/lit/ - Literature

>>11731355
Category I works out to be about 3 and a half hour of study a day.
It could easily be learned in under 8 weeks. All of these figure should be divided by 3 to get full time study for non brainlets. 12 hours a day studying is feasible.

>>11731355
Why is French relatively the hardest Latin language for English speakers?
Why is Hebrew easier than Arabic?
Why is Swahili as easy as German?

>>11731355
German has extremely similar sentence structure and shares boatloads of words with English, I'd argue it's just as easy as Spanish.

>>11731729
>Why is French relatively the hardest Latin language for English speakers?
The others ones have pretty strict rules that are easy to learn. (Not sure why Romanian is not harder)
>Why is Hebrew easier than Arabic?
Because it's a modern reconstruction and therefore more logical than a natural languege
>Why is Swahili as easy as German?
Swahili has a fair amount of grammatical similarity to English.

>>11731729
Pronunciation is a bitch.

>>11731737
German has a case system and is less grammatically rigid

>>11731737
Read Mark Twain's essay The Awful German Language to get some perspective.

>>11731768
>Swahili has a fair amount of grammatical similarity to English.
But why? Did they just develop in similar ways by pure coincidence?

Does it have something to do with the fact that English is basically a mashup of French and Old English while Swahili is a mashup of Bantu languages and Arabic leading to two languages being synthesized in ways that would be intuitive even to a speaker of a completely unrelated hybrid language?

>>11731778
I'm not sure but I'd say It's just a coincidence.

Norse and English

proto-norse (which includes proto-english) is literally a language created to tell tales
originally all germanic languages had the retarded crude and ugly syntax similar to modern high german, but in the mid-late first millennium north and "west" Germanic changed just to be more poetic and flowing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fnPwj1AMpo

>>11731355
English is the most /lit/ language, because it's the world language.

India, the Caribbean, and large swathes of Africa write in English when they want to reach an audience farther than the next town over, not to mention the actual Anglo-American countries, or the fact that continental European work is almost always translated into English first. English is the most /lit/ language, because it gives the widest and most comprehensive overview of any literature.

If you want the next-most important language for literature, then Spanish, or Mandarin. Latin writers dominate several genres. Mandarin has both the second-largest community of speakers and the longest literary tradition.

If you go further down the list, then Farsi.

You can learn Finnish, but never master it as a foreigner desu

>>11732653
Foreigners master languages like Japanese. I think they should be able to handle Finnish with enough effort.

>>11732641
>Lotsa people speak language so that make it pretty dhurrrrrr . . . .
Utility is not the measure of beauty, Anon.

>>11731355
esparanto

>>11731729
I am a Hebrew speaker
It has:
1. Easier pronounciation
2. More euro load words
3. SVO word order and I guess some grammar

I don't think it has anything to do with Hebrew being "rational"

>>11732673
>not realizing
>not realizing that the slang-pun is worthless and that the question in question is the other one superimposed upon the original post (aka OP) by the original poster (aka OP), where OP (aka the original poster) asks in the OP (aka the original post) about the language most fully embodying and incarnating the spirit, zeitgeist, and culture of this subsection-partition of this most Christian Tajikistani horse-urine spray-icon communication wall, yes, that division known as /lit/ and populated only by the most holy of sages and most virginal of wizards
m8 where the fuck did I mention beauty

>>11732701
>where the fuck did I mention beauty
Exactly! The spirit of /lit/ requires the desire for beauty to be valued above the substance of utility.

Had a chuckle at your post by the way desu

>>11731768
There are many brainlet takes on languages, but this is quite up there.

>>11732782
These are literally the reasons that those languages are ranked that way, brainlet.

>>11731355

I'm starting a Welsh begginers course tonight lads wish me luck

>>11732803
Good luck. Celtic languages are super interesting.

>>11731355
>japanese
>more than 88 weeks
I just want to play untranslated eroge...desu

Irish
>>11732803
Good luck their orthography to phonetics ratio is lower than Irish.

