And by learning I mean being able to read high literature in that language. I'd say probably around 4 if you're average and 6 if you're really intelligent.
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if you dedicate a good portion of your time to it maybe like 20
keep in mind you don't need to know that many words to read
>keep in mind you don't need to know that many words to read
Huh? You need a huge vocabulary to read high literature in any language.
no, maybe like 1000 or 2000 words
You can't even read YA slop with merely 2000 words vocab.
>the moment you come across the one word on the page that you're unfamiliar with, you HAVE to drop the book and grind vocab in Anki. you literally CAN'T read if you don't know every single word in a book.
lmfao
>he doesn't put every unknown word into anki
>he doesn't reflect on what was thought it's definition and the actual one.
I only do this for my NL. If I were to do this for the languages I'm learning, it'd just be a massive waste of time. I don't need to learn and know the meaning of, for example, Infralapsarianism, when I'm still expanding my core vocabulary.
>Infralapsarianism
This is a technical term, most technical terms derive from Latin or Ancient Greek and are used in most European languages. They are also widely borrowed in other languages, especially if they have been a colony of a Western country. If you know highly specific technical terms like these in your native language, odds are you know them or their derivations in your target language.
>Thinks dictionary definitions of words contains the actual connotations needed to enjoy prose/verse or understand the subtleties of ideas
Wow, I'm surprised such a shallow bugman like you even bothers to read books.
you're so profound and wise
>high literature
Why are you talking about books you clearly do not read?
I'm pretty sure I've read much more classics than you.
what rare English vocab was necessary to read those classics that you had to learn beforehand, rather than deducing from context or looking up?
We'll accept a list of examples
Shove that list up your ass, pedantic piece of shit.
Seethe, moron
thought so
Nope, you thought I would play your stupid semantic game, but I can see through you b***h
nah I thought you wouldnt back up your nonsense and you didnt
Is pedantic part of this huge vocabulary of yours? Because you're the one focused on rules, gatekeeping details, and "i've read more classics than you"
can't you figure it out from context also lot of languages share worlds with some minor differences
This is true of writing, not reading
That doesn't make any sense.
It does depending on what you want to write. You can write prose with a limited vocabulary like Hemingway or poetry with an even more limited vocabulary like Tagore. You can be expressive if youre good at working with what you have. But if you are reading something then that is created by someone with a different probably wider vocab than you, and so you will not understand it so well.
Have you read high literature in many languages?
Not at all.
I can and have read many of the major classics of the following languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, French -- besides many short works in dialects/minor languages such as Occitan, Galician, Catalan, Middle English, Venetian, Napolitan, Roman, Milanese.
I can also read Latin, if I have a good translation by my side to help me make sense of it (I keep forgetting the grammar), and German if necessary.
I am 27.
Of all those languages, the only ones I'm fluent in are Portuguese, English, and possibly Italian.
If you're a serious reader of literature, reading with a dictionary close by should be very normal to you.
In my opinion, however, the learning of languages after a certain point* is vastly overrated, because there are much better things to learn that take a similar amount of time, for instance, if you don't know calculus (how many writers do?) you would perhaps profit more from learning that, or a musical instrument, or painting, or a huge deal about a certain craft (say, hunting), or simply doing something very crazy (fricking ten prostitutes at the same time), than learning your 5th Slavic language in order to read the mighty epic of Ivan Ivanovski the Belarusian village idiot. Those will enrich your life much more, specially after you have accumulated so much linguistic knowledge that it stops being something truly new and interesting to you, becoming a mere hobby -- mere additions to a mental capacity that's already extremely well-developed.
Nietzsche warned about this. He said you shouldn't learn too many languages because it fills the mind with words instead of real things (memories, experiences, sounds, smells etc.)
If you're an artist, you should diversify your learning. Shakespeare probably knew his languages, with English, French, probably some basic capacity at Latin, maybe enough Italian to read a Petrarch sonnet, probably very little Greek, but he knew so much more about so many other things which he wouldn't have known if he had spent his time in his room memorizing Greek declensions... Dante, Cervantes, Homer... None of them knew as many languages as the erudite scholar who dwells among his grammar books, yet they are the ones who make those grammars worth studying.
* Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English. These are the languages you should be able to read at some level, as they are the languages of Western erudition. Anything else is mere pastime, do it only if you feel like it, or if it's really important to you, maybe you're a Christian and want to read the Bible in Hebrew or something, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Don't forget you're supposed to be a writer, not some bookworm professor looking for tenure.
>Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English. These are the languages you should be able to read at some level, as they are the languages of Western erudition
>portoguese
You really tried to sneak that one in there, huh.
NTA but Portuguese is a beautiful language with a rich literary tradition. That includes Brazil. Pleb.
This only really applied for learning non-Indo-Eruopean language groups. Once you've learned three or four European languages they sort of plateau and you start to realize that the cognitive similarities are far, far more abundant than the differences.
You don't know shit, monkey.
>Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, English
I agree these are core and everyone who isn't a total fricking moron needs to learn to read them. Learning to read doesn't mean being great at speaking or writing either, it's much easier. If Max Weber can teach himself Russian in 3 months to read Russian news you can learn Italian and French.
If you don't learn your kids to read Greek, Latin, and one living language, you are basically a child abuser. Children can easily learn Greek and Latin. Note if you give your children any drugs like Ritalin instead of just raising them properly (including possibly relocating to a place where they can actually live a healthy enough inner life to focus and study) you are also an abuser and should have a nice day.
Ideally everyone would know Latin, Greek, and one other language to get them started by their mid-teens. Then they could start picking up the other two essentials they don't know, probably French and Italian since these benefit from immersion and being spoken more than German does. By learning French and Italian they get access to some of the most important literature in the world, and then if they really want to, they can learn Spanish/Portuguese just by hammering away at it for a while because they'll have enough romance language junk in their brain that they already know 70-80% of them anyway.
In they adult years they can then decide whether they want to learn interesting things like Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, or possibly Japanese (not much world-historical literature but a great people), with other languages dictated by special interests. In certain special cases these can be learned earlier, for example if dad is a classical philologist or Hebraist and his child takes an interest early in continuing the family tradition.
You can easily learn a couple dozen. Romance languages are basically all the same so learn Latin and you'll arleady be like triodecolingual. Then just learn Chinese. There's no grammar and all the words are pictures so it's basically just common sense. And then you can communicate with baically everyone in the world unless they speak an irrelevant language like welsh
have you studied chinese?
Nta but I have and he's correct, kind of trivialising it but in essence it's true. I absolutely loved when I got to the point of being able to read/understand characters I haven't seen before.
Hated the no grammar part though because I'm slightly autistic and dislike their overreliance on syntax.
You don't know shit about Chinese.
homie im hsk3. you can easily become hsk4 in Chinese in a month if you put 4 hours a day into it. It's only 1000 characters, and the most common 3k their meaning are easily deductible if you know the particles.
In 3 months you can have the highest level of chinese in reading, HSK 6
Dude, you realize they are making a new HSK version with 9 levels, mostly because the highest level of the old HSK only gets you to around B2 (but also they are evening out the difficulty in the first 6 levels)?
old HSK 6 = new HSK7/8
so in 3 months you can almost be at max lvl chinese. You only need 3k characters for HSK9. Most "new" vocab in the HSK7-9 range uses the same characters, and their definitions are obvious.
>There's no grammar and all the words are pictures so it's basically just common sense.
Based moron
its true tho, just learn the particles and you know the language
'bout tree fiddy
Yeah reading isn't too bad compared to speaking. I can read the great German authors but if I went to the Vaterland and tried to have a conversation I'd spill my Spätzle all over the street. I can read in like 5 languages (almost 30 years old) and trust me, I'm really not that smart.
Which languages?
in rough order of competence: English, Spanish, German, Italian, Persian, Japanese. Honorary mentions: Latin, Catalan. The real challenge is convincing myself to practice these ones instead of getting distracted by new languages.
Do you practice them often? What happens if you stay like a year without practicing them? Would you forget everything?
Sorry, went to sleep. In case you guys are still around:
Nope, that's a myth. They get a little rusty for sure but once the neural pathways are there they never go away, the brain never really "forgets" anything. I just practice by finding books I want to read, so sometimes I go quite a while without touching a language. After a while there is a feeling of flipping a switch, like "I have to turn my brain back to farsi mode" but it only takes like 10 minutes of reading to get there.
