/lit/ - Literature

i can read chinese okay, but it's not easy, and i've zero intentions of learning any other language ever again

I can barely speak my own language and english, fuck my life.

Three is enough

>>15494502
I'm a dilettante and usually lose interest after a month or two of learning a new language. The result is that I have a passable knowledge of many languages but I'm not truly skilled in any of them. I really want to get over this bad habit and just stick to getting really good at one.

>>15494543
What languages?

>>15494580
I'm like this. I chose to fixate on Latin. It'll be useful whether I decide to go from that into modern useful languages or more ancient languages. The lack of utility can make Latin seem rather unconvincing, but if you're just too busy screwing around, open a Latin textbook and just start reading.

Lads, am I allowed to post in a forgein language on /lit/? Or will it get me b&?

>>15494502
Been working at Japanese for a year (not at full intensity as I have an unrelated university subject to study also) and I still don't know shit desu. I do enjoy it though.

Duolingo is actually a great app for this
It might not as effective as a real course but for 5 minutes per day it does wonders

Too bad I waste my time on Latin of all languages
instead of a spoken one

>>15494502
Good, I've read in 3 foreign languages today.

>>15494502
I'm on chapter 13 of Lingua Latina Per Se Ilustrata. Enjoying it even though some of the chapters are hard.

>>15494502
I already know 4 languages top kek

>>15494502
It's not a plan but seems it happened me anyway.
I guess my English is ok-ish and passively improving, arabic exam in a few days. Not caring about Spanish and I'll pick french whenever i have time.

June is gonna be a lotttt of Latin, I want to get to ~1500 words by the end of the month

>>15494672
Yeah it's not adequate to get you fluent outside of maybe the longest courses like Norwegian, but it keeps you practicing every day which is essential.

>>15494502
I'm a native English speaker, I speak passable French (though I could always stand to learn more), my Spanish is tolerable, but my German is fucking trash. It's going okay.
That said, I'm basically studying languages for my Bachelor's.

I really wish I paid attention in language classes in school or was immersed in something as a kid I hate being a monolingual Anglo who learns 1/10th the speed of everyone else fuck fuck fuck.

70 streak day on duolingo's italian course. Long way to go, but it would be my third language.

>>15494502
if you already know english you dont need any other language retard

>he isn't L1 ithkuil

>forced to study french since the age of 10 because belgian (flemish) education
>still absolute shit at it

>>15494502
Great! I'm on my sixth language! I'm going to take it slow with German though.

>>15495108
How the hell do you retain them all unless you read/converse in all of them every day? How long did they all take you?

>>15495152
If you were to go a day without speaking English, you wouldn't forget it. If you went for a week, you wouldn't forget it, but it might feel weird. For a month, a bit weirder. For a year, you'd probably end up talking funny, but you could get back to normal quickly.
After reaching a certain level in a language, you don't "forget" it quite like that, and maintaining them can be a struggle, but they don't need quite as much usage as it may seem, though the more you know the harder it obviously gets.

>>15495152
I don't exactly retain them concomitantly. Fluency exists on a continuum; at any moment some languages are better than others. Right now I've been reading mostly in Spanish and so my Spanish is really great. I haven't read in French in a few months, so my French is dwindling. The good news is that if I were to pick up a French novel right now, it would only take me a few hours to get back into it. At most a week to recover where I left off. So while you sort of lose bits and pieces of the language, there is an integral whole that you can't really forget, it's rooted deep in your brain. As for how long it took me, the longest was French since it was my first foreign language (roughly 2-3 years before I was able to converse, but I was a teenager and admittedly lazy and stupid; if I were to repeat that I could get to that same level in 3-4 months). Nowadays I can pick up any Western European language in a few months.

I should say, I think people have elective affinities with regards to languages. For some reason I never lose any Spanish, it's just always there. French is more elusive. Italian/Portuguese are somewhere in between. Some languages I realized a long time ago just were incompatible with my soul, to use a vague expression, and so I forgot them quite rapidly and just quit learning them. This is something that fascinates me. For some reason, some people struggle with some languages, but learn others easily, and this is independent of the difficulty of those languages. I know people who learned Russian, but can't learn Spanish. I don't know what this is the case, but I suggest finding a language congenial to your spirit and mastering that one. After that your language learning journey will be greatly facilitated.

>>15495715
>4 Romance languages
Nice way of inflating your number of studied languages.

