My first language is spanish and I learned english, Normally I read in spanish literature from other romance cultures like french, and russian literature because I have heard that both spanish and russian the difference between formal and informal speaking is more prominent, a thing that would be less noticeable in english.And in english, literature from germanic languages and more obscure books that would be impossible to get in spanish.In which languages y'all chose to read?
>>23624423English and Japanese. Japanese isn't worth it.
>>23624423Any language I can that I also like to read in. Some books go ocer me, but even those I get beyond the basics off.
>>23624423For most things I read in English. For specific stuff like the Edo period or Chinese warlord era I read in their respective languages, Japanese and Mandarin. Last time I read something in my native language was like a decade ago.
>>23624423>English >French>Spanish >Italian>German>Portuguese Currently working on improving Latin, Greek and Russian.
>>23624662and your native language is?
I have been reading in French almost exclusively for a year
>>23624675Turkish.
>>23624619I feel you, the only interesting things that I can think of Japanese literature is the Kojiki, Nihonshoki and maeby some of the Murakami books, the rest is pasable, you should only lean Japanese if you are a weaboo
>>23624671uh, that's nice, I would like to go to the same path of being a polyglot for reading purposes, but the thing is, is it worth to learn so relatively close languages? In the sense, if I already know Spanish, does it worth learn Italian or french? Or a good translation is enough? would like your opinion in that, because in in between starting French or Russian
>>23624423the original language obv
>>23624423I only read in proto-indo-european, and I only read Junie B. Jones novels
>>23624671I hope to fluently read the following languages one day>English (NL)>French>Italian>GermanRussian seems too difficult to be able to learn to read fluently
>>23624423English, Persian, and Classical Arabic, sometimes Hindi too but I'm not fluent in anything besides English. Briefly studied Japanese but dropped it.
>>23624423>Swedish/Norwegian/Danish>English>日本語Wish I had maintained my school french, but alas, not a very exciting language for a teenager.
>>23624671Five of those are the same language with a different accent.
>>23625761if Spanish French Portuguese and Italian were the same language would be have the craziest literature tradition
>>23624671Read Grande Sertão: Veredas
>>23625972>Eu falo: português, alemão, francês, inglês, espanhol, italiano, esperanto, um pouco de russo; leio: sueco, holandês, latim e grego (mas com o dicionário agarrado); entendo alguns dialetos alemães; estudei a gramática: do húngaro, do árabe, do sânscrito, do lituano, do polonês, do tupi, do hebraico, do japonês, do checo, do finlandês, do dinamarquês;Basado?!
ESPAÑOL, ENGLISH, PORTUGUÊS.
>>23624882It obviously matters for poetry, but prose is usually a one-to-one translation for the Romance languages. Even so, the sonority and feel of the different romance languages is lost when translating across. It's worth it if you're obsessed with languages and romance philology, especially considering that a good portion of the western canon is originally in French, Italian and Spanish (you get Portuguese for free after learning these)
>>23626038makes sense, poetry is always really delicate with translations, at lest for me that why I read it in the original language, even if I don't understand it, with a translation by my side. But I think I will stick with learning Italian and french, they are similar to Spanish, but being my first language it is going to me relatively more easy, guess that I will only learn russian and not russian and Serbo-Croatian tho
>>23624423Lithuanian and if it's not available in it, English. I almost exclusively read translations.
>>23626052Yeah, those honestly shouldn't be too hard if Spanish is your first language. I learned French first, but after that, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese were a breeze.
>>2362442320, native language English.Ancient Greek, Latin, EnglishLearning French right now and will learn German afterwards for all the historical and philological works. I would like to learn Coptic or Arabic one day for all the eastern Christian works but most of them are in French or German so it's not really essential.
