/lit/ - Literature

>>11585321
Why the actual fuck would you learn a dead language

>>11585321
I never took English classes, i live in a 3rd world country and im too poor to afford it, but thanks to internet free guides now i have an average knowledge of English and i can fap to Sasha Grey too

>>11585324
To read great works. It also aids in learning Romance languages and in the etymology of many European languages. Just look at it as a hobby and it makes a lot of sense.

I just started learning Latin and Greek on my own.
I try to work 3 hours on one of them everyday.

>>11585351
out of curiosity, what guides did you find?

>>11585351
Which country? Please note that if you are a nonwhite living in a nonwhite country, you are not allowed to fap to Sasha Grey. She is a pure white whore reserved for us aryan children of the sun, Teutons, Germanics, Slavs, Balts, Anglos, and Mediterranians.

Nords are nonwhite.

You have been advised, thank you for your compliance.

Learning Classical Greek. Currently working on articles, nouns (first and second declensions) and learning how they work within sentences.

> want to learn more languages but can't decide which to start with first

I'm always debating whether to learn Greek or Latin. It's suppose to make everything very interesting and fun they say, meaning have a connection with the best record of human thought; though perhaps translations are good enough and I don't have to put the work in. Or I could just have a notebook of latin and greek quotes and use them pretending I am a learned man.

I'm currently studying Chinese because after landing a useless bachelors I have no other marketable skills and need to stave off the noose for a while.

>>11586107
I studied both in HS, it's 100% easier to find a list of 500 common roots and then use them to springboard you into a heavily influenced second language like Italian or Russian.

>>11585845
>Sasha Grey. She is a pure white whore reserved for us aryan children of the sun, Teutons, Germanics, Slavs, Balts, Anglos, and Mediterranians

Oh anon, she is a coalburner, have you seen Sasha Grey videos? I mean, she fucked niggers all the time while she was an active pornstar, even retired she still bang niggers, answering your question i'm latino from a little country called Bolivia

>>11585830

https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/online-english-courses/

Im poor but thanks to God and his son Jesús Christ i'm blessed with an average IQ, i learned basic english in 3 months, is a nigger tier lenguage, very easy to learn

I taught myself English as a baby

>>11585324
I don't understand why somebody who doesn't see the value of greek and latin would post on /lit/

>>11586609
>I don't understand why somebody who doesn't see the value of learning a bunch of languages spoken by dead white homophobic, misogynistic males would post on /lit/

Ftfy le newfriend :^)

>>11586620
Is this racism?

>>11585962
>excuses

>>11586620
>dead white homophobic, misogynistic males w
i almost god mad

>>11586620
I know this is an ironic post but
>ancient greeks
>homophobic

I'm learning French but my pronunciation horrible. Everything comes out in my thick, ocker Australian drawl.

>>11587380
They executed Socrates for ""corrupting"" the youth (aka diddling boys). Now if that's not homophobic I don't know what is

>>11587382
Literally me.

>>11587387
Again I know this is an ironic post but he was "corrupting the youth" because he made them question customs and beliefs. Socrates was somehwat unique among Athenian men in not having sex with younger men (not boys). He made a point of this

>>11585321
Unless you have studied Latin on a regular basis since an early age, you will never know this language good enough to appreciate those stylistic subtleties of Latin literary works which cannot be conveyed in translation. At best, you will be able to impress pseuds by occasionally inserting Latin phrases in your speech or writings.

>>11587382
Australians shouldn't be allowed to speak European languages for this reason.

>>11587382
purse your lips like you're going to kiss, and pretend you're a snooty French man caricature while you speak

>>11585931
So the very first page then.

>>11587410
Utter nonsense. You have obviously not studied either language.

>>11585321
Learning Russian. Really need a russian anon to talk to.

>>11587846
How difficult is Russian? I've always loved Russian literature, but it won't really help me much with my job so I've been hesitant to try learning it.

>>11587852
>but it won't really help me much with my job
Imagine being this servile

>>11587410
Word order is untranslatable and that's day one stuff

>>11587846
>Learning Russian.

