Quote:
Originally Posted by jsj
Hey, I'm not bragging about reading "Blood Meridian"... after all, I had to look up over a hundred words - definitely not saying I'm some kind of rad linguist. It's just obnoxious when someone comes along and makes a comment like "... a dictionary is rarely useful if you're not entirely new to reading in your own language". Speak for yourself. I, and many others, find a dictionary (and in my own language) incredibly useful.
|
Calm down Mr Well Read, you definitely misinterpreted my words.
Cool you find your dictionary pretty useful, when reading in your own language, for those odd words here and there. A hundred you say? My, my! Good for you, so what did you get so stiff about?
By saying
"of course a dictionary is rarely useful if you're not entirely new to reading in your own language" I was just replying to the guy who posted before me: "I've not used the dictionary in my e-reader, ever (had it for 3 years)". Sure, you could find the use of a dictionary pretty useful, but that guy doesn't and I was addressing him, not you.
My point was that, market-wise, dictionaries might not be that great a feature to advertise.
Like that guy who hadn't needed one for 3 years, a dictionary in your own language is rarely essential to understand the whole story, and some people choose to do perfectly without (a hundred words about that flower you've never heard and that color you've never seen, are not so critical when compared with the 99.9% of the text you have understood).
That's not true when reading in other languages. Sometimes you simply cannot go further in the story without searching that confusing verb. That's why I said it's "
rarely useful" (and not
useless), because I had in mind a comparison between reading your own language and other languages. There's such a gap of usefulness in there that it makes your-native-language-dictionaries look almost unnecessary (not that they actually are)
Now if we can close the off-topic and swiftly get back to the main issue here.
---
ps: please stop making assumptions about the people you talk to on the internet. We're not here to see who's got it longer, and you sounded pretentious and childish in your first post, I guess that's why other posters picked on you. I don't know who you were talking to specifically, but
The hunger games has not even been published in my own language yet (and yes I've read it, but that's completely unrelated?)