>World-defining Languages
Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Classical Chinese, English
>Primary Literatures
French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Persian
>Secondary Literatures
Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish
>Specialist Interest
All others with classical traditions. Sumerian, Ge'ez, Old Norse, other East-Asian languages, etc.
>Wastes of Time
Everything else
>old languages are better because umm like they just are!!!!
opinion discarded
What is a good secondary language to English that I can learn to get access to vast amounts of literature? German seems to be the easiest because English also came from Germanic languages. French seems too hard.
(Me)
Let me rephrase the question what's a good and easy secondary language to learn?
Latin is really easy to learn for literary purposes. No need to worry about conversational nonsense, no need to learn a new script or radically foreign grammar/syntax, and there are a plethora of entry-level classical texts you can work on in short order.
German is easy enough for conversational use, but don't be fooled in thinking it's easy for literary use. Especially the "classic" texts are challenging even to native speakers, and philosophical texts written in german often employ newly "created" words, which are mostly two or more words contracted together. Without a very good feeling for the language, this can get frustrating very fast. Also, literary texts employ the rather complicated grammar (if you only know English, that is) to a much larger extend than conversation, naturally.
Vocabulary-wise I don't see that much benefit in choosing german over french for an english speaker, due to many germanic words in old english being replaced by the corresponding french and latin words in middle and modern english. I think both are very rewarding choices, and you cannever go wrong learning a new language.
What do you mean by “classic”? If I want to read everything including and after Goethe, would I need extra effort besides the grammar and vocabulary from regular courses?
Yes, absolutely, that's what I mean. If you learn modern german in a regular setting, it won't translate (hehe) well into reading classic literature like goethe or schiller. Even something like hesse won't be easily readable, because the language changed. And don't get me started on something like Hegel or Kant, who are in their own league. You can get into those works, but it will be extra effort. I think if you learned german with right from the outset with a focus on these works it could be easier, but then everybody will think you're a turboautist when you try to speak normal modern german.
I dislike German philosophy but German fiction is top tier.
French definitely man . Its not hard , do the anki top 5000 words deck along with a sentences deck and just listen to podcasts , youtube , the finest of french cinema and you'll be amazed at teh progress you'll make in a year . Its been almost 3 years since i started and i feel even more motivated than the first month of learning. I'd say i've reached a C1 level in the language and can read any book i want , acquiring vocabulary now is easier than ever since i can reliably rely on context. I'd say another more year and jumping into German or Russian
Well I know Russian and English and want to learn Chinese for literature and poetry, which means learning two subsets of the language, simplified and classical. Some ancient Chinese words also depend on additional background information such as the period and historical context for their meanings, which makes it harder but it would be interesting to research that stuff. Apparently there's tons of untranslated ancient Chinese literature. Any resources for this endeavour?
Right now my chinese is grade school level though and I can only read the little prince.
English is all I need. It's all you need. It's all anyone needs. Learning any other is just a fetish. A waste of time.
> Critique that language IN THAT LANGUAGE
have a nice day
Gaelic should be on there somewhere
It's not as big a corpus as some languages, but I think Esperanto literature is under-appreciated.
That said, it's necessary to understand that Mandarin and Classical Chinese are, in fact, two different languages, just as Latin and Italian are.
>Sanskrit
>World defining
I mean yeah it's one of the five great classical languages of the world alongside Latin, Greek, Classical Chinese, and Arabic.
I know enough Latin to read Tacitus (not much, I know) and French still boggles my mind.
........... Hebrew is one of the languages that contributed to the definition of our world, more than English could ever dream.
Though substantially in translation.
Not sure how Classical Chinese was world-defining.
Confucianism? Taoism? Sun Tzu? Li Bai? Du Fu? Chinese Buddhism?
>not mentioning gaelige as a world-defining language
anacrach. But I s'pose if you don't know, you can't know.
>gaeilge
Don't be pretentious, in English it's called 'Irish'.
Don't misunderstand me, it's not pretention, it's marketing. I made you look it up, if you didn't already know, and now you're talking about it. It just works.
No, I was aware that 'Gaeilge' is Irish for 'Irish'. I'm of Irish ethnic origins, though my family has been in America for some time, and Irish is one of the languages I'd like to learn, there's just so many others.
I'm happy for you, anon, but I've taught a lot of americans that are getting involved in their local Irish heritage groups, especially those who think "Gaelic is Irish for Irish." But yeah man, you should take the time to learn, it's absolutely worth it, and you can take part in helping rebuild something greater than yourself. If you end up wanting to buy some resources, check out siopagaeilge. Gearóid is a great guy and always leaves nice messages for you.
eh, I laid it on so thick that I just assumed you would catch on, but I guess you didn't. This is typical, but now I actually mean what I said, pleb.
I'm learning French for reading
I'm half Chinese but I don't see the point of learning Chinese also I'm quite bitter about not being taught any Chinese growing up
I've casually tried learning Latin (3 months) and Russian (2 months)
After having sudden doubts about the value of learning Latin I switched back to French and have stuck with French for a relatively long time
I'm really not sure what to do after learning French
>I'm really not sure what to do after learning French
Learn Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. They're practically free after learning French.