Don’t. Unless Russian is your first language, you’ll always make shitload of mistakes in it and you won’t be able to read serious Russian books without constantly looking up words in the dictionary. Just give up и лyчшe изyчи бoлee пpocтoй язык, фpaнцyзcкий, нaпpимep.

>>11587852
Very difficult. It's kind of a meme how complicated the words are, but it's true. Also the o sounds like a when unstressed. So sometimes a word with multiple o's can have no o sounds or in some cases only one. Grammar is really complex too. It's like an amalgam of different languages. Really the only thing that separates it from Chinese and Japanese and Korean are the symbols used, but those languages are on a different level, very different languages but Russian feels as difficult as those languages, sometimes individual Russian words can be more complex than a Japanese phrase (considering the pronunciation rules and stress rules and soft signs/rarely used hard signs). Idk, my native language is Filipino, so I can easily imitate the accent of Russian which has a lot of rolled r's and ch and sh sounds. Good luck.

I'm learning English and I'm learning how inferior it is to sign language daily.

>>11587948
>и лyчшe изyчи бoлee пpocтoй язык, фpaнцyзcкий, нaпpимep

ты пpaв, чyвaк, мoжeт быть, я этo yзнaю, кoгдa кoгдa-нибyдь бyдy жить в poccии. тaкжe дeвyшки любят фpaнцyзcкий язык бoльшe, чeм pyccкий, кoтopый звyчит кaк пьяный нeвнятный язык.

Извинитe зa мoй pyccкий.

Literally had to check this shit with Yandex. Fucking Russian dude. Are you Russian? If you are, can you confirm a rumor that I read online that says: russian is the most complicated subject in russian schools.

I don't know whether I want to learn French or Spanish tbqh.

>>11588267
>russian is the most complicated subject in russian schools.

Nah, that’s math. It’s pretty easy to master even the most difficult languages if you’ve been using them daily since childhood. But if you begin studying some difficult language in your adulthood, the chances that you will master it are practically zero.

>>11587775
I just started less than a week ago. It's the first chapter of the book I'm using, so yeah

>>11588616
Well fuck. I guess it's time to transition to french. But I'll still do Anki for russian once in a while just to incrementally increase my vocab.

>>11587948
>>11588267
i'm learning russian at school and google translate isn't useful for what either of you two said, but are you saying French is the better language to learn for a native english speaker? or just better in general?

>>11588712
I’m a Russian who is fluent in French and, personally, I think that French is a much more elegant language. And yes, it’s infinitely easier to learn if you’re a native English speaker.

>>11588725
even compared to say italian or spanish?

>>11588754
If you're British, you've already had at least three years of mandatory French.

American: not sure they have mandatory anything.

But yes, French is easier than Spanish due to the vocab similarity.

>>11588754
Half the vocabulary of the English language is French thanks to Norman rule. English is a Germanic language that grew to use Romance words and the similarities it has with Italian, Spanish, Romanian and so on come from that shared French vocabulary, but it is only a similarity because they share the same roots as French.

>>11586620

started with the greeks. currently reading homer

>>11585845
>Nords are nonwhite
what the fuck

>>11589024
/pol/ doesn't like the nords because they have left wing governments

>>11587846
Ya yem khleb
That's about as much as I remember from those two weeks on Duolingo

>>11589033
Oh right. Haven't been to pol in awhile

>>11587410
Even if my native language is a Romance one?

>>11585321
1th world contry here

mfw i've used the same method for learning french (in order to read hugo's poetry) and now 87yo grandma mocks me cause "wtf anon, french is a feminine language, why haven't you learned latin or improved your english?"

>>11589289
She's right desu

How many non native English speakers are on here? How easy was it to learn to read English well? Did 4chan actually help?

>>11587373
Well, ancient greek, latin, spanish or persian? Help me choose. I have Athenaze, Lingua Latina, some spanish and persian language books. What do?

>>11589297
Granma go out of my 'chan!

>>11589297
Grandma go out of my 'chan!

>>11585324
Latin is very much alive. Maybe the exact way Latin was spoken by the romans is no longer being used, but to say it’s extinct just ignorant.

>>11589347
By whom'st? the Vatican?

