If I were to learn a second language just for poetry what would it be?

You could learn both French and Italian in the time it would take for arabic script

Greek
German

Italian and Latin.

Language learning is for cucks.

t. Nietzsche

I'm a weeb so Japanese so I can read Haiku and samurai death poems in their original language.

For God's sake, learn a Romance language. German won't take you anywhere further than Goethe's house and Greek will take you as far as Greece, but if you learn Italian you will be able to go from Dante to Racine to Cervantes to Fernando Pessoa, from Firenze in the 1300's and the Italia of the Risorgimento to contemporary Brazilian favelas and the legends of Orlando, in a matter of two years at most, as long as your IQ is above 115.

This.

Chinese or any Romance language

Exactly. Non-romance speakers simply don't understand how closely the Romance languages are related. Once you've learned one, you know the grammar for *all* of them and about 70-80% of the vocabulary of one can be derived from that of the other. A never touched a French, Italian, or Spanish grammar in the history of my life but have read Dante, Cervantes and Camus in the original merely because I grew up as a Portuguese speaker.

You learn one major language and, by learning it, you also learn about 70% of what it takes to learn three others. And there are also the great minor ones: provençal, catalan etc.

Currently learnjng Mandarin/Traditional for many reasons, poetry being one.

Basing this on how far back the poetic tradition goes for China as well as the delightful possibilities for word play including pictographs.

Something fascinating about Mandarin that I have learned, compared to English which is a language of precision, is that Mandarin is very much one of implications so you can imagine how rich the poetry might be.

>grew up a portuguese speaker
>read Dante in the original without learning any italian
t. lying through his teeth
The Cervantes part is absolutely real tho, Camus less so.

French. Spanish or Italian are distant second choices.

>never touched a French, Italian, or Spanish grammar but have read Dante, Cervantes and Camus
sure

If you have a double language edition you can easily read the original and check the translation on the right page when you don't get one term.

China has a great poetic tradition, but there are many languages that would be more useful as the first foreign language of an English speaker.

From what I hear, people will usually take some 5 years to learn Mandarin. However, you can learn to read the Romance languages in half that time, and it will give you access to a larger number of literary traditions, which are also probably more important. More cultural variation too: life in a contemporary Colombian slum is completely different from life in a 13th century Venetian palace. So the range of reading and the range of cultural experiences that will be available to you will be much larger.

Maybe if you're interested in novels. If you enjoy poetry, Italian and Latin is the choice, no question.

Completely agree on the cultural variation thing

One can read Dante in the original without studying Italian, but not without learning it. What I meant to say is that learning Italian is such an organic process from a Portuguese speaker point of view that it doesn't count as learning the usual sense of 'studying' something. It doesn't really take any effort besides browsing the dictionary.

Again, I've never touched an Italian grammar in my life. I merely bought a dictionary, a few easy Montanelli history books, and armed with my Portuguese vocabulary and a bunch of words and expression I had gotten from watching too many Fellini movies, I dived right into the heart of the language, finished Montanelli, read some Calvino, some Leopardi, and then read Dante two months later. I had to take a look at the dictionary quite often while reading, but, in the end, it took me just nine days to finish the whole Commedia. The Convivio is much easier.

Yes, it is true. Only non-Romance speakers or Romance speakers whose IQ's are below the 115 mark will find themselves unable to believe what I've said.

>it took me just nine days to finish the whole Commedia
c-congratulations user..

Dude I agree with you, but leave the IQ meme to /pol/ for god's sake...

I'm a romance speaker with a 150iq lmao. you do you.

It's not a meme. You have to be able to make connections between the words you know very fast if you want to have any enjoyment while reading. And you need a good memory too. Many people can't do that, which is why there are Brazilians who can't even understand written Spanish - they fail to recognize simple verbal patterns.

No. You are not. Otherwise you wouldn't have said that.

Here's an image showing my annotations in one of the first pages, and then in the one of the last pages, of L'Etranger. As you can see, reading at first was very slow, but then it got so easy that I didn't really need to look for the words in the dictionary anymore, because it wasn't necessary for me to understand the book. What you gotta do next is to reread the book, now with all the unkown words right upon the page for your comfort, and reread it yet again, and then read more Camus, and then proceed to Flaubert etc.

Forgot to say: it took me three days to finish L'Etranger, which is pretty reasonable time. The only thing that really helped me that other PT speakers usually don't possess was knowing Italian, which can work as a fine bridge between Spanish/PT and French.

shitskin lmao

Yes I am lmao. Don't talk about IQ if you're gonna whine whenever someone more intelligent than you chimes in. Im a 150iq classical composing great dancing model fucking Veeky Forums posting chad who got into bitcoins 8years ago.

Keep in mind spanish not only allows you to read spanish poetry, but also south american poetry.

