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).
It sounds like the English may be more straightforward, though I will say I often need to reread sentence or take a moment to think about what’s being said (beyond being an insightful comment, I mean). I think reading vol. 1 of Capital took me about 2X longer to read than a modern book of a similar word count for this reason.
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.
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.