/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22944394]

Does learning a second language decrease your proficiency in English? I’m hesitant to learn French for this precise reason. Ever since I discovered that Shakespeare was monolingual the idea that one should dedicate themselves to mastering their native tongue and nothing more has been a persistent, nagging thought.

[Anonymous No.22944402]

Just fucking learn French, stop procrastinating and do it
2 languages is perfectly doable and will in fact enrich your appreciation of English and learning French in particular will enrich it

[Anonymous No.22944405]

>>22944394
Shakespeare knew how to read Latin and French

[Anonymous No.22944418]

>>22944394
Yeah I think it unironically does. I speak 2 languages and as an adult I learned a 3rd one to the level of being able to read it, and whenever I go through a period of intensely concentrating on one of the other languages I feel that my grasp on my native language fades a bit.

One thing involved here is that to be functioning at peak ability in your language you have to spend a lot of time just reading in that language. If you're concentrating on other languages that eats into both the time available for you to read in your first language and the mental energy you have.

On the other hand it does deepen your understanding of language in general, and especially the relation between thought and language, so there are benefits as well as drawbacks.

[Anonymous No.22944427]

>Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off- the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, reposses, prevail.

>Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding.

Written by a guy fluent enough in Spanish to translate Borges while he was living in Mexico. You'll be fine.

[Anonymous No.22944431]

>>22944394
You’ll be fine if you simply read and write a lot in English

[Anonymous No.22944467]

>>22944394
No. In fact French and English have a lot of similarities in both vocabulary and grammar. So it may strenghten your knowledge of English in terms of etymology.

[Anonymous No.22944525]

>>22944394
Absolutely not, many of the best English writers learned French, Latin, Greek, etc. It
only served to improve their understanding of how English works.
With that said, you should always be working to expand your knowledge of English.

[Anonymous No.22944567]

No, lmao. Not at all. Anyone who tells you differently is a retarded monoglot.

[Anonymous No.22944584]

>>22944394
Yes anon you true speak saying very. Once time clicks me in “how i learn the greeks talking of”, soon whenever can i knew this, me begin to retarded in mouth and the also brain can’t right. Do’nt done i big warn for you before too much lately.

[Anonymous No.22944589]

I'm learning French atm and I feel guilty reading anything in English
I want to reach a level where I'm 95% as comfortable reading in French as I am in English and so I just feel this constant urge to spend all of my free time reading in French, completely neglecting reading in English

[Anonymous No.22944616]

>>22944394
You'll probably be fine. If you're worried about it just engage more seriously with English literature and rhetoric to compensate

[Anonymous No.22944663]

>>22944394
By "mastering" a language, you're "mastering" semantic content. The idea that you'd lose your ability to navigate the ambiguities of meaning by understanding meaning in terms of two different languages seems really stupid to me.

[Anonymous No.22944680]

>>22944394
I'm French, and I've learned English and Spanish. For a while, the total immersion in English did reduce my capacity to express myself in French, but it never affected my understanding.
Keep in mind that it's all in the environment you build for yourself. If you're surrounded by english-speaking people, hearing english everyday, reading english regularly, you won't have a problem at all. And even if you did, it would go away the moment you start reading in english again.

[Anonymous No.22944682]

>>22944589
>I just feel this constant urge to spend all of my free time reading in French, completely neglecting reading in English
French guy here. This is how it worked for me with English. Keep going and you'll make it.

[Anonymous No.22944844]

>>22944394
>Ever since I discovered that Shakespeare was monolingual
Not true. He spoke English as well as his native Italian, and as a Catholic likely some Latin too

[Anonymous No.22944874]

>>22944427
How do I learn to really understand and produce text like this? I can grasp it, but it's written in a roundabout style I'm not used to. English is my third language.

[Anonymous No.22944880]

>>22944394
Certainly not if that second language is English.
In fact, I dare say the opposite is likely to be true.

[Anonymous No.22944910]

Does learning italian have the same etymological understanding improvement effect on one's grasp of English as say Latin or French? If anything, learning another language has only made me cherish my mother tongue more.

[Anonymous No.22945013]

>>22944394
Meds. Seriously.

[Anonymous No.22945437]

>>22944663
Language attrition is a common phenomenon.

[Anonymous No.22945453]

>>22944405
There’s speculation over which languages he knew. One of his plays essentially copies a story from the Decameron and this was before any English translations were available.

[Anonymous No.22945455]

>>22944394
No, you retarded monolingual.

[Anonymous No.22945463]

>>22944874
>roundabout
My improve your vocabulary first, Samir.

[Anonymous No.22945472]

>>22944427
How can anything grow among rooms instead of inside them?

[Anonymous No.22945475]

>>22945472
Do you not know the definition(s) to among, Mr. ESL?

[Anonymous No.22945482]

>>22944427
How can you justify writing paragraph long sentences with so many commas. And you expect someone to read at least 500 pages of this?

[Anonymous No.22945509]

Of course not. Rather, as Goethe says (if you can tolerate my quoting a non-English author for the moment), he who is not familiar with another language knows nothing of his own. You would only have to worry about losing your English if you emigrated to a Francophone region and used only French every day for many years. You may have other reasons for not learning French, but fear of getting worse at the language in which you read every day and conduct your daily life should not be one of them.

Also, as someone else said, a misconception to think Shakespeare was a monoglot. When Ben Jonson in his elegy said that Shakespeare had "small Latin," he was comparing Shakespeare with himself, and Jonson had better Latin than probably the average Classics PhD in the 21st century. Shakespeare definitely was able to read Latin and likely had at least some knowledge of French and Italian.

Or take Joyce (in my opinion the master of 20th century English prose). He was fluent in Italian and French and was an excellent Latinist. Or Milton (not personally my favorite), who wrote voluminous poetry in Latin and had a comparably strong command of Italian, French, ancient Greek, and Hebrew. Did they "lose their English"???

In conclusion, the best advice I have for you, as for so many others on this board, is: read a book

[Anonymous No.22946002]

the way to properly learn is with etymologies so you will always enhance all the languages you already know