Also mostly a myth in my experience. The closest that happens is that sometimes I'll be trying to think of a Spanish word and the Italian one pops up instead. But it's never a real barrier to conversation (Spanish is the only one I speak on a regular basis to people) and I can't be certain I would have remembered the Spanish word in that situation anyway. In any case that's one of the things that I enjoy most about the process, it's fun when that happens.
In your case I certainly wouldn't worry. Only thing I'd say is that because you listed three languages that all have noun gender, you'll get confused when they don't match up, like how "sun" is feminine in German and masculine in French. So that'll be annoying, but if you're into european languages you can't escape it.
Does adding new ones, more than to distract you, interfere with your knowledge of the prior ones? I‘m also to where I can read German pretty well but flounder in conversation; and I‘d like to add introductory stages of French or Greek while continuing to read in German but am afraid I‘m going to get my words all confounded.
The more languages you learn, the easier it becomes to learn more. First of all, if you learn related languages, a lot of vocabulary is shared and the grammar too. Not to mention loan words and shared etymologies. If you already know Italian and French, Romanian probably isn't too much of a stretch. I bet you could learn 20 if you just dedicated yourself to it.
This too. When you are reading, you can check up words and meanings. Conversation is the true hard part of learning a language.
I'm hoping that I can learn French and Latin to a high level but I still need to make the leap from monolingual to bilingual
You need to constantly actively use the languages. You might get fluent in X, but you also need to read in it, talk in it on regular basis. good luck doing that with 3+ languages.
Yup, that's the biggest issue when learning too many languages.
>high literature
> really intelligent
It doesnt work like that. It takes few months to learn a language, a year of constantly hearing that language, and (almost) a lifetime of vocabulary expansion to not sound like a plebeian.
Languages I wanna learn:
French
German
Danish
Latin
Greek
Sanskrit
Russian
Japanese
Chinese
I hope I can learn them in my lifetime.
better start yesterday
you need to rule out at least a third of those anon if you want to be realistic
If you wanna learn Sanskrit, you gotta start with learning Bengali, Hindi and maybe even Urdu. Get a feel for the modern derivations of the prime language before attempting to learn the original just so you might understand what they were talking about. I'm not even sure where you'd learn Sanskrit, tbh...
scratch out danish and do norwegian instead. the richness of dialects in norwegian make it that much more of a treat to learn. our literary history is richer than denmarks as well.
I've been struggling with french for past 3 years. The fact that I am only bilingual yet aware of my exceptional ability to understand languages is the worst reminder of my intellectual and motivational impotence.
Depends how you decide what's a language and what's a dialect. Is scots a language? Is Franconian a language?
Assuming you learned languages that are all closely related I bet you could do like 30-40.
If you're really intelligent, then way more than 6. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Ceylonese dude spoke like a dozen languages fluently, even Icelandic, I think. Really clever dude. Need to read him one day.
Only your mother tongue and English. The AI will make learning languages obsolete.
Learning languages will never become obsolete. It's an intellectual pursuit, not s financial one.
I am fluent in French. Getting to that level was the hardest thing I ever did.
I read about a dozen more, many to a very high level, and am only 25. I'm really not so smart at all. I'm actually quite thick.
>I read about a dozen more, many to a very high level, and am only 25
Lol doubt
I am like a useless shut-in gamer, only for languages. I have bypassed opportunities for work and romance since the age of 16 to stay in and study fricking Greek or whatever. I only got in the habit because I knew I was stupid and enjoyed feeling the passive approval of everyone around me for the fact that I could remember the full declension of Der Apfel, something that all German toddlers know already. Now it's all I know and I'm still stupid and I can't stop. I'm at a dead end in life, but I read constantly and learn and feel almost nothing. All it's ever got me - I won a scholarship to go be an expat idiot in China, where my Mandarin got actively worse because I was too anxious to use it before COVID sent me back. All my friends think I'm some worldly person when I've hardly seen the sunlight anywhere and half my knowledge comes from Assimil textbooks, and the other half from Romantic and Decadent novels that by now leave me utterly unmoved. I am like a shitty parody Eugene Onegin. Would that I were bullshitting and could take this life back.
How long did it take to learn german and french?
I learned French mostly despite myself. I was immersed very frequently from about the age of 10 on. I refused to speak it until one day I realized it really was all there. But getting from that point to actual functional fluency was two years of hard work.
