I’m curious about the experience of reading Marx from our users for whom English is their second language. For me as a native English speaker… I love reading Marx but the language feels so arcane at times. I mean, he rarely uses words I don’t understand, but the context in which he uses them often eludes me. It’s almost like he uses to many words when a briefer sentence would be more effective, at least to a modern audience. It’s nowhere near the experience of say reading Shakespeare, which I can’t do without some sort of modern guide. But I feel like the language is challenging enough that it’s a barrier to some people.

So I’m curious if the experience is similar in other languages (especially curious about German).

  • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Yea for sure, it's still Marx, not exactly light reading. German grammar just likes to employ a lot of inversions and overly complex sentence structures - stuff that just doesn't fly to that degree in English, so the translator already did a lot of work to make it more straightforward, on a grammatical level.

    • GinAndJuche
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      The Reddit meme about how easy German because “le Concatenation, just mash words and works” vs the reality of learning all sorts of complex stuff.