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Originally Posted by Bob Russell
I'd love to see e-books with side by side translations. I took enough French in school to recognize a few words here and there, and it would be neat to have the French and English sentences right next to each other. In fact, if that had been available to me when I still actually remembered some French, I probably would have kept reading in French. (I did it for a while in the past, but it was just too slow to keep looking up so many words.)
Surely that's a way to kill three birds with one stone... learn a language, encourage reading at the same time and provide a new application for e-books.
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I have 2 bilingual print books (romanian-english - poetry though) as you mentioned, left page original, right page translation, line to line, and my feelings are mixed about the usefulness, though it's true I speak, think and switch at ease in both languages (with my wife I talk in romanian, but with my son in english since while he understands romanian but living all his life here, he prefers english)
Ultimately to read in a language, as long as you know a little bit, you gotta bite the bullet and read something you really want to read and have no other choice of languages. It's not that easy as I can tell since I still have not gotten around to reading some books by M. Dantec that I really want to read but cannot find myself to summon the energy for. Only for the amazing Les Bienveillantes (prix Goncourt and prix du Academie Francais 2006, written by an american!! in french), I recently found the energy to slog through.
Liviu