New language

I'm going to learn a European language for Veeky Forums. I already speak English and German, which other language has the best literature that would be worth reading in its original?

Right now I'm leading heavily toward French since I'm reading Michel Houellebecq's Elementary Particles, and I would like to read the volumes of political literature that has been written. People like Michel Clouscard remain untranslated and are unavailable to me. Use this Thread to talk about authors that haven't been translated from your language if they are obscure, but good! Convince me to learn your language...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Clouscard

I'd say either French or Russian, I'd go for Russian but I'm biased 'cause I love Dostoevsky

You should learn the language that you are interested in.
French is a good choice for political works as it was a language that a lot early political scientist worked in. (And you already know German the other major political science language)

Learning Russian, while very hard and oft frustrating, is one of the most rewarding experiences-once you know enough to read in it.

I imagine there is a deluge of untranslated Russian works, do you have examples which might be interesting?

If memory serves right, there was a thread of an user talking about some translations of some Russian sailor novel by a Yuri M-something on here not too long ago. You might be able to find it on an archive.

Also, not that this would be untranslated obviously but, I recommend the Dover/Bantam Russian dual language reader for any Russian student who is looking for some extracurricular study. The stories are fun, short, and of varying difficulties.

The aforementioned user was the one translating the sailor stories, just to be clear.

Also, there is a Dual Language French reader from the same company. While I do not have it and have never read it (Presuming that it is off the same quality as the Russian one) OP may be interested in picking it up.

Finnish

Thanks, I'll look for the dual reader!

Norwegian, Czech, or something that's not as popular as the big ones. You'll be more interesting for it.

Latin.
Definitely NOT Greek. Better for philosophy, but in literature they only have the Iliad/Odyssey and Aneid is better than both. Sophocles and Aeschylus are worth reading though.

I swear, if any of you bozos come at me sucking Homer's dick I will bash you.

Any tips for learning German? I swear to god, artikels gonna kill me soon.

stop_posting.png

I don't know, I learned it as a kid and still mess it up sometimes, like anything though, the more you read the more you will learn, you just have to know it by heart basically until its intuitive, although you can converse with most people without problems even if you mess it up, also make sure that when you are talking about he/she/it the Artikel still determine their gender. So for example a when talking about a snake being your friend, you would say "Die (feminine) Schlange ist meine Freundin (w/ feminine penis)". Which is strange for English speakers cause they would never refer to a snake as "her" or a "gf". Just think about how you call a genderless baby "it" instead of he/she. That rule is applied to the genders of nouns in German, so the gender determines not only their article but their pronouns and the masculine, feminine or neutral versions of other nouns used in reference to your noun (i believe this is the correct words). It is strange, but you will be very satisfied with yourself once you begin to correctly gender things. Good luck, there are a host of German authors and poets waiting for you to discover them!

Latin's not that hard. He could do both.

my mother language is arabic but i learned english french and russian and trying german now the next logical one for you would be russian
and half ass easy languages french and spanish easier than german or russian you already speak german so the russian language wouldn't be that hard for you and again half ass easier ones italian spanish french as you can see im half assing english enough to read it can't do that with russian but the rest do it

and stay away from asian languages and middle eastren ones they are not worth your time

Italian or french. Leopardi or Baudelaire? Your choice.

greek or latin

alternatively learn mandarin/japanese/korean cause they are actually useful

Impara l'italiano brutta testa di cazzo, o vengo a casa tua e ti cago nel lavandino

Thanks for the reply man. But I am mainly learning it for a job or Erasmus in Germany. Do you have any recs for magazines or YouTube channels. They are probably easier to understand than novels and films

I'm not that guy but here's my two cents.
Dive straight into some short story reading, there's a torrent named "German graded readers", start reading that stuff.

French and English are the only languages that have always had great literature. German had good medieval stuff, but then nothing until Kant/Goethe/Schiller. Russian literature didn't exist until Pushkin, enjoyed a century of sustained greatness and then leveled out. Spanish has the golden age and the Latin American Boom, Italian has the big three and one or two good authors every 100 years. So yeah, French.

t. German native speaker

French is great also because they translate a ton of German stuff.

I don't really watch that much Youtube, I don't really subscribe to any magazines, but I do try to read the news regularly, but that could be confusing if you aren't too familiar with the political situation. Like the other user said, try your hand on some short stories.

Neither Persian or Arabic are worth learning? I've traveled to the Mid East and speaking the language would have bee nice. Don't have many authors?

Two points:

a) French is a dead language that will only live on a bastardized form spoken by Africans.

b) French literature is singularly awful. ""Enlightenment"" and ""modernism"" belong on the dustheap of history.

Learn Russian or Polish instead.

Did you get lost on your way to pol user?

> muh /pol/ bogeyman
Quel connard!

T'as quelque chose a dire un peu moins con peut etre?

> I've traveled to the Mid East and speaking the language would have bee nice. Don't have many authors?

Boku haram, you only ever need one book by one author, PBUH.

>Muh proud Polish people are saviours of the white race
I hope you'll move there soon

I'm not Polish, I'm Russian.

And yes, Polish people are self-destructive emotional wrecks and their retarded ethnostate is a joke.

You'll still get more use literature-wise out of Polish than out of French. (German is OK if you want to read philosophy or buy cheap boardgames.)

English and German is a pretty god tier combo. Actively learning German myself and I love the language so far. Even though I am not fluent it seems to just make sense in my mind.

I would suggest your 3rd language be one of the Romance languages. Spanish, French, or Italian depending on what suits you best.

>You'll still get more use literature-wise out of Polish than out of French. (German is OK if you want to read philosophy or buy cheap boardgames.)
You have to go back.

Arabic is very fun to learn I find. Persian is a lot easier as verb conjugation and sentence structure are very simple imo (studied Arabic for a year in uni, went to Iran for 6 weeks, so my knowledge is nowhere near fluent, mind you)

I'm not sure about Arabic literature's quality as I haven't read much of it, but just listening to it and getting the hang of a completely unfamiliar language make it really fun for me (though this quality is interchangeable)

Also, for the general thread, I didn't see Dutch mentioned yet, so I'll just suggest it then. There is actually quite a lively literary tradition in the Netherlands, which I'm only just discovering. Not sure if you'd want to agonize yourself with learning it though, I've been told it's quite difficult, and the guy I'm reading at the moment writes in colloquial spelling as well, which would be even harder.

Just pick whatever you want, you're going to spend too much time learning a language to have it be determined by someone on here, it'll be hard to stay motivated that way. Good luck though

Go back to where, fucktard? I never left.

Anyways, French literature? As in, Voltaire? Proust? Rimbaud? Dumas??! Don't make me laugh. (Or puke.)

You'll get more use out of mid-list authors like Sienkiewicz or Lem than any of that celebrated French tripe.

Did you not think Candide was a good book? =/

>polish nationalist
yeah bro don't forget kerijkjsk

I appreciate your effort to be a contrarian, I'm usually the one striving for that position, but you can't deny that French poetry is dope af.

> (You)
>Go back to where, fucktard? I never left.
Yeah, it shows.

since 1980s the arab world turned to propaganda novels and with the jailing of authors and religious and political censorship as an egyption we are fucked with whats happening in lebanon right now decent authors and writers published there without it we'have got shitty teen oriented writers books are written to mimic alain de botton and sucking teen dicks in novels to be qouted by a tumblr user with camu poster in the background

>Dutch
>Difficult
Dutch is one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers and the two are very similar.

Kokko kokookko koko koko kokoo?