I have a friend from Ukraine who came to the U.S. about four years ago. Her spoken English is pretty good, but her reading ability is weak. She has been trying to read some English-language fiction without much success. For example, another friend loaned her an Elmore Leonard novel, and she couldn’t make sense of it (not too surprising, what with Leonard’s complex sentences and use of jargon).
She likes the movie Gone with the Wind and is going to try to read the book. It probably will help that she’s familiar with the story, and I’m sure Margaret Mitchell’s prose is more transparent than Leonard’s, but I still wouldn’t recommend it to someone who struggles to read English. For one thing, the book is pretty long.
My friend has read a lot of classic Russian literature, so I’d like to recommend something to her that she can read yet doesn’t insult her intelligence. Hemingway’s prose is very clean and easy to follow, although I don’t know that his stories would appeal to her.
Can any of you good folks recommend something? Thanks.
Natsume Soseki is a Japanese author, but according to my teachers he’s quite researched by foreign scholars because he writes rather simple language. I’d imagine that a translation would be similarly simple.
You might also try some of the more erudite children’s literature like At the Back of the North Wind, Pinocchio, Watership Down (unless reading about Commie bunnies would disturb her), etc.
How about the Redwall series by Brian Jacques? They’re very well written, full of detail and great stories. They’re also supposedly kid books but I didn’t even start reading them til my mid-twenties and it’s my second favorite series (after Discworld).
I have managed to get three people absorbed in the series. Two of them didn’t even like reading and the third isn’t a very good reader.
Jack London and Ernest Hemingway were both taught quite a bit in schools of the former Soviet Union. They are likely to be familiar stories and the prose is pretty straight forward without a lot of slang that is hard to understand.
“Enders Game” - a good story told in very straightforward language (easily understood by middle-school readers).
I know SF isn’t everyone’s bag - so alternatively perhaps she would enjoy some historical fiction about American frontier life - perhaps “My Antonia” by Willa Cather. Or, why not the “Little House” books? I just read them for the first time, and I’m 33 and highly intelligent.
The fog index is a measure of the reading difficulty of a work, which depends on the proportion of polysyllabic words and the number of words per sentence. The lower the number, the easier it is to read.
A couple years ago, I calculated the index of random samples from some of my favorite authors. Stephen King had the lowest fog index by far. He tends to use a lot of slang, however, which would make it hard for a foreigner. Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck were also good. I didn’t test Hemingway because he’s not one of my favorites, but I bet he’d compare well. Until her reading comprehension is better, she should definitely steer clear of Tolkien and anything by any 19th century author.
I see now there’s an automatic fog index calculator online: http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/ I wish I’d known about that before.
[hijack]I guess the immigrant shouldn’t go to the Wikipedia page on Hamiltonian Mechanics, the first paragraph of which scored a whopping 25.3 on the fog index!
What about having her read Russian literature in English translation? That way, she will already know more or less what the story line is, but can still enjoy the twists and turns and maybe not have to stop so often to look up words just to know what’s going on.
I know when I was studying Russian formally, we read short stories, because you don’t need quite so much stamina as you need to slog through a novel (especially some of the classic Russian novels!), and you still got that sense of accomplishment from actually finishing something. Maybe some Hemingway?
