Alexander Arguelles, linguist and polyglot who speaks 50 languages, believes that we should all learn six languages that fall into four categories:>classical languages of one’s own culture>major living languages of one’s broader culture>the international language>exotic languages.Thus, a well-educated Westerner should know: a) Latin & Greek, b) English & French, Spanish or German, c) Russian, and d) Persian or Arabic or Sanskrit or Hindi or Chinese or Japanese.How many of these do you know?
English
>>24985064I took intro courses on Latin, I have English as a second language, German as a third and Spanish as a fourth with descending fluency. I also took an intro on Russian but we really didn’t dig deeper than some basic vocabulary and the cyrillic alphabet. According to Irving Finkel sumerian isn’t that hard to learn; https://youtube.com/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBAIt’s always looked interesting.
>>24985064> Argüelles is highly proficient in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Catalan, Swedish and KoreanNot impressive. He maxxed out on learning easy European languages that facilitate each other. And then learned the easiest Asian language there is, second to Malaysian.>But he knows how to say hello in 50 other languages!!
>>24985084No, he actually knows upwards of 20.
>>24985064I know my native language, English, Python, C, C++ and JavaI also know about finite state machines, context free grammar and turing machines.
For me it's >none>French>French?>Old IcelandicI studied Japanese for 8 months or so casually but I stopped after I realised I didn't want to devote the time needed to study it
Been studying Japanese for 7 years. It's a waste of time. Never learning a new language ever again.
>>24985064>None>Spanish>English>JapaneseI'm fine with what I have now. No desire to learn Latin or Greek.
>>24985064Brilliant man. Learned a lot from his Youtube videos and web forum posts. He was part of a web forum I joined many years ago called how-to-learn-any-language where he and many other brilliant polyglots like Richard Simcott got together to share their love and knowledge of language learning. The forum got hacked I believed and shut down but I tell you his posts were gold. I owe a lot to Alexander Arguelles and Richard Simcott. Brilliant guys.I'm a native English speaker who learned Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Egyptian Arabic. Homeric Greek is one I always wanted to learn but it's hard to find the time now that I'm older.
