English, German, Yiddish, Plautdietsch, French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Ladino, Italian, Latin, Chutch Latin, Corsican, Sicilian, Romanian, Dutch, Luxembourgish, West Frisian, Cornish, Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots, Breton, Danish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, Swedish and also Ancient Greek.I currently know Yiddish, Catalan, Latin, and French. How realistic is this goal? I figure once I get to 10 or 15 I'll hit exit velocity and the rest will come naturally with very little study. My goal is to be able to read absolutely everything in the Western Canon.I have an IQ of 110 but lots of free time.
>>24963845*Romance, Germanic, and Celtic
>>24963845I predict you will burn out after 2 months of learning your first language, which will be German or Latin.
>>24963873Well it's not as bad as you, who couldn't finish reading the post.
>>24963845It's a lifelong work. Definitely possible, but I venture to say you might not be doing a lot of other scholarly work that would compete for the same time and focus requierd to learn the languages.
>>24963845There used to be better bait on this damn board
>>24963845Goddamn why ??? You assign too much credit to the great authors and their ideas to think that only by reading them in their original will I be able to consoom them fully. The beauty lost in translation is not worth abandoning your time to do great things for yourself, and develop your own *creative* skills.
>>24963946>abandoning your time to do great things for yourself, and develop your own *creative* skills.What does this mean? I should write poetry instead? I'm not cut out for that.
>>24963845Why do you know Catalan and not Spanish?
>>24963985i spent a summer in the arms of a hulking catalan nationalist
>>24963951Don't waste your life. To your happiness, the most beautiful words of another won't even compare to every little things that you have made out of you and for yourself; if we learn it is to create.The strongest and fondest memories are always made of a certain pride that you have brought yourself to those instants: a little witty joke that you made and made everyone laugh, looking at your family and feeling it is a result of your work, writing a shitty thing that made you smile, speaking boldly defying expectations and going against the current.All of those are "creative" or have involved a certain unique thought, an impulsion, a connection, that you only you had and acted on. Feeling out of habit, out of conformity, out of passivity, is where creativity lies, it doesn't have to be art.
>>24964047I think if I commit four hours or so (more on vacation) daily for the next 10 to 15 years I could easily fulfill my goal. It's not like I'm locking myself up in a basement.
Unless you're an autistic savant or as devoted and disciplined as you'd like to think you are (unlikely) that's not realistic. Start smaller and expand your goal as you go. Pick just a couple of those languages, which ever ones you find most interesting and you're drawn to.
I don't think this is that hard.I think if great thinkers of the past had all the resources we have today they would have done this too.There were no Cornish dictionaries. Now you can just click on a word and get it translated instantly.
Why bother learning the Celtic languages? Gaelic literature, the magna opera of which are not written in the modern tongues, is essentially isolated from the Western Canon. Brythonic literature’s greatest influence is on the French and English Arthurian cycles
>>24963845You'll die before doing it. Just learn four or five.
Learn Old NorseI don't know why you want to learn so many meme languages but Old Norse is solid
As a Ukrainian, who is able to read in 7 foreign languages (Russian and Belarusian by default, English, German and Norwegian Bokmål by learning, Norwegian Nynorsk and Danish by knowing Bokmål), I can say that it would be still very OK if I knew only 2 languages (English and German, for example), because I don't have time to meaningfully read more than in 3 different languages per week: there are to many tasty books in English and German (I read mainly non-fiction), so I have like only one day for Bokmål and don't use other languages at all.My advice: choose 2 languages with large scope of content (in which you are interested; there should be free books on shadow libraries, audiobooks on torrents, etc) and learn them.
>>24966726don't you have a van (Ivan) to catch?