>>23626486makes sense, question, is it worth it to learn ancient greek? or is better to learn modern greek? I like ancient greek for the literature, the bible etc, but is more difficult to find resources compared to modern greek? Also, some meanings and stuff is lost in modern greek translations? or is almost the same? Curious because I wanted to learn greek but didn't know if I wanted to lean to ancient/koine or modern
>>23626527Tbh if you don't particularly care about modern Greek I wouldn't learn it. Just start with Attic Greek. There are also plenty of resources for ancient Greek so I wouldn't worry about that. I could give you some advice on where to start if you want. Also if you learn ancient to a pretty high level, modern won't be too hard. I've studied a bit of modern and many of the changes make a lot of sense when you know ancient. For instance, θέλω ἵνα (basically "I want to") turned into θα and is used with the future. ἵνα ("in order that") to να. Hortatory subjunctives take ας ("let") which comes from ἄφες ("let"). There's a video by Deka Glossai that goes over the main differences. So you could get modern grammar down fast and then just input. I'll probably study modern more indepth at some point since I want to read the more vernacular Byzantine authors, and medieval Greek is very similar to modern. As for meaning lost in modern Greek translations, I couldn't tell you since I don't know it well enough.
>>23626570Thankyou anon I guess I will learn some ancient variation of greek and start from there, I suppose at the end I will learn most greek variations to some extent
>>23626589Ofc, φίλε. Come to /clg/ if you ever need help.
I read in Spanish, English and German
>>23624423English, Classical Chinese, Latin. My Mandarin can pass in a lot of contexts. I wish my German was better.
My first language is English and I learned Spanish. I read the Bible in both languages as well as interlinear text in the original languages. Have read novels in Spanish, lot of books translated into English from other languages. I study languages, learning Arabic.
>>23628343I have family from Mexico and in Mexico, in Texas most people speak at least some Spanish. In studying the Bible, I've studied Hebrew and the Hebrew alphabet, which is really very similar to the Arabic alphabet.
>>23628351Spanish and Hebrew both help with learning Arabic as Spanish has many words borrowed from Arabic.
>>23628340What did you do? Learn Mandarin first and then switch to Classical, or just slam right into Classical and acciddentally learn a bit of vernacular along the way?
>>23628369Spain itself has an Islamic history. There is also a difference between modern Arabic and classical Arabic. The modern Arabic used in newspaper and broadcasting, or say the military, is not the same as classical Arabic of the Quran.Translations of the Quran are also counted as only translations, scholars make an interpretation and can insert lies as well. If it is not Arabic, many say that it is not the Quran. While Islam is a religion and not a race, it is distinctly Arabic in scripture and often in common parlance.There is also an influence on Western literature. Juan Andres writes that Dante was influenced by Arabic traditions in his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, pinned on the front of this board. Specifically, a book that tells the story called Miʿraj that is one of a two parts, meaning ladder or ascension.Alfonso X of Castile, a Christian ruler also called "el Astrólogo", had a doctor named Ibrahim al Tulaytuli translate the book. Now the poem itself is in Italian and is epic in scope, and it also matches much of Mi' raj or part what is called the Night Journey. Many of the encounters for example are repeated in the story, though it is a deeply religious Christian text.
>>23628351for Arabic did you learn Estandar Arabic? or did you learn an dialect? I have hear that the best dialect to learn is Egyptian for the massive population and how central is between Moroccan and Arabic dialects, also is true that arabics understand Estandar Arabic but can't speak it?
>>23624679pourquoi?
bump
>>23629429Because my reading fluency isn't where I want it to be so I need to read as much French as possible in order to improve I just don't really have the time to read in English anymore Also over the course of the year I've become increasingly obsessed with France
>>23624882>I would like to go to the same path unnatural> is it worth to learn learning>so relatively close such>In the sense that, >does it worth learn inconsistent even within 2 sentences>Or a good translation is enough? incomplete sentence + lack of question form inversion of verb>would like your opinion in thatweird unnatural subject dropping, ON that> in in betweenprobably a typowhy don't you just work on English first buddy.
>>23631093because it's a shit language, besides being the Lingua Franca y don't care much about it also, my priority is reading not speaking/writing in English, and my writing style is just erratic in any language
>>23631104your writing style is shit and you have shown you don't understand basic english grammar. how do you expect to get anything meaningful out of other languages that you couldn't just get in translation if your understanding of grammar is so bad? If you can't learn English grammar, how the fuck are you gonna get a fluent enough grasp in Russian grammar for it to be worth it? I'm trying to save you the waste of time dude.