It took me about six months from zero to reading knowledge of German. That was my first after French, so I'd be faster now.
Suck my wiener
Okay IQfy help me out. I want to learn both Chinese (simplified and traditional Mandarin because I'm interested in Taiwan too) as well as Japanese. I took two semesters of nip in college and remember a decent amount of it, and I still have my old textbooks for reference. My only Mandarin knowledge is from some book I bought at B&N.
Which should I learn first? I'm overall more interested in Japanese media and it's where I'd travel first anyway, but I read online that knowing Chinese ahead of time will make learning the two gorillion kanji in Japanese easier, whereas the reverse isn't true.
Do you wanna speak and read or just read?
tbh just read for now, since I'm not in a position where I'd be using either vocally often enough to justify getting that down, but I do want to travel to both countries in the future.
>I'm overall more interested in Japanese media and it's where I'd travel first anyway
Seems you have your answer right there
Japanese has about 2000 kanji that you 'need'. kana supply the rest.
mandarin requires 6-8000 characters to read a newspaper
I know both. Mandarin is vastly easier. Contemporary Chinese culture and literature are stultified and depressing. Chinese people are often friendly to the point of being overbearing.
Japanese is vastly harder. Japan might as well be a Western European country with its arc of artistic super-productivity into shitty americanised decline. If you are anything like me Japanese people will never talk to you for any reason. I hope you aren't anything like me though.
Pondering which to study is however less important than just doing it.
8 one for every decade of life
>learning a new language just to read books
I see a lot of people thinking like this but I always felt the whole thing ends up having diminishing returns.
You want to learn a language so you'll be able to read a book in its original form and understand the nuances lost in translation. Escept that doing so requires you to be extremely proficient in said language. The time spent trying to learn the language (which is a lot) could've been used to read dozens of different books in your native language.
Hell probably reading about the historical and cultural context around a certain work will give you more insight than spending years upon years mastering a language just to understand the nuances of a few words.
Study languages if you have an interest in talking with its natives or spend time in its Country. Doing it just to be pretentious seems like a worthless endeavour.
This is all true except for poetry. Poetry is worth learning languages for if you care exceedingly for it.
>could've been used to read dozens of different books in your native language.
Are any of those books as good as Faust? As The Odyssey? As Finnegans Wake? As The Aeneid? And I could go on and post many other books that are "untranslatable".
I can not understand how a guy that likes high brow literature - after all, you are on IQfy - can talk down learning a new language to read books.
Your post starts being reasonable but in the end you show what you really think about it: "just to be pretentious", "worthles endeavour".
>but I always felt the whole thing ends up having diminishing returns.
That's right, because with your opinion it is obvious you are a monolingual plebeian, or in the best scenario you know your native language + English, which I doubt.
>You want to learn a language so you'll be able to read a book in its original form and understand the nuances lost in translation.
Yes, but the way you put it the only value lost in a translation is contained in those "nuances", when in reality every single word, carefully picked by the author, matters. It's like saying that if a translation is able to capture the puns and jokes and wordplay - in a word, the nuances - in Joyce's Ulysses, or Nietzsche's Zarathustra, or Shakespeare's Hamlet, then that translation is just as good as reading the original, which is simply inaccurate. You can get the message, you can get the sublime universal, eternal truths in Hamlet, but it is simply not the same thing, at all.
>The time spent trying to learn the language (which is a lot) could've been used to read dozens of different books in your native language.
Subjective perception of value.
>Hell probably reading about the historical and cultural context around a certain work will give you more insight than spending years upon years mastering a language
Here's a thought: you can do that in your target language, which is much more immersive. You love Dante. You can get a biography on him and a book on the history of Italy at the period when the Divine Comedy was written, both books written in Italian, by an Italian writer. You can get secondary material in italian as well.
>Study languages if you have an interest in talking with its natives or spend time in its Country.
This, again, prooves you are a monolingual plebeian. Speaking the language is one of the very last landmarks when learning a language, before you are able to do that guess what you need to do a lot of? Read.
You are probably just insecure so you tell yourself it's useless to learn a new language, then you post on IQfy and hope for validation.
Learning a language should never be discouraged, whatever the final goal may be.
It's an excellent activity for your brain, as others very well put in this thread, it gives you an entirely new and deeper perspective on your native language and, most of all it's incredibly fun.
