What languages have good literature?
I'm looking to learn a new language, but I live in the middle of the agricultural wonderland and I don't travel, so I'd just be reading.
My native language is French. I also speak English like everybody else and I started learning Swedish a while ago for some reason. Did some latin along time ago too, but I'm not really lookin to learn dead languages right now I think.
Bonus question : what language has the best literature?
What language has the best literature?
French.
English desu senpai
People are going to tell you to either learn German or Spanish, and those are the two best languages for literature you don't already know
I would personally recommend Spanish because I find it both prettier and I find Cervantes, Marquez, and Borges far more compelling than any gross German
As a native English speaker I think we have the best literature
>Russian
>French
>English
>German
in that order
>Russian
So you can be even more bored when reading Dostoevsky
Spanish is what I was most thinking of learning.
That or Italian since both would be pretty easy from French.
Did italians ever write anything good?
I think it sounds better than Spanish, but that may be because I associate Spanish with those trashy venezuelan guys that invade the fields in the summer and annoying TV shows characters.
the modern Italian corpus is seriously lacking compared to Spanish in my opinion. You have greats like Eco of course, but most great Italian lit is hundreds of years old and the language really isn't the same
If you're willing to masochistically torture yourself in a cruel, masturbatory sounding of the mind's urethra, try mandarin. but if you're not that crazy, try arabic.
it has many benefits:
1) incredibly large and varied vocabulary rich in nuanced dialects. does it mean "nephew" in Egypt? surprise! it means "multiple partner sodomy" in Kuwait.
2) phonetics that are naturally conducive to poetry and song. strike up a chord, pick up a sword, and serenade that infidel before cleansing the caliphate of their filthy presence.
3) a broad abundance of poetry, philosophy, fiction, and histories, all containing a significant amount of multiple partner sodomy.
4) a grammar that includes complex, 4-condition declensions, 12 pronouns with multiple contextual forms, multiple conjugation forms, twisted conditional syntax, a number system that is so pants on head ass backwards frustrating, and an entire new alphabet. Also, any native speaker you ever encounter will tell you that everything you say is wrong in some way.
How can English even compete?
not totally sure it that was the intention, but this post kind of makes me want to learn arabic
admittedly even learning the alphabet is fun. what I wrote about the grammar is no joke though, it is a nightmare.
can you explain why the numbering system is retard?
Translation software is on the brink of making learning other languages obsolete.
>not wanting to read a well written text in its original form
i bet you only speak english
I'm bilingual but learning entire languages just to read a few books is silly, especially since it would take you a decade to learn all the proper nuances to appreciate a master piece, if at all. A lot of things are lost in people who are not native speakers who grew up immersed to the referenced culture. You will never read a Russian work like a Russian because no matter how technically flawless your Russian gets you will not have the lived context of what it means to be Russian.
If you want to get a good feel for a text it is better to read a good translation by a professional translator than to engage with the main text with your limited grasp on it.
>the numbers we use are called arabic numerals
>check actual numbers in the arabic language
>it's completely unreadable gibberish
what did allah mean by this?
I don't see how a russian that lives in a shitty russian concrete town and that works a shitty job in an office can understand better than I would a text in russian written 200 years ago.
That's because you're American.
I think you'd be better off learning spanish. It would be easy for you since you are a french native. The sanish language has an inmense number of great works, and very diverse too, with al the different countries in Latin America plus Spain.
I think t would be even easier for you to lean italian, which also has great literary works, but not at the level of Spanish, i believe
because they were developed by the vedas (indo-europeans) which then spread to arab traders and europeans didn't know any better so they just called them arabic numerals
interesting
>Did italians ever write anything good?
You mean, apart from Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Aretino, Tasso, Bandello, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Vasari, Goldoni, Alfieri, Leopardi, Marinetti, Svevo, Pasolini, Pirandello, Moravia, Pavese, Calvino and dozens of others...? No. They never wrote anything good.
>I know nothing but here's my opinion btw
Inb4 butthurt memes, I'm not even Italian.
>but most great Italian lit is hundreds of years old
wrong
I don't know, I may be biased since I'm Italian, but you really don't seem credited to judge Italian modern literature. How many Italian works have you read?
Also, that remark about the language of the old masterpieces not being the same is kind of a stretch. Dante, which is almost as old as Italian lit gets, is understandable by most cultured Italians (obviously they may struggle with mythology/astrology/scholastic lexicon but that's another story).