>>11589326
Can only speak of the first two. I think usually the order is latin > ancient greek.
The LLPSI books are imo great, but nonetheless can become frustrating. They require a lot of rereading, which shouldn't come as a surprise since they're geared to teach you to read. iirc there's quite some jump in difficulty between pars prima and pars secunda; nothing impossible as they're diligently composed. There are also tons of material similar in method, including surprisingly many audio resources.
Ancient greek is a different story. The english version of Athenaze is kind of good for getting you started, but is in no way a match for the LLPSI. The italian version has a lot more text and there're two or three "companion" books. I used both versions since i don't speak italian, and the grammer as well as some of the vocab is glossed in italian. Also there are i think two books entirely written in ancien greek (Alexandros to paidon hellenikon iirc).

Latin, Spanish, Esperanto. I might go for Norwegian too, unsure.

>>11589368
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin

>>11589514
>Esperanto
why

>>11588267
>Извинитe зa мoй pyccкий

im learning japanese for the sole reason of getting some of the japanese pucci that lives around here

>>11589194
Ignore him.

>>11587410
this is an incredibly retarded post, some of the finest and most intellectually sophisticated Latin literature was produced by people who learned it as adults or adolescents.

>>11585324
You probably also wonder why the previous generations in America could actually speak English properly.

The answer for both questions is the same.

>>11586278
>Im poor but thanks to God and his son Jesús Christ i'm blessed with an average IQ, i learned basic english in 3 months, is a nigger tier lenguage, very easy to learn

Fucking hell that's hilarious. Sadly the fact that you think it's simple shows you don't know it very well. It's one of the more complicated languages to come out of Europe. There are rules and intricacies you will never understand if you aren't a native speaker.

>>11587410
must be bait

I’m learning french very slowly and I impulsively took a german course in uni that starts in a week. I already know spanish.

>>11590711
this meme again

>>11585324
Really proliferates the prions, doesn't it?

>>11586180
You can't learn chinese

>>11585321
all you gotta do is know what dative, genitive, vocative, nominative and accusative are

then you've solved 90% of the language and it should take you a few hours to master it

>>11590711
Lmao. Go ahead faggot, clear up some of these supposed subtleties for a non native speaker like yours truly.

English is about the easiest language ever and the skill ceiling of English is super low as well.
The only hard part is to master the useless made up vocabulary that your British cock sucker ancestors made up to enlarge the disconnect between the working classes and themselves.

>>11586283
Unironically this. I live in a shithole and my parents were absolute shit at parenting. They used to lock me in their bedroom and let the tv open on cartoons which were 100% in English at that time. This started when I was around 2 untill I started school at 7.

Can one learn a language like a kid by absorption? like watching anime with subtitles and eventually starting to grasp shit? they always say kids have greater language capacities than adults but it strikes me as dishonest since they're fucking retards.

>>11593277
Yeah, I learned english mostly by movies with subtitles and music. Did study a bit though

>>11593207
>English is about the easiest language ever
You only say that because you learnt it in school. No linguist will tell you English is an easy language to learn.
>skill ceiling of English is super low as well

False. Most native speakers haven't even mastered it.

>>11588225
>>11587948

God, you people are insufferable. Everyone has the "hardest language"

People make mistakes and sound stupid when they speak any second language, that's just how language learning is. No matter what language you learn you're going to need to use a dictionary a lot when reading real books. Russian is not special in this regard. Maybe there might be a few less cognates with English than you might get in another European language, but cases and verb aspect are not as difficult as every slav language speaker will tell you ad nauseum every time you mention you're interested in slav languages.

>>11590711
The only thing complicated about English is pronunciation rules or the lack thereof

Learning japanese. Finished Tae Kim last week and I'm now reading NHK Easy News and will read yotsubato when it arrives

>>11589317
Portugal here, not hard at all. I honestly don't even know how i learned english, but it was probably through raw exposure in vidya and by 12 I knew enough that i prefered the original english to portuguese transations. Never learned a single thing through a grammar book. Literary english was harder but it was really just a matter of googling "x meaning", after reading a word a few times it sticks. 4chan did help as it was my only way of conversation/production practice, it introduced me to japanese shit, which is only translated in brazilian portuguese and I'd rather read in english, and /lit/ made me interested in literature.

