/lit/ - Literature

French, I can understand some conversational French but I'm not good at it

>>21854482
Whatever language she's speaking

german

>>21854482
It would be Latin and Japanese for me. And i like a lot of french authors, it would be handy to know French, comparing and choosing translations can be a pain in the ass.

>>21854494
Why french?
>>21854507
I would also choose german though i dont know why.

>>21854482
Probably Italian. I'd say Russian but I think the classic Russian novels are very translateable, which is not necessarily true of Italian poetry. I'd love to read Dante and Ariosto in their originals. I can read French just fine, German too, so no need for those.

Russian

>>21854482
Chinese

I chose Italian and don't regret it, however I'm getting to the point where I might choose another one and in honestly considering Arabic.

I already know Hebrew which is supposed to ease the transition,

>>21854518
for Schopenhauer
>>21854520
>the classic Russian novels are very translateable
ive tried to read dead souls in english and it was so pale and without all this hillbilly words you hear like twice in your entire life yet still know the meaning. I dont even discuss russian literature with foreigners since then because i feel like we talk about two absolutely different things. For same reason i prefere to read american books in english

>>21854535
>for Schopenhauer
Lol no

>>21854482
Sanskrit

German if from scratch (I‘m like 80% there now)

Ancient Greek if I can pick a new one

>>21854482
Latin

Hebrew

>>21854527
doing this rn too. it will be the project of a decade but i hope it pays off

>>21854482
>If you could
But you can
I believe in you

>>21854550
Good lord.

Japanese.
Some of the very best extreme horror in the past 15 years has come from Japan, and I wonder how much is changes or lost in translation. Or worst of all "localization".
I don't want to ever have to be at the mercy of western companies to remain faithful to the original, especially when the works involve extreme content like splatter punk and horror stories.
Shit might end up being destroyed by a retarded sensitivity reader/censor/localizer.

>>21854482
German because Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzche, Hegel, Husserl, Heiddeger, Wagner, off the top of my head. Also their are a few German alchemists whos names Im blanking on that I would like to read in their native language.

>>21854557
Seconding this.

>>21854482
Probably Ancient Greek. It looks hard as shit to learn, but has a wealth of literature. Besides, every single philosopher (and author I liked) worth a damn learned it anyway, so I'm thinking about making an attempt.

>>21854746
>but has a wealth of literature
There is like, 100 books written in ancient greek at best

>>21854550
poor schopie

Probably latin or italian.

>>21854482
Sanskrit in order to read the Vedas and talk to gods.

>>21854482
Miles mathis enjoyer i see

russian

>>21854550
>hes just me like fr

Anything but Latin is pseud tier. Not only can French, German, etc be translated to English easily but European languages can be learnt easily if you know Latin. Unlike Greek, there is more Latin literature than English, French, and German combined. It pays off. It just works.
I can understand if you choose Chinese or Arabic or Sanskrit though.

>>21854964
That guy’s insane but he’s based.

>>21854482
Italian.

>>21854482
German

>>21854482
>in order to read its literature
Probably russian, I love russian lit and I would love to learn to read the originals. But if I make the effort to learn a new language, it will probably be german, since it may aid me professionally in the future (I'm a STEMfag)

>>21854599
I’m gonna start next year

>>21854550
Hegelchads... we can't stop winning.

>people wasting this on italian
You could pick a language that takes other people a lifetime to learn, and you're picking the easiest language in the entire world

You can learn Italian in a month, a week or two if you already know another romance language

Ancient Greek and it's not even close

Czech

>>21855193
Indeed
>This famous actors last name was Smith. Looking at thepeerage.com, we find Smith of Clifton. Coincidence?

>>21856697
>entire treatise on how the real stephen hawking died in 1985 and was since replaced with an actor by Big Physics

>>21854482
I already speak the big 3 languages and german. Greatest challenge of learning language of sex lies ahead of me and i havent yet made a first step.

>>21856572
Italian may not be the hardest one, but "the easiest language in the entire world" is a fucking retarded statement. It's on the harder end of european languages if you are not a native romance speaker like a spanish or a french guy.

I think that Japanese is the only real choice. You get one language that you can master via magic, so you want to maximize your total gains by picking the hardest language, the massive number of weebs that try and fail is a testament that Japanese is hard, ergo Japanese. I could thus learn French, Latin, etc in between reading Japanese literature.

>>21856740
>big 3 languages
Chinese, English and Hindustani?

