Rubbish. Comprehending this material has been well within the capabilities of 16 year olds for as long as the material has been taught. For your premise to hold true there would need to have been a significant diminishment in children's linguistic and reading skills which would no doubt be reflected in all manner of standardized testing across the cohort. If someone's struggling with the material it seems more likely that either it's being taught poorly or they simply have no interest in engaging with it. Curb your enthusiasm for revisionism, not everything should be easy.
Markest thou well, good sir, thy words are naught
But foolish prattle. Forsooth, for many a year,
The younglings of sixteen winters have grasped
This very material with ease and little fear.
If thy premise held water, then, by the stars,
A woeful decline in linguistic arts
Would manifest itself in tests of old,
A downward trend that would not be untold.
But nay, 'tis not the youth that falter here,
But rather thou, dear teacher, dost impart
A lesson poorly taught, or else the pupil's heart
Doth not incline to learn, and doth not start.
Curb, then, thy zeal for revision's sway,
Not every task should be a trivial play.
Some things, by rights, should challenge and vex,
Lest wisdom's virtues be but empty text.
If ever I was ok with an AI generated comment on HN this is it.
I’m firmly in the “the cognitive load to read/understand Shakespeare far outweighs leaving it in the ‘original’ form”-camp and this further confirms my view point.
I love reading, I always have, but I never loved reading Shakespeare and probably never will. I maintain that teachers do their students a massive disservice by shoving dry or hard to understand books down their pupil’s throats in the name of “it’s what we’ve always done” instead of something that students might actually enjoy AND learn from. Maybe one day they will enjoy “the classics” but I think you turn more children off of reading as whole with way it’s taught currently.
And yes, I’m including books like To Kill a Mockingbird and most “required reading”. Maybe I’m dumb (I don’t think I am, my career and what I’ve accomplished says I’m not) but it wasn’t until years after reading it that actually understood it. I still have an incredibly negative reaction to that book, not because of the contents, but because of how it was forced on me. English classes suck the life out of every book they touch. In fact, I dislike just about every book I was forced to read in
my English classes but I regularly read more than my peers. I was lucky that my mom and grandmother instilled a love of reading in me, school did its best to beat that out of me.
I didn't expect so many eager responses to my AI generated copy-pasta!
Oddly on topic, I've recently experimented with shoving classics into an LLM to "modernize" the language and see what comes out on the other side. ( https://github.com/hnfong/gutchopper/ )
And I don't know whether the results should be considered good or not:
It's a fact: when a single guy with a fat bank account moves into a new neighborhood, he's basically a prize to be won by one of the local girls.
It's telling that AI generated mediocrity in lieu of an actual thoughtful response would be cheerlead by the same crowd that suddenly can't read Shakespeare despite it being an uncontroversial curriculum topic for what, a dozen generations or so? Eh, water finds it's level I suppose.
...huh. As a non-native speaker, that was... easy to read? Where did I learn this vocabulary again? I haven't read Shakespeare's works yet (though they are on my reading list).
What makes it hard to read for some people and not others (as with any translation problem) is unfamiliarity.
It's easier to learn just japanese honorifics and then read a partial translation than to learn all of japanese and read the original. But a full translation loses that dimension of meaning.
But it's not as difficult to learn some Early Modern English vocabulary, and this way you can avoid losing any meaning. I hear there are a lot of puns that wouldn't work with modern vocabulary.
If it wasn't required reading in English-speaking countries, "translating" it probably wouldn't be even in consideration.
That's not actually Shakespeare. Enough word meanings have shifted and other words that were once common becoming rare that it makes it much harder to read. A lot of context has been lost too because we're not 16th century English people. It's particularly bad in the "comedies". If every joke has to be pointed out and explained is it really a joke still?
Like here's some real random Hamlet:
"My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d,
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d,
Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors, he comes before me."
What exactly is down-gyved? Purport as noun here is weird for contemporary speakers even if they have an idea of the meaning and a lot of the clothing terms like doublet and ungartered are not spectacularly common these days.
"Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle" -- seems pretty clear that it means something to the effect that his unfastened stockings have fallen down to his ankles, no? And the context seems clear, that Hamlet's clothes are in disarray, as is his emotional-state.
> "Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle" -- seems pretty clear that it means something to the effect that his unfastened stockings have fallen down to his ankles, no?
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on whether this is "pretty clear" or "only passably comprehensible due to the surrounding context". It's hard for me to consider something "pretty clear" if I could replace one of the words with actual gibberish and the meaning wouldn't change to me; "Ungart’red, and down-barboodled to his ankle" is equally "clear".