The moment I was able to read one entire paragraph of Nietzsche in German was literally one of the best feelings I've felt reading a book.
Third option: move to countries to learn the language solely for the purpose of reading literature and getting closer to your literary icons. You'll never truly understand Nietzsche until you've spent several months wandering the streets of Salarno and Turin.
>likes romanticism, medievalism, mysticism, Blake, Hopkins, Dante, Yeats, Traherne
What language should I learn that delves into similar things? German?
Definitely German
Alright German it is then
What is this painting? I like it, it’s inspiring. Maybe because he looks a bit like me.
A lot rides on when you started learning, based on my experience of a multilingual society. In Luxembourg, trilingualism (Luxembourgish as the home language, French/German as the wider societal language and the other of the two as a secondary societal language depending on region) is pretty much the standard that schoolchildren are expected to meet by their teens, in addition to English as a "second" language (ie, a language acquired through lessons instead of natural exposure in childhood like a native language) which some are of course more competent in than others. Beyond school age, most people don't learn any more languages and those who do spend a longer time reaching fluency the older they get.
If you're starting as an adult monoglot, 4 languages would be beyond the average person if the goal is full fluency.
You can easily learn a dozen over your lifetime, without needing to practice it to an autistic extent or being a hardcore world traveler. I read a lot of French and Spanish literature and can have a conversation in about a half dozen languages and I'm not yet thirty. Didn't start learning languages till my late teens, so I imagine that it's not inconceivable to have a decent level of fluency in 10-20 languages by 50. It gets easier as well. French took me about a year to reach fluency, Spanish six months, Portuguese three months, and I could have a conversation in Italian within the first week. Once ended up boarding with some Pashtun speakers for a while and I could understand about 20-30% of their conversations just from prior experience in Indo-European language families. If someone knows six languages, the leap to speaking seven languages is miniscule.
There are plenty of explorers from antiquity and the late medieval period who could speak 40 or so languages without problem. In cosmopolitan/multi-ethnic countries it's not uncommon for street kids to speak five or six languages in their daily life.
>Once ended up boarding with some Pashtun speakers for a while
What do you do? CIA spook? Work for a refugee NGO? Vous êtes très intéressant mon ami
Merci mon gar. J'etais vivant dans la rue et comme je suis musliman ils me invité virvre avec eux dans un banlieue proche du Paris. Would love to be a CIA spook but you need to go to Columbia or Yale for that; or be a street kid in the right place and time to get promoted to 'expendable asset'.
Either way its either not feasible or not worth it. Knew a couple guys from the later category; one found Jesus and got out before getting himself killed, the other started working for the Saudi's in prison and is now climbing whatever ladder that involves. From the first category you've either got to attend an upper tier school in the US or go into military intelligence, then bust your ass for years. I've got an inkling that certain freemasonic lodges provide a fast track, but if it's a field you're interested in Paul Balor wrote a definitive guidebook on the subject with a lot more detail than I can give you.
I just like drifting around and learning languages, and often end up stumbling into weird shit. Wouldn't be opposed to a job offer but it hasn't happened yet.
>I just like drifting around and learning languages, and often end up stumbling into weird shit
You must live a very interesting life anon, a life most people can’t comprehend. Any funny anecdotes you’d like to share?
In 2015 I was working for the American Field Service in a rural northern backwater of Argentina, working as an English teacher. It was also an election year, and a big win for the IMF/American business interests, which I can only assume was the reason the AFS had me writing regular "journaling assignments" for them. Anyways one of my coworkers was the daughter of what I can only assume was one of the many SS officers who had to flee to the remotest parts of South America after the war. Her whole family was white-as-snow and she constantly complained about being surrounded by "Black folk" (the many indigenous people who lived there). They stood out anyways, being the only blond Germanic family for miles around in a sea of mestizos and guarani. I did the math and she must have only been a teenager when the war ended. Her grandkids where typical Argentine youngsters, but she never managed to shake the Nazi-racism of her parents. What's funny was she was a huge fan of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, so go figure. Everybody in Argentina refuses to speak about the war, out of prudence or politeness I guess, so there's a weird mixture of ex-nazi war criminals and israeli diaspora coexisting more or less side-by-side in mutual amnesia.
