Bilingual books

Hey everyone, my native language is English, and I have been learning Spanish. I think that I have an intermediate level of proficiency in Spanish, and one thing that I have found to be really helpful to me are bilingual books. An example would be a book that I have called “Stories from Mexico”, its a side by side English and Spanish book of Mexican folktale short stories. I guess it’s like a snippet of a physical version of LingQ haha.

Anyway my question is, because I like these types of books, I want to know what are some of the specific bilingual books that you have used and like, and why? Pleased be as specific as possible, I have taken a great fascination in these kinds of books

I’ve used books from the Loeb Classical Library to work on my “dead” languages. They are side-by-side English-Latin or English-Greek. I didn’t have any for Spanish, but I did use Spanish books alongside English versions of the same books. Now that I’m learning German, I wouldn’t mind doing the same thing, if someone knows of any bilingual English-German books…

ad jstoddard:

I don’t know of any site where you can find them for free, but you might be interested in one of these sites.

http://www.amazon.de/englisch-zweisprachige-lektüre-Bücher/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A186606%2Ck%3AEnglisch%3B%20Zweisprachige%20Lektüre

Amazon offers lots of bilingual books for children or young adults, but their list also comprises books for a more mature audience. Just try and check it out. You might be able to buy them also through amazon.com or find the books somewhere else based on their ISBN number.

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Thanks! I don’t absolutely need “free”, but since it is a hobby, I do need “relatively inexpensive.” It looks like Amazon has some good options now that I know to search for “englisch zweisprachige,” as does DoppelText, which I had never heard of before…

Years ago I tried to read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book Philosophical Investigations. For some reasons the book I ordered from Amazon had the original German down the left hand side page and the English translation down the right hand side page. I tried to read only the English, but I kept accidently forgetting and turning the page and reading the German. I usually got several lines into the German page before realising that it was written in a language I couldn’t at all read. I guess that says a lot about how well I was understanding what I was reading in English.

I prefered his Tractatus. It may not have been any more comprehensible, but at least it was shorter.

You can find classics and indeed many kinds of books in epub or pdf format on the internet, stuff like “The Hobbit”, “White Fang”, “Mein Kampf” or whatever. They can be found in many languages, so you could have the “Bilingual book” effect like that for free. If you had two e-readers you could have them showing the same page of the same book, in two different languages, the effect would be that of a bilingual book.

An update. www.doppeltext.com produced more books than it lists on its own website. If you do an advanced search on Amazon with ‘doppeltext’ in the publisher field (leaving all other fields blank), the search will return several books not listed on www.doppeltext.com. I discovered this after purchasing the Kindle edition of Moby Dick oder Der Wal and discovering its publisher was doppeltext. When I looked at www.doppeltext.com, I could not find a listing there for Moby Dick oder Der Wal, even though I had just bought it. Good luck to all in this crazy little thing called love of languages.

Edited to change Wall to Wal.