familiar with what we read to the club, here links to wikipedia entries about these literary works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alexanderplatz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandma ... t_story%29
When Jean and I joined a local literature club (which interestingly consisted mostly of women; there was only one man in it), in which the members read passages from books they liked to each other, none of the other members knew how to read; they all read in the way I described. Then Jean and I started to read (Jean had chosen a passage from "Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Alfred Döblin, I had picked "Der Sandmann" by E.T.A. Hoffmann). Our way of reading seemed to have made a lasting impression on the other members, because the next time the club met everybody started to imitate us.
In case someone is not familiar with what we read to the club, here links to wikipedia entries about these literary works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Alexanderplatz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandma ... t_story%29
I agree, it's rare that an author is any good at reading his/her own books and it's usually better for an actor to do it. That's why Stephen Briggs and Nigel Planer are so good at reading Terry's audiobooks.
But reading out loud is good practice for actually reading what's written on the page rather than just what your brain takes in.
But reading out loud is good practice for actually reading what's written on the page rather than just what your brain takes in.
The problem is that good reading is not taught at schools. Pupils learn how to read, and the teachers in elementary school are glad if they can read out a text aloud without any mistakes as to the content. Mistakes in accentuation are however not corrected at all.
i learned to read the right way by myself. It just did not sound right to me to just read the content aloud without any accentuation. Strangely enough, when I joined an amateur dramatic society and we did the first loud reading of the play we wanted to do together everyone but me read in that monotonous voice, and when I first came in with a part of my lines the director remarked "You are accentuating already", whereupon I answered "I always read that way. Besides, I thought accentuating the lines was the whole point of this reading so that everyone can show the others how he or she wants to cast his or her character".
Strangely this seemed to baffle the others, though the director agreed it was a good idea.
i learned to read the right way by myself. It just did not sound right to me to just read the content aloud without any accentuation. Strangely enough, when I joined an amateur dramatic society and we did the first loud reading of the play we wanted to do together everyone but me read in that monotonous voice, and when I first came in with a part of my lines the director remarked "You are accentuating already", whereupon I answered "I always read that way. Besides, I thought accentuating the lines was the whole point of this reading so that everyone can show the others how he or she wants to cast his or her character".
Strangely this seemed to baffle the others, though the director agreed it was a good idea.
Maybe I had an advantage to other pupils, though at the time it did not seem to be an advantage at all. Two days before my first school day I broke a leg when running through the house and slipping on a piece of clothing. My mother was about to go washing in the cellar and was moving the dirty washing from the closet she kept it in into a basket. We did not have a washing machine back then; my parents bought their first washing machine four years later. So washing still had to be done by hand, and there was a washing trough in the cellar. Anyway, i slipped on a piece of clothing that had accidentally fallen to the floor and had a complicated leg fracture which required me to stay in hospital for six weeks with my leg high up in the air.
My parents bought me a so called "Pixibuch". These "Pixi books" were a series of books for kids by the Carlsen Verlag (Carlsen publishing house). They were quadratic (four by four inches) and had twenty-four pages with lots of pictures. The book they bought me was named "Der kleine Elefant" ("The Little Elephant"), and my parents read it to me several times while I was in the hospital.
Little kids have a phenomenal memory, and I quickly knew the story by heart, word for word. And so I taught myself reading with that book.
When I finally went to school the kids learned reading with cards which had words on them, on one side in handwriting, on the other side in print. The kids in my class learned handwriting first though, and they had not started reading print yet. Handwriting was a book with seven seals for me though, so I flipped the cards over. When my teacher realized that he asked what I was doing, and I answered "I can't read it else", which surprised him of course. He did not believe me at first and challenged me to read print, which I of course managed to do perfectly. I then told him how I had taught myself reading
The teacher recommended my parents to buy books which were in handwriting for me, and they bought two of them. One was named "Der kleine Bill" ("Little Bill"); I have forgotten the name of the other. And that's how I learned to read handwriting.
I mention this because my parents read that little Pixi book to me with a lot of accentuation (my mother is an excellent reader and actually won a prize for her reading when she was in school, and my father is a natural actor,though he never acted professionally; he just did one man shows for friends and family in which he recited self-written verse in costume in a comical way). So it seemed natural for me to read that way too. And that was the kind of advantage I had from the disadvantage of missing the first six weeks in school.
My parents bought me a so called "Pixibuch". These "Pixi books" were a series of books for kids by the Carlsen Verlag (Carlsen publishing house). They were quadratic (four by four inches) and had twenty-four pages with lots of pictures. The book they bought me was named "Der kleine Elefant" ("The Little Elephant"), and my parents read it to me several times while I was in the hospital.
Little kids have a phenomenal memory, and I quickly knew the story by heart, word for word. And so I taught myself reading with that book.