The idea is appealing but I don't know if it'd be worth doing since I'm not sure whether I actually want to use those languages in my life
For example take Italian
The only Italian authors I've read are Dante and Umberto Eco
If I could learn to read Italian somewhat confidently after 200-300 hours it could be worth doing but then you also have to take into account the effort required to retain the languages you've learnt
Then again I started learning French despite having only read 1 French author (Camus) and 1 French book (l'étranger)
Yeah I was going to include my problems with that in my post but I wasn't sure if it was completely accurate
Basically the way I understand it there are 3 periods of Chinese language
The first is classical Chinese which obviously has changed a lot, the second is vernacular literary Chinese which is the language of the Classic novels and the third is modern literary Chinese
It just seems like so much work
My family don't even speak Mandarin so that's another problem
I would say that the language of the classic novels is, essentially, Mandarin, though with a lot of words and phrases from Classical Chinese mixed in.
>They're practically free after learning French.
if you're serious I might pick up french
'Free' is an exaggeration, but I speak conversational Spanish and basic French, and I can make out a good portion of written Italian or Portuguese.
>I'm half Chinese but I don't see the point of learning Chinese also I'm quite bitter about not being taught any Chinese growing up
Well, Classical Chinese is pretty important for world literature but it's also not the same language as Mandarin.
>World-defining Languages
>Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Classical Chinese, English
Sanksrit, Arabic, Chinese, and English the same as Latin and Greek? Frick. No. English should be below, forget about the rest.
>Primary Literatures
>French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Persian
German and Italian below on the category below. The rest should be two categories down (and so should Chinese, Sanksrit, and Arabic).
>Secondary Literatures
>Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish
Portguese and Polish the same as Russian and Spanish? You're out of your fricking mind. Russian should be primary, too.
>I disagree!
You're wrong.
Sanskrit, Arabic, and Chinese are absolutely on par with Latin and Greek in their respective cultural spheres (which for much of history were richer and more important than the west.)
>Based languages
Basque, Finnish, Farsi, Jula, Greek
>Mid-tier languages
Anything not mentioned elsewhere
>Cringe languages
English, French, Mandarin (And other Chinese), Korean, Spanish, Portuquese, Russian, Japanese, German
Anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong and doesn't properly understand prosodic patterns and how they influence poetry.
I like English because it's the only language I'm fluent in
What are prosodic patterns, and how do they influence poetry?
Most important language: Spanish
I started with simplified because I know how some traditional characters look like from japanese (though I'm no expert on japanese) so the simplified characters make less sense to me. On reflection that might have been a stupid idea. I do need to learn more characters and I'll start trying to read in traditional from now on.
Do you have any tips for remembering characters? I read about mnemonics, but I don't understand what use they would have for complex characters when it would get over the top confusing trying to come up with mnemonics.
Mnemoics are usable for complex characters, because they are mostly built from smaller elements which in itself may be characters in their own right. I'd typically remember Heisigs books for characters if you're learning them for classical chinese/ROC mandarin and wanikani for japanese.
The most important thing is to understand the nature of the radicals and phonetics, because something like 90% of characters are phono-semantic compounds.
Do any of these languages have anything worth reading that was published in the last twenty years?
English will always be supreme
Why is Polish a secondary language but not Czech?
You literally only need english, german and french
>it's certainly pretention to assume that others don't immediately know what you mean by Gaelige
I'd be genuinely surprised if you asked 100 random people here if more than one of them knew the answer without having to look it up. But that's not pretentious, pretentious would be if I felt like somehow better than everyone and implied it's some esoteric thing, which clearly isn't the case. If anything, I'm actually being kind by expecting someone to be curious, which is probably a stupid assumption to make because the people here are generally moronic. Which I'm sure that even you would agree with that assertion, but maybe you feel like being extra contrarian today. I guess what I just said could be seen as pretentious, but it's also been true so who cares about plebian insults? Besides, if I felt good about being better than a bunch of midwit losers, it would imply some serious issues I'd need to work out. Thank God I'm okay on that front. Yes, yes. I'm leaving out a ton of information that could support my claim, but it doesn't matter, not really. Does it? Well, not to me, and it shouldn't to you. That is pretention.
>to put Irish on the same level as ... without reference to which no educated person has ever been able to form a thought
I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of "bait"? This is the marketing part. Why waste my time telling you about how Irish druids influenced the Greeks by interacting with people like Pythagoreas and so on? Why waste my time with explaining to you that there is some academic baseline that indicates Ireland (English) AKA Hibernia (Latin) is Hyperborea (Greek) that involve stories that come from both civilizations at the time? No, I want to know you're interested, then I put in some effort. But of course, you aren't interested, you're likely just some anglophone homosexual whose closest bit of historic literature is Lord of the Rings and thinks Arthurian legend is English, instead of actually Weslh lore, or somehow even worse: An anglo-saxon "simp".
For the love of God, go outside. Gaelige is a beautiful language, but homosexuals like you give it a bad name. Next time, read your shit out loud before you post. Embarrassing.
Objectively correct changes:
English = Primary lit
Polish = Special interest
Italian = Secondary lit
Russian = Primary lit
Should specify:
Ancient Greek = World-defining
Modern Greek = Waste of Time