La Sombra del Viento: A fun read for advanced readers.

I really enjoyed La Sombra del Viento (El cementerio de los libros olvidados nº 1, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, 2009), but it's not a book for an intermediate reader. A B2 reader aspiring to become a C1 reader could attempt it (and probably should consider it seriously), but a weaker reader will be overwhelmed.

What the book is not

Right off the bat, let me say that nothing magical or supernatural happens in this book. Some of the reviews (even the professional ones) leave that impression, but there are no ghosts here except the ones in people's minds, and there are no angels or demons except the human kind. Those, however, are plentiful.

This is not a Young Adult novel. Yes, the protagonist is only 10 years old when we first meet him, and he's only 19 for the rest of it, but this is literature, and it's targeted at an adult reader. It's a thrilling story, but the book is not a thriller.

What it's about: A spoiler-free outline

In post-WWII Spain, during the time of Franco, Daniel Sempre, the young son of a bookstore owner, comes across a captivating novel titled "The Shadow of the Wind" (La sombra del viento) by a Julian Carax. He loves it so much, he wants to find more books by the same author, but despite the book being relatively-recently published, he has trouble finding out anything about it or its author. Both he and his works appear to have vanished with hardly a trace.

Initially just from curiosity, Daniel tries to investigate the mystery. He finds some clues, and he meets some resistance. He makes unexpected friends and enemies, he falls in love, he travels all over Barcelona, he crosses paths with the local police and even tangles with Franco's dreaded secret police. The more he learns, the more he realizes that something truly monstrous happened back before the war, and the more he wants to know exactly what that was. But, whatever it was, it hasn't finished happening, and he finds himself in the heart of it.

The book never gets dull, and the tension builds right up to the climax. 

Why it's difficult

The degree of difficulty is almost entirely due to the vocabulary, which is extremely large. There are a few words I couldn't find at all, and I suspect those were borrowed from Catalan, but the enormous vocabulary of ordinary Spanish words is the real challenge. With a Kindle and a dictionary, it's not impossible, but, as I said above, if you're not already a fairly strong reader, you're likely to be doing so much of it that it'll spoil the fun. 

If you do attempt it, I strongly recommend following a policy of trying to use the built-in monolingual dictionary and only resorting to a bilingual dictionary if that fails. If you're strong enough to read this book, you should be strong enough to use the monolingual, but, more important, a lot of this vocabulary just isn't going to be listed in any of the bilinguals currently available on Kindle. In a pinch, you can open the monolingual dictionary as a book and use the bilingual dictionary to help you read the definitions.

How I read the book

I tried something a little different this time. Beyond just reading it on the Kindle, I highlighted all the words I had to look up and, for the first 10% of the book, I created flash cards for each such word. I used Anki's basic template, not the fancy two-way template I usually use, because I wanted to minimize the effort. That is, I only studied how to translate Spanish words into English--not the other way around. I persisted with this for the first 10% of the book.

It was way too much work. Yes, it did help speed up my reading, since, like most authors, Zafon tends to have some favorite words and expressions that are otherwise uncommon. But the effort was so great that it detracted from the fun of reading, so I gave it up at about the 10% point.

Part of the problem was that the list of words grew too fast. Anki generally only wants you to learn 20 new words per day at most, but I needed over 100. That turned out to be agonizing. Another problem was that the chore of simply creating the words was unpleasant, owing to the fact that the Kindle app on Windows wouldn't let me copy/paste text, so I had to retype everything.

I still think this would be a great approach, but Amazon would have to help. First, for each word, it would be nice if Amazon could tell me how many more times I can expect to see it in the book. Words that don't occur again, I could skip. Second, it should help me generate the cards in the first place.

Kindle users are probably aware that Amazon does in fact have a "Vocabulary Builder" feature that purports to do just that, but, unfortunately, it doesn't really work. First, it doesn't create cards for root words--only for word forms. So instead of one card for colgar you'll end up with separate cards for colga, colgó, etc. Second, instead of a simple definition, it shows you the original sentence you read it in, which makes the review too easy. Third, it cannot handle phrases at all. There's no way to make dar con a single card. Fourth, there is some sort of memory leak in the software, and the more cards you create, the slower your Kindle becomes, until it reboots itself. Unfortunately, if you turn the feature on, it creates a card for every word you look up--including ones where you say "Oh yes, I knew that" as well as ones you only looked up to verify that you really understood them.

(I'll write a post sometime with a list of things I think Amazon could do to assist students of foreign languages in general.)

Upshot

Despite the challenge of reading it, I really loved this book. I'm powerfully tempted to read the other books in the series.

Feel free to review the list of foreign novels I recommend reading as well as reference books I use for learning how to read foreign languages.

Como Agua Para Chocolate

I finished Como Agua Para Chocolate ("Like Water for Chocolate") this week, and enjoyed it a lot. Other than requiring the reader to master a hundred or so words of cooking vocabulary, it should be well-suited to an intermediate reader with a good sense of humor. Young female readers may especially enjoy it, but it's really a fun read for anyone.

Outline of the story (no spoilers)

A basic but boring description

Tita la Garza is the youngest daughter of a wealthy Mexican family whose ranch lies in northern Mexico not far from the US border. The novel takes place during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. Tita wants to marry Pedro Muzquiz, the boy next door, but her family's tradition says that the youngest daughter must stay home to take care of her mother. She rebels, but her mother is a very strong woman who brooks no disagreement. Tita boils with repressed anger and passion--like the water one boils to make hot chocolate.

A more exciting description

Strange things happen around Tita. Magical things. Surreal things. Forced to work in the kitchen, she pours herself into the work (and excels at it), but when she's very emotional--for better or worse--all kinds of things happen to people who eat her cooking. Even without Tita's help, the la Garza ranch is a place where people do strange things for stranger reasons, but Tita definitely pushes it over the top.