>>11587382
>>11587395
based aus /bros/ . when I get around to french Im going to make sure to put in effort in accent formation

>>11593310
Why would english be hard? It has no case or gender inflection. Please list something that is even remotly hard for non-natives to grasp

>>11585321
>not learning chinese and arabic

You know whos century this is right?

>>11593936
The strict order of adjectives and large number of homophones

>>11593544
>"Portugal here"
>No Capital I whenever using first person singular
>"Never learned a single thing through a grammar book"
Leave both my country and my board, you subhuman.

>>11593936
Phrasal verbs are apparently unintuitive, a lot of the spellings are weird and seemingly illogical, there are lots of homophones are irregular verbs that are necessary to know. English is a strange mixture of the Latinate (which it takes from French) and the Germanic, which make's it somewhat less systematic than most other languages, and typically the less systematic something is, the harder it is to learn. It's not that English is the hardest language to learn, but it certainly isn't the easiest either. The difficulty of learning another language depends among other things on your linguistic background, and if you speak an inflected language, which if you're not a native English speaker you probably do, then much of learning English (the word order in particular) is going to seem unintuitive, much in the same way gender and case does to English speakers trying to learn a romance language.

>>11593207
You have learnt a sanitised runt of English, called International English.

If you had actually to converse with native speakers, who have thousands of dialects, accents, rhymes, euphemisms, and neologisms; you'd be lost.

>>11594139
If you ask a non-native to explain article use, you inevitably receive some bluster about them being 'useless'. Foreigners think English is 'easy' until it isn't.

>>11594335
Yeah, well, welcome to the world. Here in Italy we have different dialects actually still spoken nowadays which differ not only region by region but sometimes even between provinces or cities.
So learn italian but be ready to get here and don't know what the fuck is being said half of the time too.
Given that, I would say that english is indeed one of the easiest languages to learn in Europe, your grammar is really quite simple compared to others

The Italian and the Anglo are both retarded. My personal ironical thanks to both of you for ruining this thread with your dick measuring contest.

>>11595294
All language threads that aren't exclusively Latin or ancient Greek should be on /int/

>>11594511

stopped reading at Italy.

I've travelled in 4 continents and not once have I needed any knowledge of your shit. Keep trying to stay relevant please, it's pretty funny.

>>11589289

congratulations, your shitty communication skill will now be scoffed at by two different languages!

>>11585321
What does 'suum' mean in "Iu-lius baculum suum su-mit et disce-dit."? I know the sentence means Iulius takes his staff and leaves.

>>11595578
Suum is his. It's possessive and goes with baculum. Suum baculum, his stick.

>>11595598
Merci beaucoup.

>>11586620
>homophobic
Scared of how gay they all were, maybe.

>>11587846
Why do you asking? Wanna learn some russian suka blyad like expressions to become really successful in life? (btw i'm actually want to improve my english and just find reason to response here)

>>11595578
What's up with the dashes in the middle of your words

>>11588645
>giving up on a language because anons told you it's hard
Lmao don't. Many people who learn languages like Russian as adults never reach an advanced level because they give up like you're doing right now. There's nothing preventing you from getting good at a language.

>>11589317
I started learning English in school when I was 8. I got some exposure on the side by e.g. watching Friends and playing Runescape. I think I was 11 when I starting reading Harry Potter in English. I quickly learned to understand the language but it wasn't until I was 15 that I started being able to speak the language reasonably well, since I was too shy to speak in my English classes. When I turned 16, I stopped learning English at school and instead I started reading literature in English: at first I read "simple" authors like Christopher Isherwood and then I gradually moved on to more complicated stuff like Shakespeare, Nabokov and Wallace.

I'm 18 now and I can easily read literature in English and desu I prefer it to reading in my native language. If I concentrate, I can speak and write very well but if I'm just shitposting or writing comments on 4chan I make quite a few mistakes.

>>11588230
ASL? English does have a far larger vocabulary.

>>11589024
Probably the projected 30% muslim population in a few decades.

