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.
February 14 2009, 21:24:42 UTC 12 years ago
I still remember which books I learned certain words from. And yes, I was never really daunted by the size of a book or by words I didn't know--largely because it wasn't too long before a nice thick book had only a few unfamiliar words. I do remember having some trouble with class vocabulary-building assignments, because we'd be required to read a story or a few chapters of a book and write down, say, ten vocabulary words we had never seen before, and I would usually labor to find one or two. (I also had a friend who would write down words she didn't recognize in books, and then take the list to ME for the definitions.)
And yet I was always looking for more. That was part of the fun of reading--learning new words and the concepts that went with them!
Also, I'm curious about science fiction/fantasy books with lots of neologisms and oddball jargon. I ate those up as a kid--I especially liked Star Wars EU books, and never had any trouble inserting myself into a sci-fi world and taking new concepts in stride. It wasn't until my freshman year at college, when I took a course on science fiction and mythology, that I found out that wasn't an automatic thing for most people. A few of the students had to LEARN it.
*laugh*
February 14 2009, 22:35:47 UTC 12 years ago
Same here. I think my parents gave up that when I was a toddler, and went from stacking books to looking in them. They figured if it was too far over my head, I'd just put it down myself, which I did. *ponder* Which in essence made the rule in our house, "If someone is interested in a book, it's appropriate for them."
>>Also, I'm curious about science fiction/fantasy books with lots of neologisms and oddball jargon. I ate those up as a kid--I especially liked Star Wars EU books, and never had any trouble inserting myself into a sci-fi world and taking new concepts in stride.<<
That's how I got into xenolinguistics. The earliest mark I can peg for sure is that my mother read me The Hobbit when I was four. I can remember referring to the small, peculiar, off-the-beaten-path sort of museum as a "mathom-house."
>>It wasn't until my freshman year at college, when I took a course on science fiction and mythology, that I found out that wasn't an automatic thing for most people. A few of the students had to LEARN it.<<
I had that sort of experience a lot. I remember being utterly baffled by foreign language classes, because all the answers were in the book so that all I had to do was memorize them. It took me another year or few to realize that what I'd been expecting from a language class was what other folks would consider "field linguistics." Which, as it turns out, I'd been doing for years while visiting other worlds: I've got an option to align with the local language so I can write out conversations and events in English, or to receive it straight so I can write it out the way it really sounds and then try to figure out how it works.