A few years ago I was drinking with an ex-smuggler-turned-bitcoin-millionaire at a bar in Vancouver. He used to brag about a trick he had for taking free vacations to Abu Dhabi. Apparently there are shipping container auctions there where you can buy abandoned cargo for a few hundred dollars, the gamble of course being that you don't know whats inside. Anyways he bought a shipping container full of tiny bars of soap, and shipped it to London where he sold it to hotels for 25 cents a piece. The soap itself paid for the trip, but in the middle of it was a box of Rolex Watches that had inadvertently been forgotten. He said it made for a nice bonus to the whole adventure.
Last summer I was drifting around Italy and ended up having a brief fling with an heiress to a powerful American political dynasty who's name escapes me. She was convinced that the COVID vaccine roll-outs were nothing but large scale testing for a variety of different MRNA technologies, and then gave me a knowing smile and said "but don't worry, the vaccine I got only had saline solution." I'm not vaccinated myself, but that conversation still keeps me up at night sometimes.
Another time, while I was still living in Argentina, me and a friend decided to head off to Brazil to experience the beaches and big asses. Naturally, we ripped off a cartel dude we knew through a mutual friend before leaving town, and took about a kilo of weed, some sheets of acid, and a few grams of coke for the ride. The acid we dropped on the busride to the border, a small town we'd picked for no other reason than it's appealing name which translates to something like "Passage of Freedom", and the rest we pocketed for Brazil. Once we got to the border we soon realized out mistake: it was a single bridge with border checkpoints on both sides. I wanted to turn around and figure out a different way to cross, but after some inquiries it soon became apparent that this town was a dangerous shithole and that walking to the nearest city center would probably get us both stabbed. So we decided to brave it anyways, all the more stupidly because I didn't have a Brazilian visa. My friend wanted to take a taxi, but I talked him into catching a large autobus thinking that we'd have better luck in numbers. At the first checkpoint my friend went inside the offices to get his passport stamped, I waited around outside smoking a cigarette. Some guards looked at me, looked at each other, and started walking towards me. Thinking fast, I put on my best gringo smile and waved at them enthusiastically, then walked right up to them and, before they could start inquiring about my visa stamps, asked them politely where the bathroom was. Once on the bus, we were stopped by Brazilian border guards halfway over the bridge, with nowhere to run. Luckily they walked right by us and promptly detained a couple of dark skinned natives who were crossing to sell used clothes in the comparatively larger town on the other side of the river. People on IQfy sometimes like to pretend that white privilege isn't a real thing, but to this day I'm convinced it saved me from a stint in a Brazilian prison.
An aside, but that cartel member we ripped off once latched onto us while coming down from a three day coke binge. He was crying, shaking, and in between threatening to knock our teeth out decided to tell us his life story as a child soldier in a FARC camp in the mountains of Columbia. He even went so far as to pull his phone out and show us GPS coordinates. After that day I started to pretend I didn't understand Spanish whenever he was around.
You should think about writing a travelogue anon, in the style of Henry Miller or Hunter S Thompson. You’ve got more than enough source material. Do you see yourself settling down anytime soon or do you think you’re destined to live out your days as a rolling stone?
Thanks anon. I've been thinking about it recently actually, at least my travels in Argentina. It's an interesting culture and I was there during an interesting period in its history. Unfortunately I've got a record so my options for travel are kind of limited atm. If I was in better shape I'd love to join the FFL but currently I'm just trying to make money and build a career.
how old are you? more stories please
Twenty-six. About a month before my twentieth birthday I was at a house party with some friends. A mutual friend of ours from highschool was suffering a schizophrenic breakdown and broke into the house late at night with a sawed-off .22 rifle. He shot three of my friends in the head, but on the third try, by some act of God, the bullet bounced through one of my friend's heads (lets call him Z), under his skin but not breaking the skull, and exited the back of his head before going through the bedroom wall behind him. He started shouting and managed to wrestle the gun away while waking the rest of the people in the house. By the time I had climbed the stairs to the living room where they were wrestling the gun had already fallen to the floor, so I grabbed it and ran downstairs to hide it. Then got back up there and, with the help of a third friend(call him M), we were able to subdue him and tie him up. Z called the police, and as we were sitting there dazed, suddenly realized that an alarm was going off from one of the bedrooms. M ran to turn off the alarm, and that's when the screaming started. I immediately pieced together what had happened and my blood went cold. I'd never seen a dead body before though, so I decided to go take a look, out of some morbid curiosity. He looked like he was sleeping, with a small hole in the base of his scalp, pink soupy brains leaking out over his still closed eyes. The other one was bent over against the wall, and I've sometimes wondered if there wasn't some sort of struggle. The shooter is out now, on good behavior and proper medication, although he's claimed that the ghost of Adolf Hitler just told him to stop talking about the voices. Either way the state is now paying for him to attend university, which is about what you can expect from the Canadian justice system.
