Progress on the KJV update adds the book of Ephesians, some of Acts and some of 1 Peter. Acts isn't one of my favorite books, so I'm thinking of switching back and forth between that and the some of the shorter ones.
As I'm going through, I'm finding things that don't directly translate from the Greek. That reminds me. If you're a European reader, I saw an interesting article on English this week. The language rules we know - but don't know we know. I thought it was a fun article. It's probably C2, but if you're really into the language, it's definitely cool.
So, I'm finding things that don't directly translate. Part of the update involves making the English more literal to the Greek where possible. It doesn't always work. The word pregnant never appears in the KJV. I think it was considered offensive in polite company around 1600. And afterwards for a long time. They used the quaint expression "with child". Greek doesn't say with child or pregnant. It says holding womb. In modern terms it would be holding uterus. That would be too shocking for the reader. If they had had movies in Bible times, it would sound like a scene out of Samarian Short Sword Massacre. You know how they felt about Samaritans. They would have made them the serial killers in their movies. That's very scriptural.
I've been doing this update since late April. I was getting a little discouraged with my French. I've been reading things and watching videos for a while. It doesn't feel like I'm making the progress I should be. I haven't been killing myself with it. I've taken a casual approach. Around the middle of May, I got distracted into the first part of June and didn't keep up with it as much as I had been, but I was still doing the KJV update, which involved a lot of wrestling with Greek sentence structure. I'm not trying to learn ancient Greek. French is more interesting to me. However, I was having to figure out what a lot of sentences were saying rather than relying on the KJV translation. Remember. Greek is like Yoda but worse. When I got back to where I could concentrate on the French book I was reading, something amazing happened. It was so much easier to read and understand. I blew through that book so fast, and it was much more enjoyable than before.
Partout is the word that stands out to me the most. In my dictionary it means "everywhere" with a special usage meaning "all over". It was used at the end of a sentence in a scene describing a messy apartment. Things were scattered partout. I was reading along and automatically knew it meant "throughout". That's not in my dictionary, but Google translate has that as the second definition. That's so cool! Even though I'm not learning Greek, I'm still doing language stuff with it for hours in the evening at least five nights a week. Apparently, my brain has been getting exercise it's able to use for processing French. It's so much easier to read it now. I hope that's not too geeky. ;)
I guess that's more for people trying to learn two languages at once. The "rule" is to put 80% of your effort into the harder one and 20% into the easier one. Ideally, they should not be similar to each other. That makes so much more sense now. Of course, you can learn two languages at once. It might actually be easier in some ways. Just be careful.
A few real numbers. When I was 35% through the book before
getting distracted, my Kindle said I had 17+ hours to go, which I didn't
believe. I went from 35 to 50% really fast. When I got to 50, I
surprised at the progress. It said I had under two hours left in the
book. That's dramatic improvement. I'm a lot more excited about my French now.
Have a great weekend.
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