>>11733014
it's a conservative estimate based on a few hours a day, you can probably half it if you're committed to learning it and you can probably get down to a third or even a quarter if you move to japan and have a bunch of very patient japanese friends and language tutors to converse with and you don't need to support yourself... i.e., studying for 12 hours a day like mentioned here >>11731429

>>11732641
>English is the most /lit/ language,
Possibly
>because it's the world language.
But not for this reason.

>>11732790
They may be the official "reasons" but they are still wrong. Describing any languages as "logical", for one thing. Plus the sheer number of German English cognates would make any passing grammatical similarity (both SVO! Woah!) a moot point.

>>11733063
Linguistic logical consistency is pretty self explanatory. Spanish for example is an extremely logical language because it rarely deviates from its own rules while English is not one because it often violates its rules. "Logical" is being used in a descriptive and clinical sense not a qualitative one.
>Plus the sheer number of German English cognates would make any passing grammatical similarity a moot point.
You're dumb. Language isn't just vocab. It's a network of interactions.

Why is japanes the hardest of them all? This seem a lot arbitrary

>>11733081
>Spanish for example is an extremely logical language because it rarely deviates from its own rules while English is not one because it often violates its rules. "Logical" is being used in a descriptive and clinical sense not a qualitative one.
So you mean regularity? Any language has underlying rules for speakers to even communicate in the first place. Just because English uses different plural forms of a noun does not make it "illogical". Lol keep using wonky terminology to show how much you know about linguistics. "clinical sense"? Explain how Hebrew follows more of its own rules than Arabic. Isn't (Classical) Arabic is a far more conservative and regular Semitic language than Hebrew?
>You're dumb. Language isn't just vocab. It's a network of interactions.
Vocab is a pretty big part of learning a language! Especially for non-linguistically inclined diplomats, who won't see the abstract similarities between grammars. Also one look at the grammar of Swahili with it's noun classes, verb forms, verbal agreement, will tell you it's not similar to English at all.

>>11733109
So that weebs can feel superior.

>>11733081
Glorious Español the tongue of Cervantes the language emperors use to speak to God

100% regular pronunciation no weird shit around here

>>11733140
Lol
If your "language" pronounces lead, lead and lead differently your language is retarded

>>11733171
>HUR DUR BUT THE SPELLING THO
So you're just a brainlet, as I thought.

>>11733140
I was wrong about Swahili. The reason that it's easy to learn is the same reason as Spanish; its logical consistency. The remark about Swahili was just something a ling professor of mine told me once.
I already explained the reason behind Hebrew. (P.S. Modern Arabs don't speak Quranic Arabic and even if they did a language's age/preservation isn't indicative of it's complexity. For example, Latin is much more complex than Spanish)
>Vocab is a pretty big part of learning a language!
True and false. Someone can memorize a sizable amount of vocab in a relatively short time even if it's totally alien. That Vocab is totally useless without having a drilled in understanding of the way it's all put together. A hard to learn grammar will complicate a language much more than weird words.
>who won't see the abstract similarities between grammars
Are these theoretical diplomats also retards? Because they'd have to be to not see those.

>>11733184
That guy is not me. I'm the person you were arguing with.

>>11733171
yet you have learned it and are talking in it, out of choice, because this is what you enjoy doing with your time.

Colonized.

>>11733140
Coronel, Wednesday, had had, etc. You have to admit English is retarded at times.

>>11733140
Colonel, Wednesday, had had, etc. You have to admit English is retarded at times.

>>11733140
>>11733207
Also, to be fair, my point about Latin could also be true about Hebrew (since they were both used as Ecclesiastical languages) though I'm pretty sure Hebrew is far more artificially by moderns constructed than Latin is.