When I finally went to school the kids learned reading with cards which had words on them, on one side in handwriting, on the other side in print. The kids in my class learned handwriting first though, and they had not started reading print yet. Handwriting was a book with seven seals for me though, so I flipped the cards over. When my teacher realized that he asked what I was doing, and I answered "I can't read it else", which surprised him of course. He did not believe me at first and challenged me to read print, which I of course managed to do perfectly. I then told him how I had taught myself reading
The teacher recommended my parents to buy books which were in handwriting for me, and they bought two of them. One was named "Der kleine Bill" ("Little Bill"); I have forgotten the name of the other. And that's how I learned to read handwriting.
I mention this because my parents read that little Pixi book to me with a lot of accentuation (my mother is an excellent reader and actually won a prize for her reading when she was in school, and my father is a natural actor,though he never acted professionally; he just did one man shows for friends and family in which he recited self-written verse in costume in a comical way). So it seemed natural for me to read that way too. And that was the kind of advantage I had from the disadvantage of missing the first six weeks in school.
I'm puzzled. In my experience as a native English speaker, one always drops the tone of voice (not the volume) at the end of a declarative sentence. What's annoying to me is a late-20th-century trend of raising the voice at the end as if it were a question, which makes the speaker seem uncertain, as if they were asking the listener for reassurance.
On topic: I liked the Eyre Affair but thought the author had lost control of his material in the sequels. I liked both Nursery Crime books; in my mind, the Eyre Affair series exists primarily to provide a background for the Nursery Crime stories.
On topic: I liked the Eyre Affair but thought the author had lost control of his material in the sequels. I liked both Nursery Crime books; in my mind, the Eyre Affair series exists primarily to provide a background for the Nursery Crime stories.
I was talking about German, not English. You don't let the last syllable drop into the cellar in German when reading aloud. It sounds horrible, as if the reader is not interested in what he or she is reading. But it is the same in English. Let's take the sentence "I went out that night", for example. Do you drop the tone of voice for "night"? Hardly. It is different with words that have more than one syllable, of course, because the stress lies on the first syllable in almost all English words. But then again you don't drop the stressed syllable of the last word of a sentence.
Let's take this German sentence from a book I am currently reading ("Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank"). "Herr und Frau van Daan hatten durch das offene Fenster eine rötliche Glut gesehen". A good reader would drop the tone for the last word, but all three syllables would be in the same tone. A bad reader (like most) would go downstairs with the voice for each syllable of "ge-se-hen". That sounds as if someone is rattling off a litany.
Let's take this German sentence from a book I am currently reading ("Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank"). "Herr und Frau van Daan hatten durch das offene Fenster eine rötliche Glut gesehen". A good reader would drop the tone for the last word, but all three syllables would be in the same tone. A bad reader (like most) would go downstairs with the voice for each syllable of "ge-se-hen". That sounds as if someone is rattling off a litany.
Yes! this is particularly endemic among Generation Xers and Yers. I think that the widespread adoptio of this stems from the "Valley Girl" era of the 80s, where movies (and Frank Zappa's record "Valley Girl," featuring his daughter Moon Unit). Yet, I believe that the style itself originated in the midwest. I have cousins in Wisconsin and Minnesota who have always talked like this all their lives (they're now in their 50s); it's sort of embedded in the broad upper midwestern accent. So my guess is that the style moved from the midwest to the west coast, and then movies and LA TV personalities popularized it among young people.
I thought I read in the notes to The Big Over Easy that FForde wrote it years before The Eyre Affair and then he either couldn't get it published or he put it aside. Once the Thursday Next books took off, he went back to the TBOE and rewrote it accommodate the TN conventions. So one could really say that TBOE was the incubator for the TN series.
I thought I read in the notes to The Big Over Easy that FForde wrote it years before The Eyre Affair and then he either couldn't get it published or he put it aside. Once the Thursday Next books took off, he went back to the TBOE and rewrote it accommodate the TN conventions. So one could really say that TBOE was the incubator for the TN series.
Ah, I see. The rhythm of each language is different. In English, you do drop the tone of voice at the end, even for "I went out that night." The only time I wouldn't would be if I were correcting someone else's statement and emphasizing that I had gone out in the night, rather than in the daytime.
That resembles something of what little I know of French - where all the syllables of a particular word receive identical emphasis instead of having only some emphasized. In English, "That sounds as if someone is rattling off a litany" would have the last word descending in tone in two or three steps: "lit-an-y". To emphasize them all equally would give the word more strength in the sentence than it really deserves.
That resembles something of what little I know of French - where all the syllables of a particular word receive identical emphasis instead of having only some emphasized. In English, "That sounds as if someone is rattling off a litany" would have the last word descending in tone in two or three steps: "lit-an-y". To emphasize them all equally would give the word more strength in the sentence than it really deserves.
Real life got in the way of me attending the Fforde Ffiesta 2013 (set in 2057) but I managed to be there for Sunday night. By all accounts it was a good event but I have no idea what Jasper talked about as nobody will tell me.
Means I will make an extra special effort to go to the Next one at the end of May 2015 (needs more time to organise)
Means I will make an extra special effort to go to the Next one at the end of May 2015 (needs more time to organise)