Is anyone learning Serbian?

>>15495789
True, after the first romance language, each additional rom lang only counts as 0.5.

I have the anglo problem of not knowing what lang to learn. I dont want a boring language and i dont plan to travel so its 90% reading and people online.

Lived in spain for 8 months, Italy for 3 and France for 2 yrs. Advanced in spanish and french, beginner italian

I'm only learning Japanese (for eroge and h-manga, of course), but I really enjoy watching this sort of videos https://youtu.be/L_hXODDU4cA of people who try learning a bunch of languages but end up sucking really bad at most of them and are only somewhat decent at two or three languages at most.

>>15494687
Tips with this? I bought the book and the Exercises, but I haven't started yet.

>>15495715
boring takes

>>15494502
i bought an old "how to improve your german" book from a website for used books, turns out the book is supposed to be used alongside some VHS's and there's no way for me to find them.

>>15495789
>>15495803
People exaggerate their similarity. Italian was a puzzle when I first picked it up. I still can't speak it with much fluency, but I'm literate in it after months of study. Portuguese and Spanish are superficially similar, native speakers can probably understand 60-70% of the other language when written. But spoken, and it's another game. Speaking is the difficulty there, otherwise Portuguese and Spanish probably would've melted into each other at some point. French isn't really very similar to the other romance languages at all. It's the most "evolved" (or degenerated) of the four. Speakers of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese would all struggle a bit with French. Anyways, it's one thing to learn the basics of the language, it's another to get to a high degree of literacy where you can read the greats in each language. That takes a long amount of time no matter how similar the languages may be grammatically, syntactically, etc.

I am learning German now. It's the next language I'd like to become literate in.
>>15495856
Shut up, faggot. You're boring.

>>15495802
I'm, i like the language

>>15494502
Should I follow Schopenhaur's advice and do Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, or should I learn some actually useful modern languages like Spanish, French, and German?

There never was a plan, the foreign monkeys can learn to speak god's own language.
t. glorious anglo

>>15496210
I'm not claiming they're the same thing, but French, Italian, and Portuguese are all much more similar to each other in terms of both grammar and vocabulary than Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are.

>>15496342
Learn Mandarin Chinese or Modern Standard Arabic, and get to understand both ancient and modern works.

>>15494672
>thanks to duo lingo for bringing us this post

>>15494502
Learning German, kinda wanna learn French but at the same time I want to know a more obscure language. Can't decide what to do and I don't have time to learn more than two languages.

>>15496517
Why not learn one language and get to the level at which you can read or watch anything in it as well as you can in English?

>>15495663
I will test this homeschooling my kids

>>15494502
Good, /fit/ has been helping me get better in the language of the tooth and nail. One day I will achieve peak /fitlit/

>>15495808
Latin.

>>15494502
been trying to learn German for over 10 years.
-Still cannot speak at all
-Can only write with multiple resources at hand (dictionary, verb conjugator, adjective declension chart, various grammar rules), still get told by german anons on /int/ that my german sounds bizarre
-can only read middling level material like news articles with great difficulty and dictionary at side, zero hope of reading actual works of philosophical or literary merit, which was my original goal starting out

I also had ambitions to learn like 5 or 6 other languages, at this rate I'll need a lifespan of about 400 years or so to achieve my goals

終わた。

>>15494687
same but ch. 11. keep going brother.

>>15495854
just jump in. or get a cursory understanding of grammar especially what gender, case, declension, tense, and mood is. once you get that you can really can just jump in and start reading.

>>15495152
Basically what >>15495663 says. Sometimes you have moments of retardation where you can think of a word in a few different languages but not the one you're speaking the most at the moment.
It took me five whole minutes to think of the word "ohne" in German just before I came to this thread. I could think of it in about five other languages, some of which I've never been fluent in. I knew it was the opposite of the English "with" and the German "mit" but my mind couldn't work out the English opposite either because it was busy saying things like "sans" "sin" "eopsi" "nishi".

>>15497012
未だ終わらぬ

>>15497116
Just godda immerse more immerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse moreimmerse more m'felllow acquirer

>>15494502
English is fine.

>>15497624
Based & redpilled post made by a nigga whomst knoweth why ESLs put so much effort into learning the only language that's important on a global scale

>>15497609
It's not about immersion. It's the same thing as happens to monolinguals when they forget a word, I just have more words to go through to spark the memory.

