How I started reading in english -and why I continue doing it

 

It’s no secret that a lot of us in the community aren’t native english speakers. Regardless, our paths have brought us here, together. I won’t dwell too much on how right or wrong or dangerous to our own cultures this is, because that is a complicated discussion that merits its own post. But it’s worth bringing up.

In the latest issue of the Ya zine, Stay Bookish, some awesome people -ahem, me too- collaborated on a international-themed article that explores some of the struggles and facets of being a non-native english speaker reader.

So why? Why do we do it?

I didn’t use to know many people who read, but now I know a few, and if they don’t ask me, then they sure think it –why? 

It all started with Julie Kagawa.

But before Julie, and before Reverie Society, I was just a normal reader with a decent grasp on english grammar and vocabulary.

 

The dark age of book piracy

Two years ago I wrote a post about my experience with book piracy. It was kind of ranty, because all the community was talking about it at the time, and I had opinions. So, I’ll try to summarize that experience here now.

For years, I hoarded PDF versions of books and saved them to my computer for reading. I wasn’t paying anything for them. I was pretty proud of my pdf library. I had them organized in folders by author, and then if applicable, by series.

These were of course, all in spanish at first.

I don’t know exactly how I discovered that I could read books in this format, but it was shortly after I’d finished the Twilight books.  Then I became more interested in the local bookstore’s –the only one in the entire city– YA selection. I found a book about werewolves that I did buy, and later, like I said, somehow, I found the rest of the series as PDFs. And so it began.

It was the most frustrating thing to have discovered this wonderful world that were the books and not be able to have them because the bookstore brought so few. I went each time expecting something new, but it was just the same thing as always.

So I downloaded the books from blogs in spanish that translated them and had them available. Being able to read the books in spanish was a revelation. I was so grateful to these people who had taken the time to translate the books for giving others the chance to read them too.

The authors, the publishers… they were an afterthought.

My world had just gotten bigger, until I realized… not so much. Because even these digital books had a limit. They were limited by the language. There were quite a few books that I’d search for and that could only find in english. So I’d let them go and find another book to read.

Until, I read the synopsis of the Iron King, by Julie Kagawa. I couldn’t let that one go.

 

Reading in english and communicating in english

I’d liked the synopsis so much that I wanted to read it so badly and I finally resigned myself to reading it in english. Something I’d only done before for school. And those had been books that were more appropiate for my language proficiency at the time.

But I read it -with the translator tab open of course- and my world got bigger still. All those books before that I’d not read because of the language barrier, I could read them now. It felt like my only limitation now was how many books I could cram in the seven days of the week. Yes, I was a lonely girl and had too much time in my hands.

Mind you, I read in english, but still, these were pirated copies.

 

Blogs in english

The blogs I read for information on what to read next suddenly weren’t enough, so I discovered new ones, written in english. I discovered Goodreads, and a few bloggers that would eventually inspire me to create my own.

 

Roleplaying in english

Around this time, I also discovered roleplaying or collaborative writing. So I not only began to read but write in english too. It was a sort of symbiosis. Surrounding myself with people who talked in this language I learned so many words. I was learning new words every week. Slang and abbreviations, like BRB, for example. These are things english-speakers and now some of us even take for granted.

 

I found that I was quickly getting ahead of my peers in english class because it was becoming second-nature. Before, words that I didn’t know the meaning of I ignored if they didn’t affect the flow of my reading. But after reading so many books in english, now I knew the meaning by context.

 

Being part of the community

As I began discovering more blogs in english, I also created my own blog and started interacting in twitter with other bloggers and even followed publishers and authors!

That was such a game-changer for me. Authors had always been just names and well, faces too. But they felt distant, like celebrities. Not that I became best friends with them, but I could easily drop a ‘I just read X’s book and LOVED it‘, and the author would sometimes give it a like, or/and reply with a ‘Glad you enjoyed it!‘.

This of course eventually led to me deleting my library of PDFs and start relying on kindle ebooks. This was another perk of reading in english. I now could read those books. Before, ebooks hadn’t been an option because of the extremely limited spanish versions available.

Being part of the community definitely sensibilized me towards the issues going on, since I was closer to the action. After all, YA books are mostly published from US-based authors. So, yes, way closer to the action.

 

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I started reading in english out of necessity. And I kept doing it because I wanted to continue being involved. Because being able to read books, connect with other readers and writers seemed like a damn good way of using this skill that I kept honing.

Like I said in the article for Stay Bookish zine, translations were so important for me. They were they only way I could get to access all those stories. But once I discovered how much powerful those sounded in their original language, I just couldn’t go back.

Sometimes I think about that and feel bad that I very rarely feel inclined to read YA in spanish these days.

Nowadays, I go the bookstores (there are more than one in my city now, yay!) and find so many titles in spanish for YA literature. The Starbound trilogy, Six of Crows, Children of Blood and Bone, to name a few. They are translating them faster now, and bookstores are stocking their shelves faster too. In spanish.

So, I keep relying on ebooks and the physical copies that sometimes I’m able to afford in english. Reading in english became a preference rather than a necessity.

People look at me weird when I tell them of my preference for books in english. I pay so much attention to my wording because I don’t want to come accross as a snob. It gets harder when I tell them my blog is in english too. But what can you do.

It’s a tough balance because you’re part of something big, but you want to belong to your own community as well. That’s why this year I’ve made an effort to meet readers from my own country and other spanish-speaking countries. I still like to read in english but in the end, another language is meant to expand my world, not limit it.

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Are you a non-native english speaker? How did you begin reading in english? And what do your friends think about it?

 

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