Is it worth it to learn Japanese for their literature?
>>25296999Yes and no.Hard as fuck language (and I'm a native Spanish speaker, it's even harder for native anglophones.)
If not for their literature you can read it for their hentai doujins.
>>25296999AI translation is to a point where even if a work doesn't have an official translation, you could understand what you're reading for the most part.I'd rather deal with regularly improving shit translations than spend 2k hours learning kanji that won't even help me understand idioms and other cultural specific shit anyway only for me to struggle through reading at a level that would by that point still be worse than the fucking AI translations are by then.Hell, manual, tool-assisted line by line translation of anything in Japanese you could possibly want to read would invariably take less time for a non-speaker than actually learning the language if you aren't planning on reading a metric fuckton of untranslated shit. And you'll slowly pick up the language from that to boot.Unless you are literally working in the translation space, do not bother.
>>25296999Yes if you're also a weeb and/or gamer. No for just lit.
>>25296999Yes, but you should also learn for self actualization.If you just want to read untranslated works, AI can (sadly) do it for you. To learn you have to really want it.
>>25296999I would rather learn chinese.
>>25296999For me, no, in a hard language and for a pair of books is a waste of time, it's better to learn ancient Greek.
>>25297514For what? They produce nothing (literature wise)
>>25297650Why do you have the need to loudly and proudly announce your stupidity and ignorance?
>>25297656You are free to prove me wrong (you won't)
>>25297650>romance of the three kingdoms>a dream of Red Mansions...https://www.shortform.com/best-books/genre/best-chinese-books-of-all-time
they have some good poetry and philosophy. their fiction is dogshit
>>25297657You are uncultured retard, I don't give a shit about proving you wrong. Go kill yourself.>>25297708Chinese classics are some of the best works of literature ever. Namely Dream of Red Chamber and Jin Ping Mei, 17th and 18th century books that are equivalent of western 19th century realist literature but outclass it (even the likes of Tolstoy). However I have to say that Journey to the West and Romance of 3K is what interests me the least.One cannot forget Confucius and Laozi, some of the best philosophy and lot of it is lost in translation.However 20th century Chinese literature is just as impressive. Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Su Tchung are all authors that are great in translation but must be even better in chinese. Namely Yu Hua is my absolute favorite. And even contemporary chinese stuff is great, recently I've read translation of Northern Girls by Sheng Keyi and it was great window into China, but reading it in original must be even funnier since huge part of the book are the different chinese dialects.Finally: there are too many annoying whiteys learning japanese and korean and invading those countries already.
>>25297714>我を待つと君が濡れけむ足引の山の滴に成らましものを (万葉集 2.108)I like that they were already doing the 'reincarnated as a hotspring' thing in the eighth century
>>25296999What do you mean by their literature? The farther back you go the more Chinese it gets
>>25296999So far as I can tell nobody who actually knows Japanese has answered you so far I would say it's absolutely worth it for 20th century literature, people tend to forget that Japanese is the 8th largest language in the world by number of native speakers (and even by total speakers it's 13th, right next to German), not some minor language with a niche literary output. One major caveat though is that, compared to English where the average person can easily understand prose texts from the 1600s and loosely follow texts as early as the 1300s, Literary Japanese went through an enormous transformation around 1900 to bring it in line with the demotic standard, followed by another massive orthographic reform around the 1940s. I can read literature from ~1905 without any trouble but literature from ~1885 is borderline incomprehensible>>25297793This is true in nonfiction but for literature it's actually the opposite, the further back you go the less kango you find (e.g. there's very little in the Taketori Monogatari and none in the Man'yōshū)
>>25297850I see. I appreciate your perspective as someone who speaks the language themselves. I knew about the major language overhaul in Chinese but I was unaware of the reform you mentioned.>>25297550>>25297514>>25297507>>25297494>>25297033>>25297005Seems like it would be best for me to go ahead with my plan of learning French and German instead. Even the pieces of Japanese media I'm interested in probably have or will have translations that suffice anyway.
>>25296999I have been learning Japanese for the past decade, speak it pretty well and can read it as well, but I prefer to read english translations of Japanese literature. Perhaps I'm losing something by reading translations, but when I read in Japanese I spend more time mentally translating sentences than I do being immersed in the story. Also my reading speed in english is at least 5x faster than in Japanese
I was studying Japanese for literature but I decided to take a break from it temporarily (next 4-5 years)Instead I've gone back to studying classical chineseI like Japanese though and I'd like to study kobun one day as well
>>25298830The language looks more and more daunting as I hear anecdotes like this. It is beautiful, but I doubt I'll be able to stick with it for that long while having to fall back on English translations all the time.>>25298837Best of luck, anon.
>>25296999nope
>>25298852If you're into it, don't be daunted. I never imagined I'd become as proficient with it as I currently am. I don't read literature in nip but I do read manga and I find it's both enjoyable, not too difficult to understand, and is a good way to learn new words. If you're serious about learning Japanese, I highly recommend using something like WaniKani. I comfortably learned 2500+ kanji over a couple of years by using it.
>>25296999I read 23 books in japanese last year and it was mostly slop. Just read their classics translated
>>25297737NTA, but seriously, what would you suggest are the best works of JP literature?
Not...really. Classical Japanese literature is a temu version of Chinese literature, modern Japanese literature is a temu version of 19th and early 20th century western literature. For the most part.Anglos are also quite fortunate to have great translations of the modern Japanese classics. Seidensticker, Donald Keene, Howard Hibbett...
>>25296999Bug person language. Avoid at all costs.