>>15494502
I can make polite conversation and ask directions in French. Can also read books aimed for small children. Working on getting my fluency up so I can read Dumas in the original and ignore the rest of them.

>>15497002
10 years and you're still at that level? You're either retarded or not studying enough

>>15494502
Working on my french every day

>>15497757
forgot to add, look up my podcast - gayer by the day

Anons, how do achieve HSK 5?

>>15497806
Durr

>>15494672
I've heard Duolingo is not that good for Chinese, Japanese, etc.

Does anyone have any experience with those languages on Duolingo?

>>15494654
Is there an official /lit/ language? I have never received a ban for this.

>>15494672
A solid Latin base will help with German.

>>15494502
I only planned to learn one during this quarantine.

German.

I started a month ago and I'm just over a quarter through the entire course. Its a long ass course and its such a hard language. That said I can't see my streak dying anytime soon, it's now part of my routine if you could even say I had one in the first place lol.

I currently have a 37 day streak. I do 1-2/5 of those topics every night at 11 because I dont wanna leave it any later and lose my streak and its a nice time that doesn't really interfere with a lot, i do it for 20mins. Sometimes more tho.

>>15494516
Same here, when I put my thoughts into words I sound like a toddler or like someone with a really low iq.

>>15494502
Just got my C1 cert for German and I'm enrolling in a German jni next year so I think it's coming along nicely.

I want to learn italian next or maybe a slavic language if I'm up for a challenge.

>>15494672
Yeah but the design is cucked and makes me feel like a baby so I refuse to use it.

>>15494502
Got English, Spanish, Latin and Greek down, mostly - still have to polish my Greek. Starting on Provençal now

>>15494502
Pretty good, my jap has come a looong way, and I can read pretty much anything. Started learning French as well, which is quite a lot easier. In the future I'll probably also want to dip my toes into German and Latin.

>>15499117
>Starting on Provençal now
Unless you are a scholar or a LARPer you should just learn Catalan

>>15499166
It's the language of my land, my ancestors, and the first literary vernacular of Europe. I think I'll keep at it.

>>15499176
Oh so you are a LARPer then, nvm. Hope you didn't take offense anon, I find all languages beautiful and worth learning but in my experience Occitan is pretty much dead or killed by the French state.

bought a dictionary but it's in a bad print and gives me headache

native french fluent english N1 japanese, currently working on korean

How to learn Spanish effectively? Is there any good textbooks?

>>15494687
Chapter 15(chapter with the sea) is hard, but don't give up

>>15499280
>N1 japanese
pffff

>>15499208
Shoulda downloaded a free bilingual dictionary instead

>>15498953
Nice story you've got there, but Duolingo is just a language learning game.

I understand that there is no definite answer for this, but out of these, how would you order their difficulty in learning? I would be happy learning at least two of them by 10 years time:
German, French, Greek & Latin

>>15499327
>learning languages through textbooks
Take the Krashenpill m'nigga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3lv7ExApHM

>>15499755
Regular "objective" answer:
French < German < Latin < Greek
Pragmatic answer:
The one you care about the most is the one you'll learn most easily. Any language you don't care much about you probably won't make much progress in.

>>15498914
For Chinese, yeah, and it's not good. The computer voice mangles pronunciations, the character recognition drills are mediocre, and complex characters are sometimes too small to clearly make out comfortably. Vocabulary choices are also the bad sort of weird.

If you want an app as a starting point Hello Chinese is much better. Not that it takes you very far, but it's a basis.

I learned nothing :(

>>15499755
The nice thing about Latin is that the bar to "fluency" is a lot lower, because it's almost exclusively a language you use to read old texts. French is modern, and arguably closest to English. I'd say French is easier than Latin is easier than German is easier than Greek. Greek seems like the biggest challenge; it has a different alphabet, different grammar, less cognates. I respect people who learn Greek a lot.

My mother tongue is french.
I’ve been learning English for 8 years, I’d say I’m decent. I don’t any any problem getting understood.
I’m pretty ashamed of my accent because it is pretty bad even though I tried to improve it. Anyway I gave up since I don’t speak to English people orally that much and I prefer text.
I learnt Dutch for sometimes (second language in my country) but I don’t enjoy speaking it and my level is near 0. Nowadays I don’t have the discipline nor the will to learn a new language since I feel I won’t ever have the need to use it, moreover it takes me so much time to grasp grammar concepts that people can understand way faster than me Lol.

