The Reading Room

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Knight

07:36

Are non-English literature questions allowed on this SE?

6 hours later…

Tsundoku

13:26

@Knight Of course. One of the goals of our reading challenges is to increase diversity in the literatures discussed on this site.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

14:29

Q: What did Elrond mean by telling strangers at the council this phrase below?

This phase have been taken from the fellowship of the ring, book II, chapter II, page(271): Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, we must find councel for the peril of the world.

Knight

14:43

@Tsundoku But if I would write in some other language will users understand me?

@Tsundoku @NapoleonWilson I have decided to learn German. Should I learn German the same way I learned English? I learned English in this way: first the alphabets were introduced to us, then we made sounds for particular alphabets, then words were taught with their meanings and finally we were taught how to understand a sentence.

(Let me know if either of you get disturbed by my ping)

1 hour later…

Tsundoku

15:55

@Knight You already know most of the German alphabet; you only need to add ß, ä, ö und ü. Learning how individual letters sounds does not get you very far, because many sounds in the German languages are represented by letter combinations, such as sch, st and the diphthong au and ei. But getting the pronunciation right early on is a very good idea.

@Knight There is an entire SE site about language learning. And you already know one of its moderators ;-)

@Knight Well, if your question is about a specific passage, it is helpful to provide a translation or link to one.

Rand al'Thor

16:19

@Knight Questions about non-English literature, yes. Non-English questions about literature, no. (In other words, the literature can be from whatever language you want, but please write questions in English.)

If possible, when quoting a passage from a non-English piece of literature, it's nice to provide a translation as well.

Q: Quoting from non-English literature

When quoting a book in a question that was originally written in a language other than English, is it preferable to quote it in the original version or in an English translation, or both? If one should supply a translation, should it be an official one of some kind or is it okay to do the transla...