Who is the Chinese Dostoevsky?
>>24821632Luo Guanzhong. Also:>learn ChineseWhy would I need to speak Chinese when they already speak English?
>>24821632
Lao She
>>24821632Why are sinoboos such retards? Imagine thinking fuckin' Chinese carries more weight than French and German, or that Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Vietnamese have any importance whatsoever lmao
>>24821779Right? Who the fuck is learning fucking Hindu? Or Chinese? If you want to learn a second language better learn German or French
Lao Gan Ma is famous for his great work Bing Chilling
>>24821632Yu Dafu
>>24821796He's great.
>>24821632没有
>>24821779>>24821792I think Chinese might be very useful to learn. The thing about German and French is that Germans, Austrians, Swiss people and the French already speak English.Dunno why anyone would want to learn Hindi. Japanese should be higher since Japanese people tend to be terrible in English.
>>24821673>Why would I need to speak Chinese when they already speak English?Less than 5% of China speaks english and that is a "speaks english" speaks english mind you.
>>24821632>moortugal>Chinese shillWhy are they like this?
>>24821632This is cope, only English and Russian is S tier importance
>>24821632Portuguese has the wrong flag. The most important portuguese by all metrics is the brazilian one...
>>24822295This was my first thought aswell. The twitter poster is from Portugal lol
>>24821779French and German are nice to learn because they are beautiful and come from nice countries to visit and because of the cultural weight, but learning them does not open you to any new literary and cultural tradition -- the amount and quality of crossover with English is high. Learning Chinese, though it's not a beautiful spoken language (written, it's the coolest in existence) and it is not a country you'll likely ever visit and doesn't have lofty cultural capital, does open you up to the greatest non-Western literary and cultural tradition, the vast majority of which is untranslated and in literary forms that you have no idea of.
>>24822312How long to learn Chinese good enough to read it?
>>24822340NTA, but longer than for any other major language. Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce it, and you will have to painstakingly draw it in google translate because you can only do pinyin input if you know the pronunciation. Or you can look it up in a confusing radical based dictionary.It's possible to learn but it's annoying. Also, proper nouns are hard to distinguish from regular nouns, and parts of speech are also opaque so it's hard to tell what's what at a glance, unlike say Japanese where the morphology is clear.
>>24821632Arabic is clearly more important to know in the 21st century than French, the entire first quarter of this century is almost exclusively downstream from foreign campaigns in the middle east
>>24822312>open you up to the greatest non-Western literary and cultural traditionimplessiveJapan lit is amazing and they didn't go on a communist rampage
>>24822420>they didn't go on a communist rampageThere's still time, they can still steer out of that skid.
>>24821990they all have to take english as part of their schooling. the younger generation all speak english to some extent.
>>24822385>Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce it, and you will have to painstakingly draw it in google translate Do you not know that you can take a photo of something with your phone and have Google run a search on it? You can also just upload it into ChatGPT and it will tell you the character.Learn how to learn, anon
>>24822385>Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce itNot entirely true; most characters consist of a phonetic component giving approximate pronunciation and a semantic component giving general category of meaning. If you're already familiar with the word from spoken language you may well be able to connect the character to it.
>>24822505The ones you meet in Western countries, maybe
>>24822505"To some extent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the Americans who take Spanish or French in school, how many can order a coffee in it ten years later?
>>24822491>>24822420holy cope
>>24821779You're at a massive advantage in STEM if you can read Chinese because many of the papers being published are in Chinese. Plus a good 50% of the STEM forums for technical questions and discussion are happening behind the Mandarin curtain on the Chinese internet.What German was to the early 20th century, and what Russian was to the late 20th century, Chinese is to the early 21st century.
>>24822767>and what Russian was to the late 20th centuryWho outside of the USSR spoke Russian in the late 20th century? Like do you have any examples of great thinkers or scientists learning Russian
>>24822776To my understanding it was widely taught in schools in Soviet-allied countries.
>>24822776Western engineers in the 1950s-80s could often read Russian, as they'd need to read technical papers coming out of the Eastern Bloc. They could often read German too. A lot of the aerospace engineers of the 1960s were able to read Russian. I said reading, not speaking. It's somewhat easy to learn a foreign language just to read it, especially if you're only dealing with a narrow range of words in your technical domain.
>>24822803Would technical papers from the Eastern Bloc generally be in Russian rather than Polish, Hungarian, etc even if they were from those countries?
>>24821792German and French will be dead languages in a few decades.
>>24822816Yes, they were basically all written in Russian. The Soviet Union hosted all the aerospace shit and military technology, so all the research that was on the periphery for STEM was being written in Russian. I think East Germany may of been somewhat of an exception.NASA used to host Russian language learning courses for their engineers. Although by the time the 80s rolled around it was becoming rarer as Russia was just that far behind. But you could find Engineers fluent in Russian well up into the 00s. I do seriously think that studying STEM in a Chinese university will become a bit of a flex in a decade or two, and I think the diaspora Chinese have such a massive advantage over other westerners. Getting access to both technical information on western forums and eastern forums.
>>24821779France and Germany are politically irrelevant
>>24822420Japanese literature pales in comparison with, say, French literature, and as for Chinese literature, let’s not even talk about it.
>>24823383>Japanese literature pales in comparison with, say, French literatureof course, but after euro lit it's the next best thing, much better than Chinese lit.Their approach to lit in the 1920 to 1960, inspired by the european tradition, is very interesting.
>>24821632he was mostly right
>>24823456Honestly I'm not as well versed in Jap lit than in French lit but from what I've seen the Chinese one seems more rich? I only read some classics from both
>>24821632There are more foreigners learning Korean than Chinese, it's so funny when chinks think their language is relevant.
>>24821632Portuguese and Hindi are way more important than Russian though
>>24822312The only reason why French is considered a beautiful language is because people associate it with the country it self. If a shithole in Southeast Asia spoke it then it would’ve been considered ugly
You should know at least 3 languages fluently anyway. Monolingualism causes your brain to atrophy and locks your perspective into a single culture shared by a language group (in the case of English where it is the lingua franca, the perspective of the global educated elites)
>>24822677*silly trite cliche* back at you.
>>24822340If you are good at memorizing characters then it won't take long. The grammar required for the basic meaning of most sentences is simple, so your main task is acquiring vocab.In some ways Chinese is the simplest language on Earth. There are no declensions or conjugations. Just characters. You want to denote an event has been completed? You add a character. You want to turn a statement into a question? You add a character. It's beautifully simple. >>24822385I read on a computer and use the zhongwen pop up app which automatically translates characters for me. It's much easier reading Chinese than French which requires figuring out how a word is being conjugated on the fly.
