Ereader Easy Swedish(ereader-swedish.fly.dev) |
Ereader Easy Swedish(ereader-swedish.fly.dev) |
Here's the first paragraph in English:
> The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in the West Fifties. Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable mêlée of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping apartments.
Here's the first paragraph in the Swedish translation:
> Signor Jacobelli hade en ateljé högst upp i ett gammalt hus med åtta våningar. För trettio år sedan var huset fullt av konstnärer, men nu fanns där både butiker och lägenheter.
I get that the translation is to a 'simplified' version of Swedish; translations of fiction are often restructures of the original language, but this is to a point where one not only needs to know what the words in Swedish mean, but be able to interpret them based on a vast restructure compared with the original.
Compare with a Kagi (DeepL) translation of the text:
> Signor Jacobellis ateljé i staden vette mot väster. Den låg högst upp i ett gammalt åttavåningshus på West Fifties. För trettio år sedan hade detta uteslutande varit ateljéer, men nu var det uppdelat i en mer lönsam blandning av halvkommersiella etablissemang och lägenheter med enklare hushållning.
Kagi maintains the original structure, which makes it far easier to compare words and the original structure.
I could be wrong but to me it seems far easier to learn a language when a translation doesn't come with a vast restructure of the original content.
I am at a basic level in many languages. Often it is enough to know that I have the gist right: is it "please step out" or "Please do not step out".
The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice.
This looks promising for their situation. I'll plop LoTR, Antimemetics Division or something in there later and see how it turns out!
Newspapers were the easiest and best way to bridge that. They made it easy to pick a story where you had both some interest and enough background context.
I started with De Telegraaf, a popular newspaper, with short, simple stories and lots of photos. And over the course of 18 months worked my way up to serious papers like NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant.
So I'd give newspapers (and magazines) a go.
Back then, I'd sit in a cafe with my dictionary, reading their newspapers, and handwriting lists of words to learn. Nowadays it would be reading the paper's website on my laptop, pasting paragraphs into GPT, and adding the words to Anki etc :)
Regarding learning a language, I recommend looking into Dr Krashen's theory of language acquisition, specifically comprehensible input. His favorite resource is comic books. For Swedish, I really like SVT with a VPN.
I second comic books, though the Swedish tends to be super colloquial and you will get stuff like "dig" rendered as "dej" (which is how it is generally pronounced, but not how it is formally written.) Kalle Anka is always the classic go to for Swedish learners.
NRK on the other hand actively tries to block everyone, which makes Norwegian a lot less accessible.
DR.dk has `ligetil` which is simplified/easy danish news. So if I can find similar, I use it. I can probably have LLM do easy for me. Also Noospeak for daily newsletter in Danish.
LLM has been great for language learning and translation.
pretty useful for learning indeed!
Daily news is better resource than books IMHO.
I have no vested interest here. The thing is, since it's not open source, I'm a bit worried about data privacy, especially because the plugin can see everything I browse.
I'd love a similar one to this that'd give you an "make this easier" button that'd start by providing a vocabulary for the paragraph, simplifying the language, or interjecting explanations in simple language, move to replacing words with English translations, and only as a last resort to a full translation.
With current LLMs it ought to be relatively easy to offer a UI with an "stepwise easier" option and just a handful of prompts to direct the "translation" result complexity accordingly...
I know three different words for price (price in general, specific item, and formal) but I have yet to see, say, oven.
> I want to translate this part of a book text to swedish. Translate to EASY swedish. Make the sentence structure easy. Make the words easy. Simplify it to A1 level while maintaining the story meaning. output ONLY the translation. Use the previous text and after text to understand the context. previous text: "{previous_text}" after text: "{after_text}" text to translate: $BEGIN_TEXT${original_chunk}$END_TEXT$ " DO NOT SKIP ANY TEXT INSIDE $BEGIN_TEXT$ and $END_TEXT$
With apologies to Dumas ("L’anglais n’est que du français mal prononcé" - "English is little more than badly pronounced French" - spoken by D'Artagnan in Twenty Years After)
The "quick and dirty" solution would be to cut and paste into Claude or ChatGPT, probably in sections to prevent it from going too far off piste/forget what it's meant to be doing, with a suitable prompt.
I am currently planning to take my B1 and it has been super hard.
I also have some code to add the translations as pop-up footnotes to epub files (I like to use that on my e-reader). That is not mature enough yet for public usage, but if anyone wants to help testing it, I can run some e-books through it. Just let me know!
Easy Swedish radio news: https://www.sverigesradio.se/grupp/22720
Easy Swedish books: https://www.bokus.com/cgi-bin/product_search.cgi?series=L%E4...
I even found this [1] comment on Reddit, detailing the exact same concern. Perhaps worth looking into?
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/1j4teje/comment/mg...
Don't know Swedish, but I'm fully lower-to-mid intermediate with Norwegian (I hit limits, but my workplace is Norwegian). Swedish and Norwegian are really similar. In Norwegian, they don't talk about bedrooms as much as total major rooms. So a studio apartment, the sort that contains a private bath and kitchen area, is a one-room apartment. A one bedroom is a two-room apartment.
And it looks like Swedish (unsurprisingly) is similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/16aigvx/question_o...
The main point stands though, that this is not about art studios but just small apartments, and the automatic translation messes that up.
"And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a model posed."
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75383/pg75383-images.ht...
From what I can tell, I'd hardly want to read the original. Way too verbose and I highly suspect the rest of the book is similar.
Swedish public service television also has an educational branch, which is here:
I use comic books to teach my kids to read, I agree it ought to be a good option for foreign adults too.
On SVT I'd recommend Landet runt (Around the country), it shows a lot of feelgood stories from local news and is aimed at a broad audience, including kids and the elderly:
https://www.svtplay.se/landet-runt
There's also a news program for kids I think could be a good option to learn from:
https://www.svtplay.se/lilla-aktuellt-och-lilla-aktuellt-sko...
While I don't watch any of them myself, perhaps competition programs might work too:
I love listening to the same songs over and over again anyway, and once in a while I get curious what they are actually saying in a new sentence.
I do this for learning German once in a while, but I am sure it would work fine for Swedish as well.
Markus Krunegård is my favourite right now, and I think he sings with a clear language.
But there are lots of (pop) music in Swedish with interesting lyrics; Veronica Maggio, Little Jinder, Håkan Hellström, Miss Li, Kent. A very random sample from a much much longer list obviously.
And a passive method, so, while it is pure joy, it needs to be complemented with actul studying of course.
This way your mind already has all the associations stored in your brain for easy access, and you just need to link it to the foreign concepts. Supposed to be a great way to learn new languages after you know the basic grammar and such.
Having an easy version is a big boon, though, and I think LLMs now provide an amazing opportunity to create custom proper parallel texts (showing both) where you could adjust the difficulty level of the translation to suit your current skill level.
Edit: it is.
"And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a model posed."
If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks -- they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if you have one nearby with a good foreign language section) or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned svtplay.se if you're into that.
As I mentioned above, NRK is not so great. Most of the content is geoblocked, and you need a norwegian digital ID to watch it outside of Norway (or at least, Skandinavia) without a VPN. They also regularly block VPN's, so as an example, Tunnelbear used to be fine (and gives a fairly generous free tier if you play the "invite friends and do some tasks" game), but last time I tried, it was no longer working with the NRK TV app.
Nyheter på lätt svenska: https://www.svtplay.se/nyheter-pa-latt-svenska
Quite interesting cultural differences btw. In my experience, if you ask the same question in Denmark, the answer is "of course... Everybody here speaks English"