busyAnd I was just ... bewildered. It would never have occurred to me, growing up, that not knowing the words in a book might be considered a reason to stop reading the book. If the subject interested me, and I had to trot to the dictionary a second or third time, I simply lugged the dictionary back and plunked it next to the book, and alternated between the two. I have some early memories of doing that, but probably not past 8 or so. I was reading at the adult level at least by the time I was 6, possibly earlier. My vocabulary got so big, so fast, that it quickly became rare for me to find new words unless I went entirely outside my knowledge sphere. That was actually part of the reason for me bookworming my way through a substantial portion of the Danville public library in junior high and early high school, new-word-hunger. (I can understand that it wouldn't be prudent to force someone to read a book that they couldn't understand, but frankly, I never saw concern about that; if a book was assigned, you had better handle it, and if you couldn't, tough. The only books anyone ever tried to take away from me were ones I'd picked out myself.) The books that fascinate me the most are the ones that take me into new territory.
Neither would it have occurred to me to abandon a book just because it was hard to understand. If the topic was interesting, I would reread challenging sections, or look for other references and then come back to see if the hard one made more sense, or ask my parents for an explanation, or find some adult who knew about that topic and pester them (not excepting total strangers, at times).
I can even remember that kind of persistence with a few fiction books, that I just couldn't get into but for some reason seemed like they ought to be interesting. Some became interesting later; others never did. But really, there are only two things that have a high likelihood of bouncing me out of a book: it's badly written and/or it bores me. It's possible for a book to be so far over my head that I have no interest in it, but the percentage of recognized words and concepts has to be minute and far from anything I might find useful. I have puzzled my way through a page or few of writing in languages I'm not even fluent in just for the fun of hunting for English borrowings or words that are close enough to some other language or root-word for me to recognize them.
This illuminates for me some of the reasons why I'm so different from most people, if those leveling techniques are at all common as they are described to be. There is my innate fascination with words, which causes unfamiliar words to be attractive rather than off-putting. There is the looping effect of seeking books to explain things I've encountered elsewhere, and seeking people to explain books. There is the context that my parents let me read whatever I wanted, whether it was at an "appropriate" level or not; and my disgust and outrage at other adults who occasionally tried to part me from books they considered inappropriate. I think anyone with an indelible attraction to words will tend to develop a larger vocabulary, even in the absence of outside encouragement; that anyone in a supportive environment will tend to develop a larger vocabulary than they would on their own, even if they aren't especially interested in words; and that combining the two probably accounts for many of the people with the largest vocabularies. There's logic to that, when you look for it.
But still, it seems utterly alien to me that not knowing the words in a book, or not immediately understanding its content, would be reasons to put it down.
Oh, good gods!
February 14 2009, 20:47:24 UTC 12 years ago
The play was certainly beyond my "reading level", but I could use a dictionary or work out words based on context, and if I skipped a word here and there, it didn't make any difference to how much I liked a book.
GRRRRRRR....
I think that they might may done better to use the standard that Alice uses in Alice in Wonderland. Many children wonder what the good is of a book without pictures or conversation. Long, unrelieved blocks of text will bore a child far, far sooner than anything else.
Re: Oh, good gods!
February 14 2009, 22:45:20 UTC 12 years ago
>>I think that they might may done better to use the standard that Alice uses in Alice in Wonderland. Many children wonder what the good is of a book without pictures or conversation. Long, unrelieved blocks of text will bore a child far, far sooner than anything else. <<
Now that's worth noting. Unrelieved blocks of text are physically harder on the eyes. For a while after I was reading adult-level material, I did keep a preference for books with at least some pictures in them: that was the age when I was reading every field guide and how-to book and encyclopedia in sight. And to this day, I strongly dislike herbals or cookbooks without full-color photos or at least illustrations; I darn near won't buy one. Some topics I consider to be needful of illustration.
"Conversations" ... that's an interesting point, too. Some readers and writers are primarily interested in what characters say. A theatrical script is almost all dialog. I loathe reading scripts and that's almost the only form of writing that I sampled and decided I wasn't much good at. I tend to want description and context and detail, not just conversation. But I can get bored if the characters aren't saying hardly anything.
What's really interesting is that one of my fiction worlds -- Penumbra, the dark fantasy one -- is totally unlike all the others. Its austerity is so severe that it affects the writing, so that there's very little description. That forces the characters' speech and actions into much greater prominance. If Hallelaine is a Persian rug of description, Penumbra is Zen calligraphy. I didn't do that on purpose; in fact, I didn't even realize it until it started a fight during revisions. It's easier to accommodate now that I know to watch for it.
Re: Oh, good gods!
February 15 2009, 00:04:58 UTC 12 years ago
I learned to read when I was three, so I don't have any actual memories of it. But one of the two memories I have that has anything to do with learning to read is looking at a picture story in daycare when I was 5 or so, and wondering where all the words were. I can't be sure, but I don't think I'd ever seen an all-picture story until then, and I don't think I quite understood at the time that the pictures were supposed to tell a story, or what the point of an all-picture story was.
Re: Oh, good gods!
February 15 2009, 01:01:15 UTC 12 years ago
I don't recall any all-picture books from my childhood ... well, not children's books. I think my parents had some art books that were pretty much all pictures.
I also had a thing for label books -- cutaway encyclopedia guides, or foreign-language guides, or picture dictionaries. So if you showed me a page that was just a scene, and didn't have a story with it, my first inclination was to look for labels or for lines on which labels were to be written. I still love those things. I'll nearly always stop to read a poster that has things labeled, even if it's something like a cutaway of a car engine that's going to fall right out of my head five minutes later.
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Re: Oh, good gods!
February 22 2009, 06:47:18 UTC 12 years ago
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Re: Oh, good gods!
February 23 2009, 05:06:57 UTC 12 years ago
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Re: Oh, good gods!
February 23 2009, 05:36:14 UTC 12 years ago
Re: Oh, good gods!
February 18 2009, 02:55:25 UTC 12 years ago
"I challenge you, Sir, to a duel! Choose your weapon!"
"Dictionaries at fifty paces?"