>>11596626
>thinking that white and Muslim are mutually exclusive

>also relying on /pol/ pseudo-projections that have been disproven time and time again

>also thinking that having more words makes a language superior

>also assuming that a non-native English speaker is talking about ASL when they write that they know a sign language

>>11596714
Ugh cringe poser. Fine.
1. Bothering to find out their ethnicity was unnecessary because everyone knows it isn't a bunch of white converts.

2.pew research is /pol/ now?

3. In the area of having more words it does.

4. All they said is they know sign language. I asked if it was ASL, because that is mine. Where does that post say anything about the language of majority in their country? Do you think deaf people in America are just born knowing English or maybe they have to study it? Explain why is it rude to fingerspell a novel word if every deaf person already knows English so well?

I'm learning German with Duolingo and writing all the words with translation on a journal I'm planning on learning sign language too
learning Greek or latin is a meme in my opinion if you enjoy it then cool though ig
Could someone please recommend me a easy entry level german novel so I can work on my grammar

>>11596714
>Reddit spacing

>>11587852
I learned Russian to the point i could read classical lit in 3 years. I did a bunch of grammar exercises and just read random short stories every day until i finally had that 'moment' where i could really read it and started devouring books.

It was really fun honestly

>>11585321
American schools were too poor to teach me anything so I'm self taught literate. Does that count?

>>11590711
>*nglos truly think English is a difficult language
No me hagas reír, Joe Cincuentayseis. ¿La gramática? Una boludez. ¿El vocabulario? Una pelotudez, y encima las palabritas cultas que tus abuelos rednecks no conocen son por lo general de origen latino. Mejorá esa carnada, che.

>>11597919
Dont know if you really want to read that (its YA) but „Crazy“ by Benjamin Lebert comes to mind. Its high-school level and was a pretty big thing in germany when it came out.

>>11598392
Thanks allot good luck on learning the language your interested in

Remember lads, it’s better to be fluent in two languages than to be fluent in one and learning 3.

>>11596882
1. But that still doesn't mean that white and Muslim are mutually exclusive terms

2. Pew is known for their flawed methods when it comes to projecting religion. It's also a bit weird that you chose to single out the projection for Sweden without specifying that you were exclusively talking about numbers for that one country (as opposed to, say, Scandinavia in general).
Pew relies on a few assumptions. For example, they assume that if a country receives 1000 refugees from a country that is 80% Muslim then 800 of those refugees will be Muslim. However, Christian and atheist minorities are generally over-represented among refugees, which means that some non-Muslims often end up being classified as Muslims in Pew's numbers. Their numbers also assume that all children (and grandchildren, etc.) of Muslims will be Muslim too, as well as assuming that no Muslims become atheist, which obviously leads to problems as well.
And most importantly, it clearly states that these numbers assume that 2014 to mid-2016 refugee inflow patterns continue, however we have seen a rapid decrease in the number of refugees since then.

>>11589712
Ĉar ĝi estas la plej bona lingvo en la tuta mondo, kompreneble. Kial vi ne parolas ĝin?

>>11585321
I missed all last semester's lessons due to insomnia and I've only just started studying for my last-chance resits on Tuesday so I guess you could say I'm self-teaching Chinese, yeah.

>>11598592
1. I didn't feel like looking up the immigrant's ethnicity. Even if I did it is probably more than one, so I'd still be partly wrong. Probably more wrong by percentage than if I just imply Swedish Muslims are non-white.

2. I couldn't remember the country until I looked up the image again. It isn't important. The reason all Scandinavians are going to get called non-white on 4chan is because one country might become a significant percentage Muslim. It's 4chan.
Second, it's just a projection. How much are your objections, except the last one, going to change the numbers, 1% 2% 5%? You think that's really enough to keep 4chan from calling them Mohammed?

The question was, why are Scandinavians non-white? That image is more than enough justification on 4chan to do so. If you can't understand board culture better than this, you should find a safer part of the internet because it will start to mess with your mind.

>>11598592
>>11599467
There's a difference between "should we call Swedes non-white" and "would this realistically result in 4chan users calling Swedes non-white".

>>11599520
Sure, especially in how the latter was answering the question actually asked >>11589024