>>15499744
i have a pdf copy too but it's just images and i can't search
revs up my computer too if i shuffle around too much

>>15499755
>>15499858
Latin is infinitely more difficult to learn than german, not so much because of the language itself (even though the syntax can get pretty hellish) but because of the lack of resources. Regularily speaking to native speakers of a language dramatically shortens the amount of time it takes you to become fluent.

Greek truly is the devil incarnate. Morphology is unlike anything you'll ever tackle, except if you decide to learn Sanskrit or something. Almost every syntactic rule has exceptions. Getting anywhere near to being able to confidently read original texts will take you years of dedicated study.

I need help hispanohablantes de /lit/. I would like to read something famous in spanish (I'm B1 or so). Reading authors like Borges or G.G.Marquez in spanish would be cool. Any easy book to start with? Todos los cuentos of Marquez seems like a good starting point, is it?

I hate learning chinese, Ive been studying it for 7 years without taking it seriously,everything Ive learned has been by osmosis,exposition.
Even if I did apply myself I would never be able to read the classical works,all I can do is read retarded books for toddlers and speak so badly no one understands me.I forgot everything I ever learnt about german and my english is not good enough,specially in the pronunciation and fluency department.
But the worst is definetely chinese, I want the final result but dont enjoy the process.

>>15494502
halfway through learning german

>>15500032
Cortazar, especially his short fiction. A personal favorite of mine is Historias de cronopios y de famas. His writing style is very unpretentious, so the vocabulary is not too difficult.

>>15499752
What does this mean?

>>15494502
My Spanish is OK and I'm taking German I and II this summer at my uni. I need to read a lot more in both in order to get to the level where I can understand and appreciate the great literary works in each respective language, though.

>>15500039
Hey thank you anon.

>>15494502
>How's that plan to learn multiple languages coming along, /lit/?

My parents are immigrants, so I've been done, bitches.

>>15498945
what about the reverse? Learning German now but would love to be a Latin reader someday

>>15498964
that sucks man, try writing more probably

>>15494502
It's progressing.
For reasons that will only make sense to me, I've started with Japanese and Ionic Greek.

>>15494687
make sure you go through wheelocks or something at the same time for the grammar

>>15500723
There's a bunch of Youtube videos on this, but if you want me to sum it up briefly, what I'll say is that:
I) Any language learning course out there will cover only a limited portion of a language
II) A language course can never provide the full range of experiences or contexts by which a native speaker would learn to appreciate words and expressions through
III) Duolingo and other similar resources (like Pimsleur, Languagepod101) are meant to be used for light engagement with a language, completely deprived of context, working not very differently from how phrasebooks do.
Note: I can't say I know what the ideal way of learning languages is, but what I can say is that it requires a lot more than just memorizing some entries off a bilingual dictionary and a few conjugation/declension tables.

>>15500037
How the fuck did you memorize 160k words?

>>15499913
all you Frenchies are so sensitive about your accent, no one cares, English is dominated by people with hilarious accents.

>>15500858
>all you Frenchies are so sensitive about your accent
Every single French person whom I've met seemed to have not given enough of a fuck to do accent training in English

>>15494502
I already know finnish, swedish and english, and my french is rapidly improving, i can already read houellebecq novels and understand like 95%

>>15500889
K, now try learning a non-Indo-European language if you wanna feel like a big boy.

>>15500898
Finnish is non-indo-european, but that's my mother tongue so probably doesn't count

My native language is Portuguese, I learned English in my teen years and Italian when I studied abroad.

I learned a bit of norwegian when I was younger and fooled around with Duolingo but I didn't know shit about language learning back then. Still a fun and easy language, would like to dwell on it in the future.

Right now I'm learning Japanese, I finished RTK, I'm halfway through Tae Kim's Grammar guide and have built some anki decks along the way.

Not sure where to go after Tae Kim though.

>>15500821
>>15499280
>japanese
>>15496389
>Japanese
>>15495847
>Japanese
>>15501389

https://www.angelo.edu/

>>15501389
>RTK, I'm halfway through Tae Kim's Grammar guide and have built some anki decks
ASS Immersion Approacher spotted

>>15501416
waga syasin ha doko ni mittukata no da?

>>15500821
Why ionic greek?

>>15500017
Can you tell me about how hard learning Sanskrit is?

>>15501916
He could be a Herodotusfag

Imagine unironically learning Japanese