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Old January 30, 2011, 09:03 AM
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I mean, I'm computer engineer and my work is something unknown for me, I mean, I'm computer engineer and my work is very technical, and the books about informatics and server likely coming up wrote in English, then as I don't know technical English, I can't read very well all the book and sometimes I have doubts about my information gotten n the books.
Really?? You find technical English difficult to read? That's very interesting. It's the opposite for English speakers. Technical Spanish is a cinch to read. In fact people that don't speak Spanish at all, if forced, could translate written technical Spanish into English. Almost every word besides the the, and, or, of, etc. look almost identical to English. This is because English receive a huge amount of loanwords from Norman French (derived from Latin) after the Norman conquest, and borrowed many words after that directly from Latin and Greek. In fact I could read technical Romanian, Wallon, Catalan, or any other Romance language if it's talking about computers, science, etc., without having studied them previously. The words in any Romance language in technical registers are the same as the words in English for discussing the same topic. Not to mention the fact that most languages then even borrow words from English--no need to translate words like Microsoft, Windows 7, Linux, etc. Check this out:
Quote:
Una computadora o un computador, (del latín computare -calcular-), también denominada ordenador (del francés ordinateur, y éste del latín ordinator), es una máquina electrónica que recibe y procesa datos para convertirlos en información útil. Una computadora es una colección de circuitos integrados y otros componentes relacionados que puede ejecutar con exactitud, rapidez y de acuerdo a lo indicado por un usuario o automáticamente por otro programa, una gran variedad de secuencias o rutinas de instrucciones que son ordenadas, organizadas y sistematizadas en función a una amplia gama de aplicaciones prácticas y precisamente determinadas, proceso al cual se le ha denominado con el nombre de programación y al que lo realiza se le llama programador.
From the beginning of the Wikipedia article "Computador": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computador

It seems like about 50% of the words are the same as in English, just spelled differently. The rest of the words are what you would learn in the first two weeks of a Spanish class: "Uno, o, un, también, y, éste, del, es, que, y, para, en, de, otros, con, a, lo, por, al, cual, se, le, a, el, nombre, llama" Those are all very easy words. The only ones that you would't learn in the first two weeks are "ordinador, amplia, gama". You'd have to look these up... Unless you could guess by context, or if you knew High School French, you'd see that "ordinador" looks just like "ordinateur" (as well as being able to figure out what "le, se, de, y", etc. mean.

Even if you didn't take Spanish or any other Romance language at all, and just spoke English, you would be able to get the gist of the article, esp. if you circled all the words that were the same as in English and filled in the missing of's the's, and's, etc.

Also the shear number of cognates* means that translating the text in your head to English without writing it down would be very easy, whatever ones level of Spanish. Unlike reading a text in Croatian, where even if you knew every word, almost none of them look the same as English, and you'd go cross-eyed trying to translate it in your head, unless you were quite advanced in the language.

The shear number of cognates* in English and technical Spanish means that while reading, you can go for long periods of time without having to look up every word--which would seriously disrupt the flow of reading, and would no longer be called "reading" but rather an exercise in making flash cards/vocabulary list, which while valuable would so seriously disrupt the flow of your conscious understanding of the text, that you would end up understanding nothing that you had read.

So basically I'm surprised that you find reading technical English so difficult, as English speakers find technical Spanish so easy to comprehend. The only exception would be if it is so technical that it was beyond ones comprehension, like certain types of quantum physics books, for instance. But the fault would not be the fact that they were written in Spanish, because one would be unable to understand them even if they were written in English!

In fact, technical Spanish is even easier than even content written for young children, when you are first learning Spanish. I'm finally getting better at reading books, understanding cartoons and such for young children in Spanish, as my basic vocabulary is increasing. But before, whereas technical Spanish was all English to me, whereas children's books were all Greek to me.

Poetry in Spanish is still very difficult, but is getting slightly better. Before, Spanish poetry was as intelligible as this:

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Sjeti se da svetkuješ dan subotni. Šest dana radi i obavljaj sav svoj posao. A sedmoga je dana subota, počinak posvećen Jahvi, Bogu tvojemu. Tada nikakva posla nemoj raditi: ni ti, ni sin tvoj, ni kći tvoja, ni sluga tvoj, ni sluškinja tvoja, ni živina tvoja, niti došljak koji se nađe unutar tvojih vrata. Ta i Jahve je šest dana stvarao nebo, zemlju i more i sve što je u njima, a sedmoga je dana počinuo. Stoga je Jahve blagoslovio i posvetio dan subotni. što je u njima, a sedmoga je dana počinuo. Stoga je Jahve blagoslovio i posvetio dan subotni. subotni
That was from http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deset_B...jih_zapovijedi

Which is in Croatian! I think that part comes from the Bible, but I can't be certain. That's about how intelligible Spanish poetry was to me initially. There isn't a single word I can understand. I'd have to look up every single word in that text. That's not *reading*, that's preparing flash cards, and getting ones hands tired flipping through the dictionary, or reading the footnotes for each word! I've gotten (very) slightly better, so far, so now I can pick out a few words in Spanish poetry, so it's starting to look less like Croatian to me.

Notice what a difference that is compared to technical Spanish! In that article about Computers in Spanish, there were only 3 words in about 80 that I wouldn't be able to understand after a few weeks of taking Spanish (2 words if I knew even the most rudimentary French.)

Sent from my Smartphone. Oy, my hands hurt now My internet connection at home is down today.
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