>>11733109
These languages are ranked by investment required for an English speaker to learn based on differences from the English language

Japanese pros:
>lots of English loanwords
>lots of study resources online
Japanese cons:
>three separate writing systems used at the same time
>grammatic particles
>sandhi
>tons of homophones
>tons of pronouns
>it's a high context, pro-drop language
>strongly head final, while English is head initial
>different default word order
>verbs conjugate by politeness in addition to tense, aspect, and mood
>counter words
So everything else

>>11733207
>Hebrew vs Arabic
I am not talking about age. I am talking about conversative vs innovative, linguistic terminology you should look up.
Arabic has regularized the triconsonantal roots system of the semitic languages, making each word have consistently 3 consonants, whereas Hebrew has some words with 2 and some with 3. Sounds more logical right?
>Latin is more complex than Spanish
A misconception. There are no languages more complex than others. Or are you saying Roman children only learnt to speak at age 10 whereas Spanish children could start at age 3? Because case inflections are so hard to understand right?
Speaking about, these theoretical US diplomats, right, I'm saying that as a idiot learning a foreign language will be carried more by vocab than anything else. You can look at a French text and get a small idea on what it might be talking about, without learning a single thing about French. Meanwhile an English cypher is incomprehensible, even though the grammar is the same.

>>11733327
>strongly head final, while English is head initial
Example?

>>11733327
>counter words
True, they have different numbers for different sets of things.

>>11731355
How the fuck is Farsi easier than Arabic

>>11733385
It's Indo-European

>>11731429
>12 hours a day studying is feasible.
Am I the only one with a job on this site?

>>11733357
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(linguistics)#Head-initial_vs._head-final_languages

>>11731729
>Why is French relatively the hardest Latin language for English speakers?
Due to their nasal tonal usage I suspect. Its something that I found quite hard to get used to.

>>11733431
French sounds like a cat that's vomiting while getting fucked.

>>11733357
"Because I love you" is "君に愛してるだから…/kimi ni aishiteru dakara", which translates literally to "I love you because". Another example is question words. "Where (doko) is the library (toshokan)?" is "Toshokan wa doko ka", where ka is only at the end because it marks the sentence as a question.
>>11733362
My favorite is that their counter word for people is names. So a trio is three names of people.

Well, I don't know all the world's languages, but long words surely kill poetry, so Slavic ones German and Finnish are out.

English is pretty lit. Both simple and slick with lots of nuances caught by its vocabulary.

Irish is the most /lit/ language because no one speaks it and there is NOTHING more /lit/ than reading books that no one else can understand.

>mfw i can understand and write in eighteen languages but i would never be called proficient in them because of my crippling social anxiety

russian

t. slav

>>11731355
>Arabic is as hard as Mandarin
BULL
SHIT
Arabic is easier than Russian. What is even considered hard in it? The consonants that are difficult for westerners? The written letters that sometimes connect? The only annoyance I have with it is how awful their vernacular is compared to standard Arabic. Their vernacular is magnitudes worse than Afro American Ebonics.
>>11732641
>Farsi
You mean Arabo-Iranian Creole?

>>11733431
The pronunciation is weird but highly regular once you get used to it. I was guessing the difficulty comes from all the different verb tenses.

>>11733049
>it's a conservative estimate based on a few hours a day
A few hours of study a day in addition to 25 hours a week in a really, really good classroom. I also doubt it focuses much on reading and writing and mostly just speaking and listening. I find it hard to find that someone can learn the three writing systems, the thousands of kanji, the stroke order for writing the kanji, the multiple meanings and pronunciation of those kanji to a level to be considered proficient in such a small amount of time in additional to the speaking and listening

In no world is japanese harder than chinese or arabic

>>11734508
But the verb tenses are pretty easy once you realise that almost all of them are pronounced the same. You only need to remember a couple of sounds per tense and the sound change is predictable between tenses. It's only the irregular verbs which are a bitch.

>>11734749
Mandarin has a simpler writing system and easier grammar. In what way is it harder?

>>11731774
>The Awful German Language
as a native speaker of serbian, i laughed a lot, i am so lucky i am not from an anglophone country

>>11731355
>Japanese
>Difficult language
lol wtf? Japanese is fucking easy compared to Chinese or any other East Asian language.

