A group wherein we learn a language through a great text, or multiple great texts, mostly verse. Cast your vote for a language you would be willing to learn. Voting ends in a week, then study begins. Obviously plenty of materials will be supplied. If you want opt for a other text lmk. You can also vote for a language that isn't listedGreek through HomerLatin through VergilHebrew. The BibleArabic, the Quran.Italian through DanteSpanish through Lorca, Neruda and MachadoGerman through Goethe and RilkeOld English through BeowulfFrench? Baudelaire and Rimbaud Russian? Pushkin, of courseMandarin, the Dao Te Ching and then classical Chinese poetry.
>>25089044That's pretty obscene
>>25089098Scared, Potter?
women are the devil
>>25089136>The greatest sin!>Tackiness!Papists can't lecture.
>women: *exist*>incels: >>25089098 >>25089136
>>25089044more?
>>25089148you're a hole
>>25089160Incels are the real holes. Absolute voidsMoid, foid, void.
>>25089163Incel doesn't mean anything, it doesn't tell you a single thing about who that person is but a woman is always a woman.
>>25089164It is a very specific label applied to a sub group of un-contented men.Women are a multiplicity. Often any given woman is also a multiplicity.
real pic
>>25089044Ew>>25089186Would
>>25089044gyatt daymn.
>>25089186This is AI
>>25089178I dunno I've been through several relationships and they all act like whores. You tell me.
>>25089285Men don't where they can?
>>25089285We both know that first sentence ain't true, nigga.
>>25089304You mean clause lil esl brobro?
>>25089290No. We are innocent. Men can't have babies either but I bet thats news to you, too.>>25089304Just ask your mom, Juan.
>>25089310>We are innocent.
>>25089044You just know
>>25089044The Dao De Jing isn't Mandarin, retard.
>>25089349You can find every single word that's in it in a Mandarin dictionary
>>25089044>French? Baudelaire and RimbaudOdd choices
>>25089350And they will mean different things, as it isn't written in Mandarin. You underestimate how different Mandarin is from wenyan.
>>25089354That's what makes them good
>>25089356Good Mandarin dictionaries feature etymology and archaic definitions.
A general note. Learning from great literature is fine and good, and one of the best practices for learning another tongue. However, the difficulty increases in layers with how obscured the language is from your own, as well as with the how obscured the experience is from your own. Too abstract? Just as bad as too literal. Too hard? May as well read something easy and actually learn something. One can "learn" Latin through Vergil because it is familiar and the student has gone through translations and drills. One will not learn Mandarin through Dream of the Red Chamber.
>>25089361Even so, the meanings will be difficult to parse, especially in the Dao De Jing. This is not to mention the entire other literary style and grammar of wenyan, or how Mandarin is literally the least suitable Chinese tongue to read wenyan with.
>>25089364I think you're confusing language with context. Chinese language far easier than Latin grammatically, far far easier. It just relies a lot more on what is unsaid and implied. It will always require commentary and annotation just like if you "learn middle english" you will still want a lot of annotations for middle english poetry
>>25089366Thd meanings are difficult to parse even for scholars of the language. In part because the work is deliberately ambiguous and because Chinese tends toward allusion anyway. But the archaic definitions are still in any decent Mandarin dictionary and those aren't going to be very different from a dictionary on archaic Chinese
>>25089370I think you don't understand grammar. I know both Latin and Mandarin, as well as others, to include "context-heavy" languages. You are underestimating 1) the difference between Mandarin and wenyan and 2) the difficulty of wenyan. It is better for someone like you to avail yourself of the many resources designed to help you along, though I suppose you learned English well enough, and probably still speak whatever poor language you grew up with.
>>25089381Just fyi "knowing" a language as an idiom in English is used to mean you have a shaky grasp, generally it's used in the form of, "I know a little x". We say "I can speak Mandarin" or "I can read Latin" if we want to suggest a firm grasp
>>25089385Is that ESL logic? I used "know" because I don't well *speak* Latin, which I do read. I speak Mandarin, and read it as well. To correct your ESLisms: to "read" language implies that you don't really know it in the way people might expect, and simply only read it, mayhaps even shakily. Faggot.
>>25089388In English, if we know how to read Latin, we say, "I read Latin," or, "I can read Latin." There are many people who speak languages they don't read, it is especially common among English speakers to know how to speak Spanish but not read it very well. With dead languages we almost always say read, of course. We say, "He can read Greek," since "it's all Greek to me" is an English idiom for something you are reading that goes over your head.