>>23631121yeah, is shit because I just rant, in a language that I'm just exposed trough internet and some books, of course is shit besides that, I just prefer to rant instead of doing it correctly and without typos, is an online discussion I'm not going to put much effort into it
>>23624423Spanish (first language) and english for anglo and obscure authors, learning french to be able to read french novels untranslated (but also because I like the language), will consider learning german after getting french down.
>>23631104>>23624882>>23631134based Latinxgod not being mentally colonized by English. I respect you more than these Eurocucks who speak English better than their own mother tongue.
English only. My native language is Russian but i have zero interest in most of the things written in Russian. I haven't even read classics like Tolstoy/Dostoyevsky. I can read a short story here or there but that's pretty much it.
>>23624423Japanese for Japanese literature and maybe Chinese classics, then English for other western works. I also ponder about what languages would be best for me to read and sometimes think I may be obsessed with following this general rule.
>>23631523>Japanese for Japanese literatureWhat do you read?
>>23631134thats fine but its not related to my point. you want to learn french or russian for the purpose of appreciating literature or understanding philosophy better than you could with a translation (I assume you speak spanish or something). If that's actually your goal, you need to be able to understand the grammar of your target language to a high degree of comprehension. You cannot do that in English as you have shown, a language which you have had way more exposure in by now than you will ever get in french or russian. You either don't have the ability to read well or you haven't studied grammar formally, so if you continue the way you are now without making some big fucking changes, you are just wasting time, because you will never appreciate something in the original text as close to as well as you would in translation. im not just some forum retard for context, i know latin, some ancient ancient greek, and japanese (a little spanish french and german, and korean too) so consider what I am saying.
>>23631656well, I didn't express myself well, I understand your point, and I'm working on my English through the Languages Department of my University. And my english is not bad, however, I don't want to take my time to properly write and think of every sentence. Usually I write a rant first and then I rewrite it properly, and that is quite boring and extensive to do just for a thread. That, I understand your point, however we are in an 4chan thread, it isn't so serious
>>23624423Croatian is my native language and my favorite to read in. Sometimes the Yugoslavian Serbo-Croatian translations are pure kino. Serbian is usually my last resort, especially Cyrillic. I don't read in English. I just listen to audiobooks.
>>23631700ethnic and political history aside, how interlegible is Serbian Croatian and Bosnian? It's like Hindustani where you have same language different writing systems or they are genuinely different?
>>23631721Depending on your native dialect, you can easily grasp Serbian. The shtokavians such as myself can understand 99% of Serbian. Our vocabulary is mostly the same, but we have different syntax. From my point of view, Serbian language sounds robotic, while Croatian sounds poetic. Serbs have stopped making up new words a long time ago and now they just talk in loan words like the Japanese with their eigo. Bosnian is like the middle ground, but their accents are comical. Imagine if the hillbilly speech became the proper way to speak English. That's what Bosnian sounds like.A very tldr reason why we understand each other is we based our grammars on the neoshtokavian dialect. Neoshtokavians were this confined people whose population exploded during the wars with the Ottomans and they filled every no man's land they could find.https://hr-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Isto%C4%8Dnohercegova%C4%8Dko-kraji%C5%A1ki_dijalekt?_x_tr_sl=hr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=hr&_x_tr_pto=wapp
>>23631546Whatever picks my interest among notable works in the past at the moment. I have been reading books mostly from the winners of literary awards in Japan to understand literary history and my favorites so far are Kenzaburo Oe, Kenji Nakagami, and Yoshikichi Furui. To be honest, I have to read more and dive into its history to understand my taste because my interest was focused on western literature.
i will learn additional languages after i master the first one
>>23631700Croatian too, if I'm reading russians I prefer a croatian translation, some fantasy is good in croatian too, but I mostly read in english since it's either the original language the work was written in or I can't bother finding the translation. I also think english is an underappreciated language in lit.
>>23631104based