Strange things happen to the reader too. You laugh. You get angry. You get sad. And then you laugh some more. 

There are twelve chapters, named for each of the months of the year, although the story encompasses more time than that. Each chapter is organized around a particular Mexican dish that Tita will prepare, and you can bank on the fact that something unexpected will happen when people sit down at the table with it. 

The target audience

Unquestionably, this is a girl's book. The heroine is a teenage girl, all the strong characters in the book are women, and cooking is a major part of the story. That said, you don't have to be a girl to enjoy it, and there is a lot here to enjoy. For me, at least, the book flew by. I don't think I was ever bored.

Challenges Reading the Novel in Spanish

Vocabulary

Como agua para chocolate has quite a lot of cooking vocabulary. You'll find the names of cooking utensils, actions for preparing and cooking food, and a long list of foods. Assuming you are reading on a Kindle, you'll find that the free monolingual dictionary almost always has definitions for these words, so be sure to check it whenever your bilingual dictionary lets you down.

A trick that is sometimes useful, especially for long lists of unknown words, is to use the translate feature on the Kindle. Although the translation often makes a hash out of complex sentences, when you have a simple list of nouns, it usually does a pretty good job, and it's far faster than looking up seven or eight words in a row.

There are a few references to the Mexican revolution that might throw you. One important one is that a follower of Pancho Villa is a *villista*, but none of my dictionaries told me that--I just had to figure it out.

Experiment

For this novel, I tried an experiment: during the first chapter, I highlighted every word that I had to look up in the dictionary. I sometimes look up words even though I think I know them, so I didn't highlight anything if the result was what I expected. Just the words I really needed to understand the sentence.

At the end of the first chapter, I created a new deck of flashcards with Anki but instead of using my special template, I used the basic Anki template--the one that assumes you only drill in one direction and that you don't type the answers. On the front sides, I put the Spanish words I had looked up, and on the reverse I put the definitions.

Drilling on those words was really fast. For example, Anki might prompt me with:

I might think "that that means "to shell," and I'd press the space bar. Anki would show me the answer:

In this case, I'd be right, so I'd press space again to mark it correct and advance to the next card. If I was wrong, I'd press the "1" key, marking the card wrong for further review.

Although not as comprehensive as the sort of two-sided cards I create for serious vocabulary review, I could blitz through these one-sided cards like lightening, largely because I didn't have to type anything.

After drilling on the words from the first chapter, I proceeded to read the second chapter. Sure enough, lots of those words occurred again--even unusual ones. I repeated the experiment in chapters two and three. This fairly simple exercise made the rest of the book a good bit easier to read. I'll try this again with the next couple of books to see if I really think it's worth the trouble.

Amazon actually has a built-in flashcard feature called "Vocabulary Builder" which does almost the same thing. Unfortunately, as of this writing, there is a bug in the Vocabulary Builder that causes your Kindle to slow down and eventually lock up if you look up too many words with it. I can't get past a single chapter without having to turn it off.

Spanish "Resumptive Lo"

What is "Resumptive Lo?"

In Spanish we often see sentences with a mysterious lo in them. For example consider this dialogue:

¿Estás listo? (Are you ready?)
Lo estoy. (I am.)

It's fair to ask "what's the lo doing there?" It seems to mean "I am it." This lo is what linguists call an expletive, and it cannot be deleted.

Expletives

Sometimes the syntax of a language forces you to put a word into a sentence even when the semantics don't require it. When that happens, you use an expletive, which is just a dummy word that doesn't mean anything.

In English, you find expletives in expressions like "It is raining," "There is trouble," and "Do you see?" The "It," "there," and "do" are there because English syntax requires something in those slots. The expletive disappears whenever there is a valid word for that slot. "Have you seen?" is valid but *"Have you done seen" is substandard.

One of the challenges of learning Spanish is learning to leave the English expletives out. "It is raining" just becomes Llueve. "There is trouble" becomes Hay problemas, etc. It shouldn't be a big surprise, then, that another challenge is learning to put the Spanish expletives in.

Three places that need lo

For words like ser, estar, and parecer, Spanish doesn't allow you to leave out the complement. That is, you can't just say "I am" or "he is"; you have to say what you are or what he is. Even though lo doesn't mean anything, it satisfies the syntax. If you just say *Estoy, then you've made an error on a par with saying "Is raining."

Transitive verbs have the same problem. You cannot omit the direct object.

¿Quién tiene una carta? (Who has a letter?)
Lo tengo. (I have).

This doesn't mean "I have it," obviously, since carta is feminine, and "I have it" wouldn't make sense in this context anyway. ("I have one" would also translate this correctly.) Again, *Tengo all by itself is wrong.

Finally, when haber means "there is" you have to say what there is.

¿Hay algo que comer? (Is there anything to eat?)
Lo hay. (There is.)

Likewise, *Hay, by itself is an error.

When do you use it?

That answers why you have to use it, but it doesn't explain when you would want to. You use the resumptive lo when the missing element simply repeats something earlier in the sentence or even in a previous sentence. In all my examples above, the lo represents something the first speaker said and which the second speaker doesn't need to repeat because "it's obvious." Nothing stops you from repeating what was said, of course, but almost no one does that--in any language.

This use of lo to "reuse" something from earlier is why this is called "resumptive lo."

You can use resumptive lo inside a single sentence. This example is from Duolingo:

Este plato es bonito, pero ese no lo es. (This plate is pretty, but that one is not.)

It's very tempting to say ese no es, because that's what we do in English, but it's wrong. A form of ser has to have a complement--even if it's just lo.

For more details, read "A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish: Fifth Edition" (Butt and Benjamin, 2011, section 7.4 "Lo as a neuter pronoun").