>>25089391Understand that I am far above your level, a native speaker unlike you, and an actual linguist by profession. "Idioms" aren't set across a language, nor are they monolithic. They vary by class (relevant here), education (relevant here), geography (relevant here, hopefully), and even individual (obviously relevant). Take your middle school education back to your country and lift them out of the stone age.
>>25089397Thank you for explaining what an idiom is, professor, your erudition is truly profound, Wikipedia has nothing on you
>>25089397>world-renowned scholar, knighted for his services, and spending Saturday night/Sunday morning arguing on 4chan
>>25089186Unfuckable
>>25089414Where do you think the real intellectuals are in our blighted society?
>>25089577Six feet under.
>>25089044What language do you actually want to learn?Some general thoughts below.Learning through verse is going to be a slog, but it depends on the language. Inflected languages should not be learned through verse in my opinion, unless they're short poems or you happen to have very well annotated readers. You'll have a lot more success learning german through Rilke vs. Goethe, even though German is not a language worth knowing. Do you know any of these languages already?You've also missed Persian, which is actually possible to learn through verse since the grammar is extremely simple, and you just need to grind vocabulary. Same with Portuguese or Romanian, which are comically easy to learn. The real question is what do you want to borderline commit to memory through the learning process? If you're not muslim you will burn out on the Quran. Italian through Dante is fun and easy. I memorized the first Canto when learning italian and it was helpful to practice / listen, and it's a good poem.You should just grind through a french reader if you want to learn french, especially if you don't already know a romance language. French is an easy language. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are bad choices to learn through; Montaigne or Voltaire would be easier.I vote for Eugine Onegin, using Mark Pettus' version and maybe Nabakov's annotations as the source material.Lorca is good, but only some of his poems. Neruda is overrated imo. Hebrew is not worth learning if you don't already know Greek or are part of the tribe.There are good resources to learn Homeric greek but it is unclear how much it carries over to other greek sources naturally. Homeric Greek courses / readers also tend to be 90% grammar based study anyway, so it's not nearly as enjoyable to practice.Learning Arabic through a non-Quran book, like the Muqaddimah may be more viable.Let me know what you think.
>>25089842>German is not worth knowing, learn Romanian, Persian and Portuguese
>>25089044>Dao Te Chingpick one or the other
>>25089860Romanian and Portuguese require almost 0 additional effort if you know other romance languages (french spanish italian). If you don't know one of french/italian, you've outed yourself>Countersignaling Sa'di, Khayyam, Hafez, Rumiخدا حفظت کنه
>>25089902A man of taste
>>25089927>I don't want anyone to know about my special clubRight, let's only read stuff no normie has ever heard of. Throw out Plato and replace him with Miguel Serrano?
>>25089044>Thesis>>25089186>AntithesisSynthesis
>>25089937>the writers in OP are obscure
>>25089388那,请你来证明一下。>他youyu考试成绩较高就好不youyu地请了朋友出来吃烤youyu,然后没人理睬就令他心情十分youyu请把上面的youyu换成汉字。额外挑战:把这句话翻译成现代汉语或英文。>地不可棄者,竊以腴地不可捐以資寇糧,要地不可借以長敵
>>25089044>Italian through DanteWhile it can be great to know where the Italian language comes from (Dante is considered to be "the father of Italian"), it is very different from today's Italian (the Divine Comedy is 700+ years old, after all). I'd recommend to use a more recent author, like Foscolo, Manzoni, Garibaldi (Memorie), Verga etc. alongside Dante.This is my opinion as an Italian native speaker.
>>25090132Good luck getting /lit/ to be more interested in reading Garibaldi than Dante
>>25090144I think Dante is a better author than Garibaldi too, but if you talk and write in 1300s "Italiano volgare" nobody in Italy will understand you (in fact, Italian students use notes and translations when they first study the Divine Comedy). Garibaldi writes in a modern Italian that can be understood by today's italians without notes. Reading Dante (or Boccaccio) to learn today's italian can be useful for abstracting some grammar rules and understanding why some rules exist today, but using it as a first source I don't think is a good idea.
>>25090195Realistically though do you think this particular board, if given the choice, would be more interested in being able to speak vernacular Italian, or being able to read Dante, Petrarch and Bocaccio?
>>25090207You're right. Then Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Cecco Angiolieri, Bembo ("Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua"), Tasso, Ariosto are all great readings. Machiavelli too.