>>11731778
Grammatical systems come in three main types: Analytic, Agglutinative, & Fusional.
Analytic languages tend to have little to no Noun Declension, and Verb Conjugation, and tend to communicate information through a combination of sentence structure, and function words.
Agglutinative languages, tend to have a slightly looser word order, and communicate post-lexical meaning through tacking on more, and more affixes to the words.
Fusional languages tend to have little to no word order, and communicate virtually all post-lexical information, through a few multi-purpose affixes that denote person, number, tense, aspect, and intent, all in one.
Natural languages tend to change their grammatical structure in a cyclical nature. Analytic languages become more agglutinative, agglutinative languages become more fusional, and fusional languages become more analytic.
English, and Swahili are both languages that started off fusional, but are about 80% of the way through their transition to being anayltic. That's why they're ao similar.

Are you trying to conflate the difficulty of learning with the quality of being a better language ? I'm fluent in Russian and Yiddish, the latter was harder to learn but I still believe Russian to be the superior literary language
>>11731355

>>11731355
>These guys take almost a thousand hours to learn German
Just how severely disabled do you have to be to get into diplomacy? Asking for a friend.

>>11731355
This graph is stupid. Americans who spend their whole High School Years studying Spanish cant even pronounce or rightly construct basic phrases.

>>11735096
>american high school students
The guidelines in op are for humans

>>11733081
based
>>11733140
cringe

>>11732673
>>11732641

Quality is not quantity, true. But this isna language we are talking about and languages succeed on the basis of merit. English has the largest lexicon of any language in history and that has to do with how the simplistic structure of stuff like lack of gendered nouns allows it to easily absorb words from other languages (since there's no argument about how to spell fifty variants of the same word). And assimilating words means assimilating concepts more easily.

I honestly believe that the success of English speaking peoples has a lot to do with the strength and versatility of the language itself. There's so many exceptions to rules that there essential are none. English is more of an art than a science and it's vast utility allows for the expression of complex concepts in any field. Some languages don't even have words to express "higher" instead of "high" or "borrow" as nuanced from "take" English has the ability to express degrees like "rare", "uncommon", and "atypical" which can mean different things depending on a context only native or very practiced speakers can grasp. That is a power in competitive societies.

>>11735687
I wonder what a post-English linguistic world is going to look like. Is the development of new languages going to come to a screeching halt/radically new direction, to be sensationalistic, due to English's nigh-infinite flexibility? English creole/post-English languages only developed in relatively isolated areas, a relative impossibility in the age of the Internet

>>11735801
It looks like this bbc.com/pidgin

>>11733400
No. I hate these NEET dropout tankies too

>>11734123
Speaking English with a boot on your neck while drunk does not qualify as its own language

>>11734766
no it doesn't

>>11731737
You have no clue.

>>11735831
You're thinking of Scots, dude.

>>11735801

What's worst for me is that there is zero appreciation linguistic capability or the beauty of language in 99.9% of the population, even among the college "educated". They speak and write in buzzwords or memes, literal nu-speak.

I talked to my coworker once about part od my post above; how the English lexicon was the largest ever because of its versatility and how a degree of nuance between "often" and "frequently" was something plenty of Western languages don't have an analog for.

His response? "You're right, that is dumb. Like, why have two words that mean the same thing?"

I couldn't even come up with a response to that. Not only did he totally miss the point, he drew the opposite conclusion from what I was trying to convey. He missed my tone of reverence, he forgot I prefaced it by saying I found it interesting, and - most disgustingly - he couldn't even identify that he may have not understood something about what I said, assumed he knew and was correct, and took my opposite position to be a validation of his own vacuous, knee-jerk, unconsidered opinion of a subject he had heard broached for the first time in his life. This from a four year degree holder from ostensibly a well-respected school. Same kind of mindframe that makes a person titter during bananagrams at an obscure word (a category which, apparently, "toxicity" or "bicameral" fall into) and call the player weird for knowing it. The complacency with being ignorant disgusts me.

My coworker was a journalism major, by the way. Absolute state, etc.

>>11731355
Sanskrit

>>11731355
German

>>11732808

It was a good first lesson. Lots of sounds that I'm not used to at all, and reading it is a nightmare because it's all letters that I'm used to making sounds that they don't in English, but it'll come to me!

>>11734783
yeah but you have to be from the balkans instead

>>11735096
Thats just because of poor education systems. Spanish as a language is fucking easy.

most beautiful modern language is italian, written or spoken. Then, only rating modern languages, french and portuguese, followed by english tied with german and spanish.

