There is no such thing as a 'difficult language'. Any language can be learned by 2 year olds!
I'm saying this to encourage all foreign language learners. You can do it! Although, of course, learning a langauge that is very different from your native language in structure and vocabulary is more of a challenge than learning a language that is quite similar to yours.
Here is a tip that may help you to read the more 'difficult' books in a foreign language. Recently I created a bilingual edition of a book that I expected to be somewhat over my head, as follows:
- In Calibre, convert both the original book and the translated book to rtf.
- In Word, create a document with a page size that is the same as your reader screen.
- Then in Word create a two-column table.
- Copy the original rtf to the left column, and the translated rtf to the right column.
- Spend some hours aligning the paragraphs. This is really the time-consuming part!
- Save the whole thing as PDF and copy to your reader.
This worked very well for me. It is not just that you don't need all those dictionary lookups while reading, but it also helped me to understand idiom and colloquial phrases etc. that you would never find in a dictionary. Read the left column, and if there is something you dont understand, look to the right. It's as simple as that.
BTW: aligning the paragraphs is the nasty bit. I tried to use a tool for that,
LF Aligner, but the results were unusable for me. Still, for other language pairs this might work, so you could give it a try to save some time.