>>21854482
Albanian, Ismail Kadare fascinates me

>>21854482
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, German, French

>>21854550
She was seething so hard from getting pwned by him in one of those arguments she's describing

>>21856846
Big literary lanaguages I meant*

>>21856906
Ah, so French, German and Latin?

>>21856948

>>21856954

Chinese

>>21856960

>>21856988

>>21857009

>>21857037

>>21857041

>>21855187
And also Latin makes Italian very easy, which is one of the major literary languages in it’s own right, and also allows you access to earlier Italian literature since you’re closer to the source

>>21857050

>>21857106

>>21857112

>>21857127

>>21857127
sorry not sorry but these were my only pepes and janitor images. had to off the rails with vietnamese dog memes very fast as u can tell

>>21857169
its ok fren
ty

>>21857127

>>21854482
1. Greek (for the myth and classic writings, obvs)
2. German (for the lit and philosophy)
3. French (lit and philosophy)
4. Russian (Chekov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gorky)
5. Spanish (magic realists)

Test

>>21855187
>European languages can be learnt easily if you know Latin
I know people in their 30s here in europoor who won't shut up about having had Latin in their private school and how it makes all the other romance languages trivial. None of them know any romance languages. Even though they've had 20 years since their Latin education to learn them. Also, their English is horrendous, every single time.
I would argue that people who learnt Latin (and/or Greek) in school are, on average, much worse in modern languages. The story about Latin being this gateway drug for polyglocy just doesn't add up in practice.
Not saying you shouldn't learn Latin/Greek, but do it for their own merits.

>>21855187
>Not only can French, German, etc be translated to English easily
I guess it can, doesn't mean that it loses a lot of the meaning of the original. Even English translations of German generally lose a vast wealth of meaning in translation, even though both are Germanic languages and have some similarities. This is specially true for philosophy.
but European languages can be learnt easily if you know Latin.
Not really, there's not much in common that will facilitate the learning other than word cognates, a lot of which are already in the English language too anyway. The grammar, which is the most important part to understand when learning a language, is completely different even from its closest successors, Spanish and Italian.
>Unlike Greek, there is more Latin literature than English, French, and German combined.
And most of it is not worth reading unless you are doing specialized academic work. Greek alone has more worthwhile literature than Latin. That being said, it's not very smart to learn a language based on the quantity of works available. You can spend a whole life studying and dissecting Homer.

In any case, learning a modern romance language would probably be more helpful towards learning more languages. On the other hand you can learn German which will make easier the Germanic languages.
How many of these languages do you actually know anyway, for you to be making such asseverations?

>>21854482
>learn language
>for the literature
I wouldn't.

>>21854482
Sumerian

Hungarian

>>21854482
the openai vectorized encodings

>>21856803
It's literally the easiest to learn for a native English speaker.<div class="xa23b"><span class="xa23t"></span><span class="xa23i"></span></div>

>>21854482
Assuming we're ignoring English, given that a lot of us know it and read in it, the second would be Chinese, followed by German.

>>21854482
I already know Italian and Spanish. I want to learn German next.

>>21854482
French , for Sartre , Descartes and Voltaire.
then German for hegel and heidegger.

>>21860735
No, it's really not.

Spanish so I could read poetry to chubby latina girls.

Japanese so I could read The Human Condition, a book that became a huge hit in 1958, and was adapted into a highly regarded but relatively unknown in the west film trilogy of the same name.
Oh and would be neat to read Kawabata's work too.

>>21854482
Pali, or Latin.

is portuguese a good language to learn?

>>21854523
Correct answer.

>>21857345
I'm American and learning French made picking up Spanish very easy. I only speak both of these on a broken level but I think it is true that once you learn one romance language the others come easily. But learning Latin to learn Spanish is retarded.

>>21854482
It would have to be Japanese.
They have an excess of literature that will likely never be translated into English, and the mindset specifically around the Meiji era is very interesting.

>>21854550
>That dressing down by mommy
Remember when people used to be literate

>>21860793
I hate these charts.
It's worth remembering that there were fewer people living in all of Athens during the time of Greek tragedians then today there are spectators at a large sporting event.

My friend keeps saying he is gonna learn Hindi because it gives him a large pool of potential conversational partners and i dont get it. Who the fuck wants to talk to any of them.