>>11731355
>Icelandic easier than Finnish
Really?

>>11733014
Don't worry anon. We will make it one day.

>>11738306
1. Finnish is very different from other indo-european languages. Icelandic is very closely related to other North Germanic languages.

2. 4 cases vs 18 cases

3. Vocabulary overlap is much greater.

>>11738306
>>11738408

Finnish isn't an Indo-European language at all, whereas Icelandic isn't that far removed from English in relative terms.

>>11738270
>No Welsh

lol

>>11733347
>There are no languages more complex than others.
Congratulations on the dumbest post ITT. Languages are dynamic things. Your claim boils down to positing a magical mechanism which ensures that as soon as some simplification occurs in a language (let's say, a reduction from 3 to 2 grammatical genders), either an equivalent complication manifests itself automatically so that overall complexity is preserved, or an equivalent simplification occurs in all other languages so that parity is preserved that way. Do you believe such a mechanism exists?

>>11731355
How the fuck Nihon is harder to learn than Chinese?

Finnish.

English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Farsi, Greek and Latin. These languages form the language power axis. Everything else is secondary.

>>11738781
I can see good arguments for all the others, but what merits the inclusion of Polish over (classical) Chinese?

>>11731355
Latin and Greek, maybe Sanskrit, Hebrew and German as well.

>>11738811
>Polish
A westernized/latinized Slavic language with influences flowing from Greek and Latin of Byzantine times. Plenty interaction with German and Yiddish due to historical communities and migration.
Grammatically crazy like all the other Slav languages, if not more, with highly regarded poetry, and completely non-existent prose. I see it as a language in which parts of others meet, a natural outcome for a place with this type of history.

>>11738632
Probably because Japanese is more difficult to read. That would also explain why Japanese ends up being more difficult overall than Korean, despite its simpler grammar and phonetics.

With Japanese versus Chinese, there's honestly not that much of a difference between learning the 2000 to 3000 characters commonly used in Japan and the 4000 to 5000 characters commonly used in China because after the first 1000 to 2000 characters or so, you'll know all the components, which makes memorizing a new character a simple matter of noting its difference from already known characters constructed from the same set of already known components in familiar patterns.

But wheras the vast majority of characters used in Chinese have just a single pronunciation, which is often hinted at by the phonetic component, in Japanese most characters have at least two, often more possible pronunciations depending on the word they appear in, and the phonetic components aren't as useful for guessing the Chinese-style reading, nevermind the Japanese reading which is completely arbitrary. And of course Chinese grammar is much simpler than Japanese grammar, so there's that.

>>11731429
>12 hours
Stop.

English obviously.

German is easy if you're not half-retarded OT, most /lit/ is English, then French, then Russian, followed by all Romance. If we count dead languages, Latin is #1.

>>11731355
Is this a meme made by the 2008 weebs who would always show off the fact that they were learning obscure Japanese words

>>11732641
>Anglo-American

>>11734123
>Irish parents
>neither them or their parents know a word of Irish

It's honestly tragic. At least it's not as dead as Cornish, but still.

>>11738306
Icelandic is Germanic and so has similarities to English. From what I've read, the closest language to English is Frisian and then languages like Norwegian have few grammatical differences to English.
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are fucking weird and don't resemble other languages.

>>11731355
French and German. My tongue isn't good enough to get the German pronunciation of 'r' right since I always resort to a rolling 'r' instead of guttural 'r' which is sucks, though I don't get why the normal Germans seem to hate the Bavarian accent when i find it to be more endearing.

To add that to the list
>be Indonesian mutt.
>Speak formal Bahasa since little.
>Move to neighboring island after years of living on one island.
>People speak only their ethnic language with little proficiency of the national language.
There's no Cat III for Indonesian, the place is made up from 300 different ethnic languages which sound very different from one island to another, and the people aren't dedicated enough to stick with the language. Moreover there are arguably no good literature that came out since the 20th century that is not filled with ressentiment against the Dutch and Japanese.