Hi. I am looking for a text to learn by heart in order to learn Japanese (with the help of the translation). I love learning texts and I really want to see where it can take me. So what I need is :
Please, I know there are lots of reasons to doubt that language can be learnt that way. Do not discourage me ! I just want to give it a try and learn what I can learn. Discussing the idea can be an interesting topic too, but now what I need is to find an adequate text first.
Thank you very much for your suggestions !
- a text that is long enough (or a set of shorter texts). Very short texts (Haiku for example) might be not very interesting as they are necessarily poor in many regards (simple or vague sentence structure, for example).
- A text that is possible and interesting to learn. So the best would be poetry, and in any case not a technical notice for a microwave. Like, I started to learn Dante's Inferno because I was interested in Italian, that was a nice text to learn. It was nice also for my personal culture, so I feel motivated and I am happy I learnt a little bit of this text. I would like to find an equivalent in Japanese. Of course, beyond poetry there are other texts that might be interesting and valuable to learn, so I am open to suggestion.
- A text that is useful for learning today's Japanese. Here, Dante's text is not a good example, as it is absolutely useless if you want to learn contemporary Italian, since the language has changed to a great extent. So I don't want an old text that would be very difficult to understand even for Japanese people now.
- A text that is translated in English. (Or French, for that matter). If there is no translation it is useless.
Please, I know there are lots of reasons to doubt that language can be learnt that way. Do not discourage me ! I just want to give it a try and learn what I can learn. Discussing the idea can be an interesting topic too, but now what I need is to find an adequate text first.
Thank you very much for your suggestions !