The night before that, on some kind of impulse, I had prayed for God to watch over me, Z, and M. The other two hadn't been at the house so I hadn't prayed for them. For almost six months beforehand I had felt the shadow of death hanging over me, in a way that I can't really explain. It was the last week of Ramadan, which I had also been practicing on a whim. That was the day I became a Muslim.
Z, who got shot, walked it off and was out of the hospital that same afternoon. He got three stitches, for a point blank gun trauma wound. I'm still in awe of him. If he hadn't managed to fight this guy barehanded, immediately after being shot in the head, we'd all probably be dead now.
holy shit. I actually had a friend in high school like that, similar story -- psychotic break where he believed satan said he had to kill his mom or he'd go to hell for eternity. pushed her down a flight of stairs and split her skull open at the bottom. after, he called 911, told them he'd just killed his mother, and waited on the front porch. same story, found ngmi, medicated, lives in a halfway house now
That's rough. Mental illness is a crazy thing. It was extremely sudden too, over the course of a month. Things like that make me believe in demons. It always seems like there's some sort of malevolent force there, whispering in the ear. Its hard to say what should be done in cases like that.
One more, since you've got me reminiscing about Argentina:
When I first moved to Argentina I ended up falling head over heals for one of my students, lets call her Maria, a beautiful 17 year old from the village. Her father was actually a successful inventor, he'd created some heating mechanism for commercial cattle farming in areas with subzero climates, and had made a lot of money off of it, but ended up losing everything in a corrupt real-estate scheme involving a crooked judge and provincial politics. Typical rural shit. He was a complicated man, and whenever I would send Maria home with hickies on her neck he'd send her back to me with bruises on her arms and face. The poetry wasn't lost on me, and I found the tragedy of her family history and the deep black wells of melancholy in her eyes extremely erotic.
Anyways he ended up as a carpenter and a heavy drinker and was given a small chunk of land by the local Peronist chapter in exchange for him and his families unwavering political support. Considering these were the same milieu of people who scammed him out of his land, I always thought this was a bit sketchy, but Maria was an ardent Peronist so I ended up attending all of their political rallies in order to have an excuse to play grab-ass with her when she wasn't handing out guiso and pamphlets. The speeches were always rousing, and the Peronist party itself a fascinating example of populist politics done right.
When Maria wasn't attending rallies or at school, she worked at her families food stand, a small burger and pancho kitchen set up next to the highway. I was always following her around like a love-sick puppy in those days. So on the night of the election I was there with her brother and some mutual friends from the local highschool. When they announced that Macri (a Columbia alumni, as luck would have it) had won, a whole caravan of Frente para la Victoria supporters got in their cars and paraded around the town, honking and waving Argentinian flags. Argentinians, as a rule, don't easily discuss politics (although you can usually tell by looking at their soccer jersey, Boca being FPV supporters and River being Peronists), so this spontaneous outburst of partisanal pride was rare. Maria's brother slammed his hand down on the table in disgust and shouted "callate, hay gente con hambre aqui", which he was quite pleased with and got a chuckle from everybody.
It wasn't until later, when Macri assumed power, that I understood what he meant. Previously most food staples were held under strict price controls, once these were removed milk, eggs, and beef soon became luxuries for the poorest Argentine laborers. Hyperinflation set in not long after that. Some days I would go to the grocery store and prices would have increased by 30% overnight. The Kirchner government wasn't perfect, in fact it was extremely flawed in many ways, but it provided a comfortable standard of living for everybody. Argentina still hasn't recovered.
That first paragraph is fricking amazing, please write a book.
It’s garbage. Frick off.
Its okay
>From the first category you've either got to attend an upper tier school in the US or go into military intelligence, then bust your ass for years. I've got an inkling that certain freemasonic lodges provide a fast track, but if it's a field you're interested in Paul Balor wrote a definitive guidebook on the subject with a lot more detail than I can give you.
