Uuuuh, basically, do you take notes while you read? If so, is there a method to your approach?
I've never been one for note taking (probably because they were required/graded in school) but Kant has made me reconsider.
So far I'm just yanking the section headings that he uses, and restating what he says under them. But it occurred to me that this probably wouldn't work so great with a less pedantically structured text.
Back when I was reading for grades, I'd highlight and take notes. Now that I only read for pleasure, I let the shit wash over me. If it doesn't stick, it doesn't stick. If it's super-painful, I stop. If it's somewhere in between, I skim... or the audiobook equivalent, playing back at like 5x. Life is too short to club yourself over the head with bad prose. This is no doubt why I've been convinced three times in my life to attempt Nietzsche, and three times in my life have landed on fuck this guy and everything he believes.
You know, there are books out there for when you want to read Kant but not by Kant. That said, my general approach for reading a non-fiction book and really understanding it is the following: - Highlight new things I learn with yellow (physical book: underline) - Highlight key arguments with purple (physical book: underline + exclamation mark) - After having read and highlighted the entire book, write down / copy the core arguments from the purple notes. If I did it right, I can tell the entire story of the book with just those notes, filling in the gaps with common sense or logical thinking. If I want to re-read the book, I only have to care about the purple highlights. If I'm looking for interesting tidbits or supportive arguments, I look at the yellow highlights.
Stealing this, because otherwise too much information washes over me.
It is the arbitrary point where I've decided to stop falling backwards through a trail of connected works, though. I got here because it seemed reasonable to backtrack to Hegel & Adam Smith from Marx, and then from there I figured Hegel was closely enough related to Kant to step back again. I figure if I can't make sense of it, I'm only out time. Really, though, what I'm interested in is how people are organizing their learning. :) That's a subject I've always found fascinating, probably because I'm so bad at doing it myself.Don't start with Kant? Even the original German is supposedly incomprehensible.
It never occurred to me to take notes on anything I'm reading for pleasure, but lately I've been thinking maybe I should. At least for non-fiction. I'm reading Gifts of the Crow at the moment and finding the neuroscience a little difficult to retain. Just the act of writing something down seems to help, even if I don't spend much reviewing.
dude grok has been a viable part of pop culture for fifty fuckin' years. Matt Groening used it in parody to describe pseudointellectuals back when he was writing Life in Hell, ten years before he was even approached about The Simpsons. Just 'cuz you don't know a word doesn't mean it isn't a perfectly viable word. Heinlein coined the term "waldo" as well, and also invented the waterbed (for better or worse). In fact, the number of words you use from science fiction is probably absurdly higher than you're aware.
LOL I knew. I read Stranger millennia ago, and so on. But just cuz something exists and has an accepted common usage doesn't mean I have to like it or that I can't snark about it. Grok has a decidedly neckbeardish/D&D, Wow, empty 2-liters and accumulated delivery food waste connotation for me -- and its coinage by Heinlein certainly doesn't do anything to wash the word clean of that taste. Hey. Some people love cilantro, some people can't fucking stand it. Just don't mistake my aversion for ignorance.
Now I see they be wasting your... time. Shit. I still suck at rhyming. You don't suck at rhyming: you sucked at a rhyme! That's AABA for ya. You know how Devac gets his share of fun from making maths- and physics-related jokes? Here's one for the part-philologist guy here. :DApologies for the lazy attempt at some rhymes
They come and go dependent. Written language is a method of communication - things like spelling, punctuation and capitalization are, to me, just elements of that method which can be manipulated, altered, or simply invoked to help convey shades of meaning in the same way as the use of bold, italics, third/first/&c. person, interjections, quotations, and etc are (more commonly) accepted and used to. It would take a high level review of multiple of my published poems to maybe perceive the "big picture" of how I like to fuck with capitals and punctuation/lack-thereof, but it's a been long term fuckwiddit thing I like to do. I imagine for a non-native English speaker it may make the reading more difficult. I guess my real point is that if I misspell a word, it's more likely on purpose than not. Same with using incorrect grammar or unusual punctuation.
Eloquently put. I must say: it's a bigger pleasure seeing a message written according to a higher standard. Your using "&c.", in particular, is an eye candy. Not that I expect it to change your ways: your choice of mistreating spelling is a conscious one, and I know you to be a woman of conviction. As for me: a very high number of things I read - let's approximate it as 95%, for clarity's sake - over the last five years are in English in all of its various forms, including forums where people bother with spelling much less than most I've seen would. At this point, I find the concern of my having a hard time reading an English poem to be unreasonable as long as it uses modern English. I may stumble a time or two, but that's everyone's lot, and I think it does not disqualify me from the C1 I claim to have (if you don't know what it means, google "CEFR": you should know what the rest of the world is up to).
I think the difficulty a non-native English speaker might have reading an English-language poem would echo the difficulties any reader would encounter, when they delve into creative writing (& yes especially poems) in languages that aren't their inundated born-and-bred own. That is to say I'd think the inherent difficulty there would center more around said poem's potential use of slang, idioms, bastardized idioms, mixed metaphors and one-off one-word half-references, than word-by-misspelled-or-poorly-grammared-word comprehension. I think poems especially offer great avenues for playing with words, language, sound and sense. They also beg to fill up with echoes of other rhymes, lines, poems, lyrics and evocative works. So it's hard to learn all the fables & folk songs of a different culture which speaks a different language; it's hard to know their pop music and puzzle out whether a turn of phrase is a bastardized idiom or an original, surreal or imagistic or otherwise unexpected use of words language invention. It would be hard to read a poem in a language you didn't grow up with because poems are more like quilts than they're like comforters - sure both of them make warm blankets but one's made out of blocks and patterns within patterns and fabrics from the clothes you grew up wearing out but couldn't part with. The other one's like two colors or has the same generic printed pattern of lines or polka dots which Target and a $50 price limit combine to guarantee. Both will keep you warm but one you'll throw out after it gets ragged and starts pooping increasingly-gross-graying cotton batting from its broken corners or side seams, approx 3-5 years after purchase. Sure it might be dramatic but basically what I'm saying is, it ain't the text that I expect would throw you. It's all the murky subtext you can't look up on genius or urban dictionary.