>>21862816
IDK but Portuguese looks really appealing

>>21856572
>>21860735

It took me almost as long to learn Italian as i dd Russian and i still find it quite hard to follow conversation

>>21854482
I read a lot of German and Russian writers but I think they translate fine. Moreoever I'm reading mostly their prose, which is much more acceptable in translation.
I've had trouble reading the Divine Comedy in translation because I'm aware that I'm not reading Dante at all. But I would really like to, so that puts Italian at the top of the list.
I also read a lot of French writers, but again, mostly in prose... but I would like to read Baudelaire, which I refuse to do in translation. And my favorite writer is Sade, so I would like to get my hands on the Gallimard Ouvres and be able to read it all in his own tongue. But again, being prose, I'm sure it translates fine, so it's less urgent than Dante.
I finished the first Cambridge book on Latin some time back and had a passable ability to read basic sentences, but then I lost interest and subsequently all my little fluency. I really enjoyed the language though, it's pristine. So that's the only case of a language that I might like to learn simply for the language itself. Anything I would read in Latin, like the Ovid or the Aenid or Caesar, would in all honesty only be for the sake of reading and appreciating the Latin.
I'm not especially fond of the idea of learning new languages though, it's a huge time sink just to get a little fluent and there is plenty to read in English (fortunately the richest language for literature) and in translation so that I don't feel compelled like someone less fortunate, say, an Italian, to rummage around in other languages for meaningful works. So I'm not sure I'll ever follow through. I think if I'm honest with myself, the only one I might learn is French, because it comes very naturally to me in the little I've learned, like I was French in a past life, and because of my Sade mania.

>>21854482
Yiddish

>>21854482
I already learned one of them and I'm learning the other right now. Japanese and German. I'm absolutely floored at how easy German is. I'm not sure if it's simply not as difficult as people make it out to be, or if Japanese is just that much harder.

Ill say this. It took me a year to learn enough Italian to hold a light conversation or to read the news, but another 2 before i felt comfortable with proper literature, and there are still people i cant tackle.

It can get delightfully complex, which is a mark of a good system

>>21857345
Why are you advocating for unprincipled exceptions?

Bump

>>21861197
It is widely known as such and has been for centuries. Maybe the only thing easier is Spanish but Spanish isn't a real language so it doesn't count.

>>21864978
>don quixote was written in a conlang
conlang bros we are winning

>>21862902
I'm finding German difficult myself, the sentence structure is fuckign warped.

>>21854857
based

>>21866169
A lot of the time it just feels like highly stylized English to me (think Shakespeare). As long as you can read Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, I'm sure you can understand German sentence structure. It's just not bound by word order as strictly as English because of its case system. Try reading a parallel German Bible, starting with John.
https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/parallel/german/index.htm
This site also has some better audio recordings, but it's a different translation. https://www.jw.org/de/bibliothek/bibel/bi12/bibelbuecher/johannes/1/

>>21866209
Ok, thanks for the tip.

>>21854482

Arabic
French
Russian
German

French is the language of degeneracy.

>>21868884
agreed. i don't know why anyone would want to learn it. to read sade? lol.

>>21854533
what interesting books in Hebrew could you recommend for someone speaking this language? אתה מדבר עברית מקראית, מודרנית, או גם וגם?

German or Italian or French because I like literature of Renaissance (Italian) and of Romanticism (German and French for better understanding of English) the most, or just >>21856692 because it's funny language
Russian is a bit of the meme, like Evola on 4chan. They are great, ngl but they owe much of their success to Anglo-Saxon and later American pop culture (like French wines, Japanese swords or seeing British accent as the posh one) and it's probably thanks to good translations (didn't read anything Russian in English)
I can't think of anything French that would interest me enough to read in the original except maybe Hugo's Les Miserables or d'Artagnan Romances by Dumas but I'm a plebe so what can I know. I like their comics though
I heard that Arabic poetry is decent
Latin is a solid choice but ancient Greek is harder
>>21856827
But knowing the language is also knowing the culture and what if someone doesn't like Japanese culture?
>>21857345
It's so called illusion of knowledge. And just because they didn't use this advantage to learn a language doesn't mean they aren't right

>>21854482


Spanish.

>>21856803
>Italian may not be the hardest one, but "the easiest language in the entire world" is a fucking retarded statement. It's on the harder end of european languages if you are not a native romance speaker like a spanish or a french guy.

as a brazilian I find it very easy

>>21862816
>>21871156
hey brazilian bro, is portuguese a cool language? how would you compare it to spanish?