Hello everyone! I just wanted to pop in with a wee post to let you know that the announcement video for round 03 of our splendid Multilingual Book Club is live on my YouTube channel, and I thought it could also be nice to summarise all of the details here directly on Journaly as well.
Our Theme
Rather than a specific book, this round's theme will be discovering the wonderful Italian author, Alessandro Baricco! The primary book selection is Seta (Silk) and for those who have extra time and would like to continue discovering Baricco together, I have also selected Novecento.
My Strategy
The first book is 100 pages and the second is 50 pages, so my personal strategy will be to read four pages per day, which would enable me to complete both books with a little bit of a buffer. I'd like to try reading my four pages in the morning (more intensively for meaning), and then re-read them at night before bed (more relaxed for pleasure and review).
Other Details
Duration: 6 weeks
Start: Monday, September 13th, 2021
End: Sunday, October 24th, 2021
WEEKLY Livestreams! 🙌🏼 : Every Sunday at 5pm (UK time)
Giveaway: Each week, three people who wrote a post on journaly with the topic "multilingual book club 03" will be randomly chosen and win a free month of Journaly Premium 🎉
I'll also be posting about my own experience on Instagram @_robinmacpherson as well as at least one post per week here on Journaly. I'll be sending out a short little motivational email to the mailing list once per week just as a nice little treat to keep us all on track, and Patreon supporters will also get access to my reading notes, which I'll really make a big effort to organise nicely this time!
How about you? Do you have any particular reading and/or journaling strategy in mind? I can't wait to see all of your Journaly posts and to have wonderful engagement and discussion together. After a short two-week rest from the book club, let's come back strong and have an absolutely amazing round 03 🥳
I am so excited, I will finally join the Bookclub on time, with motivation and knowing the language!! I don't know yet how it will go, I will come up with the strategy as I go -- thank you for motivating us all Robin! ❤
I already got both books and can’t wait for the next round to start! I’ve already read the first page of Seta to get an idea of how difficult it’s going to be and it’s really tempting to jump right into it. But I’ll be patient and start with the rest of you, otherwise it would spoil all the fun. I usually don’t follow a specific reading strategy. I just read, look up words and phrases if necessary and note down those I want to remember (if I feel like doing that). I hope I can finally finish a book in time this round :)
I also have both books already (epub). My strategy is similar to the last one, with some possible improvements: I'll use my own tiny computer program for reviewing the vocabulary in the book first (i.e I'll go over all new Italian words first, with example sentences from the book to see if I understand/know them, in order of decreasing frequency) and next I'll actually start reading the book. It is quite similar in spirit to LinQ, for what I've seen so far, but offline and very minimalistic. I'm using it for keeping track of vocabulary in several different books in all my languages (Catalan and Spanish included :D) and in Italian I almost have covered 10,000 words by now, which should be more than enough for reading in general, or so I hope. I am a bit nervous, because fiction is always more elaborate to read in terms of vocabulary and language usage, but I hope it will still be doable, or better said, enjoyable. This is exactly what I did in round two of the Book Club (also with Italian, without previous contact with or exposure to the language, as I mentioned on Sunday) and it worked really well. I just love this sort of guessing game. Additionally I though about possibly alternating between different languages every chapter or two, but this is so far only a mental experiment.
Does the book come in any other languages besides Italian and English?
This is so tempting, even though Italian is one of the few languages I've never learned at all... Does anyone try it that way?
@TriciaSutton: I’ve read an article from 2013 which said the book has been translated in 37 languages. So yes, it comes in other languages as well.
@KatyaBarta: One of the few languages you've never learned? I don't understand.
Anyway, like I wrote yesterday in my last comment here, I did/do try it that way. It is indeed so tempting that I've read the book for the Book Club #2 without having learned anything about Italian. But I guess that's only enjoyable if you speak already at least one romance language.
@TriciaSutton: Like Caro said, the book in available in 37 different editions, so it is definitely available in more languages than just Italian and English. Concretely, you can see all of the available editions here: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL876504W/Seta#editions-list
@Edufuga: Yikes, I didn't phrase that very well! :) What I meant is, I have students from a lot of countries, so I've managed to learn little bits of a lot of languages, but never any Italian. But yeah, maybe I'll give it a try -- thanks for your description!
Very excited to join this round. I just bought the Spanish edition of both books. And I found very nice audiobooks on YouTube that are better ( to my ears anyway) than the free samples I tried on Audible. I'm warming up with El Principito on LingQ :-)