For someone who isn't a spook you sure know a lot about spooking..
Anyways I'm going to bed. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Anon. Good luck with your language learning exercises, its been fun.
0 if you don't have good reason to learn them
Why is French so fricking hard brehs?
It's not?
It is though?
why would speaking more than one language be desirable? beyond impressing midwits i mean.
wouldnt it be better to have deeper thoughts and read new ideas, than it would be to spend all you time learning how to express your same mundane thoughts through different languages?
In order to read classical books in their intended way.
Anybody telling you that it's going to change your world and allow you to understand the classics better is lying to you. In nearly every single case, you'd understand them better if you had just read them in your native language with help from footnotes. Unless you're learning a language like Chinese which isn't related to any language you do speak, what is lost in translation between fellow indo-european languages is so insignificant so as to be unnoticeable, poetry being the one major exception. You should learn at least a second language because it's great exercise for your brain, and it'll open the door for you to read untranslated works (usually old, forgotten histories, encyclopedias, anthropology, theology, even blogs by people on the other side of the world). The greatest benefit, however, is how much more you'll appreciate your native language after learning another. Remember, the health of the body affects the health of the mind and vice versa, so you should be training both.
Learning a second or new language is enough brain exercise to help comprehend and retain new ideas. It in some cases give you a different view of things a little based on the languages internal structure. And you thinking in it.
It is fun to learn
languages are linked to thought process. different language slightly different process to think or perceive information. trains your brain to view world from a different perspective and in more complex way
My professor seems to be in his early 60s and knows French, Spanish, English, possibly German, Ancient Greek, and Latin. He is a mathematician/philosopher.
You just proved my point. He's intelligent and he managed to learn 6 languages throughout his whole life.
College professors aren't that smart. I would guess 90% of anons on IQfy have an higher IQ.
>IQfy posters
>smart
Pick one
Even if they the anons were smarter, the college professors put in way more effort
One.
What’s the best way to learn French primarily for reading?
Le Français par la Méthode Nature
The greatest living polyglot, Alexander Argüelles, once said it was possible to learn to read 20 languages to a respectable level. It takes thousands and thousands of hours, but it's well worth the effort. My goal for this lifetime is French, Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, all forms of Greek, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Sansrkit. I've already started on most of these and the only ones that present a real challenge are Chinese and Arabic. Indo-European languages become a joke after you've learned a few from several families. Language learning is also a transferable skill, so you get better at it the more you do it. Hence, I would recommend starting with easy European languages like French, Latin, German, Spanish.
Before someone calls me crazy, others have already done better than I aspire to do.
>Language learning is also a transferable skill, so you get better at it the more you do it.
Yes, although the language is different, the learning process is rather similar.
The first language you learn other than your native is probably the hardest because you need to learn how to learn. Learning the second language you refine what worked with the first. By the third language you have pretty much everything you need to do mapped out and in order.
I speak portuguese natively, learned Italian and French. Now working on German which I love and is also a nice challenge being completely unrelated to my native language - although it shares many similarities with English. After that I'll work on Spanish and call it. Russian would be nice but don't have many expectations, maybe one day if I really master the four main romantic languages and German I'll think about it.
>After that I'll work on Spanish and call it.
There's probably no point. I learned French, Spanish, Italian and Latin. Then I got Portuguese for free, so now I can read books, papers, or articles in it. Have you ever cracked open a book in Spanish? You can probably read it.
it depends on a lot of factors. i grew up in an english speaking country but at the kindergarten i went to, there were a lot of french kids. i ended up learning french before i even learnt english because of how much time i spent around them. then in my early teens, my family moved to germany and i was forced to learn german as well. within like the first six months i had picked up the ability to speak and read very easily, and within another six months i was fluent. we also lived close to the dutch border so there were a lot of dutch kids who went to my high school and i managed to pick dutch up off of them. i can speak and read that shit but there’s no way i could write anything in it though. this was me learning four languages before i had even turned fifteen. i moved back to my home country and then learnt our indigenous language at high school and became highly proficient in like three years, bringing it up to five languages. i bet that if you were to go and travel around and spend like six months to a year in a country and then maintained your use of the language, you would be able to pick it up really quickly like i did.