Do you want me to be an Anglo or something?

And Portuguese poetry too. Portuguese has one of the great poetic traditions of the world, but it is not very well-known. Great authors like Bocage, Mario de Sa-Carneiro, Jorge de Lima, or Manuel Bandeira are almost never translated, unfortunately.

Wait what? How?

Unless it's written in Quechua or another indigenous language...

This is fucking horseshit, how the hell does Portuguese carry over to French?

I know spanish and english, and can read portuguese fairly well (never tried italian), but there's no way in hell I could read a book in french, and neither can you

tl;dr -- stop lying

hahaha why do you keep posting you low iq brainlet? I thought iq was the definitive parameter in intellectual discourse?

In South America they speak spanish

pues amigo ecuatoriano no es espanol

>ecuatorianos no comenten por favor

Here comes the lmao115IQ brainlet again.

Sad cases.

I know lots guys like you. Above average intelligence, smug attitude, introverted, few friends. These people cling to the identity of the pessimistic arrogant unrecognized genius. I'm the 150iq guy from above, pretty social, I'm talented in pretty much every aspect of my life. Though, if it it makes you feel better, I am a huge drug addict. Anyways, you guys always react the same way. When you're confronted with someone intelligent AND capable in other areas of life where you guys are lacking; you always try to frame me as some not-so-intelligent extravagant dude, because you cannot come with the terms that you're not special. The fact that some people are intelligent and have a more fulfilling life than yours automatically disqualifies us from intelligence in your eyes. You are more intelligent than the average bloke, but that's it. Admit it and grow accordingly. People don't care for intelligent autistic antisocial types.

>They call me sad, they are envious of me.
>There is no way they are not believing someone on the internet, where people NEVER lie and don't pretend to be things they are not.

Oh shit fahm

he is. why would he invoke the argument of iq in the first place? dude's identity is built on his intelligence. he then replied that i wouldnt dare tell my iq if it really was this high. dude is iqcentric lol.

Is learning Arabic really that hard? I've been reading Conference Of The Birds and some other Sufi poems and they're beautiful enough in translation but I know I'm getting like 30% of how great it really is. I'm converting to Islam soon and plan on learning the language.

That work is in Persian, and Persian isn't hard to learn. Arabic is one of the most difficult languages to learn however.

arabic grammar is a nightmare to learn. and thats coming from a native arabic speaker.

Who is this semen demon
I want her to hurt my feelings

slav jawed Veeky Forums qt who understands the world because she read about Nietzsche

I mentioned it because - believe it or not - it matters. I don't know if it matters in whatever place you live, but it certainly makes a difference here in the third world, where the average is about 85-90. I've met people who spent five years learning English at the best private schools and still can barely formulate a sentence in this language and would never be able to understand a Shakespeare sonnet. Every single Brazilian you meet will be able to tell you similar stories. People even make popular jokes about it. Some people simply aren't bright enough to learn languages with perfect ease or to play a musical instrument. That's perfectly normal: humans are different. I myself would never properly function as a basketball player, because I'm of average height. However, I don't go around crying whenever people say it's necessary to be of a certain height in order to achieve success in the world of basketball.

I have my particular methods for learning Romance languages with incredible speed and have described them in this thread. However, they will not necessarily work for everyone. Most people, as far as I know, need teachers, while my method doesn't even use a grammar book. Most people I know who read French or Italian went to school in order to learn it, so I simply suppose that one has to be a little bit smarter than they are if he is to learn it all by himself, and even more if he is to do it through the method of literary osmosis.

I just don't want an imbecile using my method, noticing that it doesn't work for him, and then blaming the perfectly fine method instead of his own imbecility. Is this so hard to comprehend?

Don't use methods that will not suit you. Never.

Fuck so I basically won't be reading the Koran in Arabic until I was like 40-50? I'm 21 now. My girlfriend speaks French fluently and says I should just learn that and pick up other romance languages.

Maybe I'll hold off on Arabic as like a long-term goal. Would Persian be worth learning as a substitute? I really just want to read the poetry properly.

Your girlfriend is perfectly right. You should certainly follow your dreams of learning Arabic, German, Greek, or Russian, but the romance languages are relatively easy to an English speaker (a lot of French influence on the English language), and, with one or two years of moderate study, you will get access to the other three major ones (PT, Spanish, ITA), You will be able to read all the way from Dante and Guido Cavalcanti to contemporary African novelists writing in French and Portuguese. So learn Romance first, and then proceed to the harder ones, specially because by then you will already have a lot more self-confidence when it comes to learning languages and will have discovered what methods work better for you.

It depends on where/how you are trying to learn Arabic. If you are fucking around for 30 minutes a day in some western country than ya it'll take you decades. If you go live in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi, etc you will pick it up considerably faster (maybe 3-4 years).

Is Chinese poetry better than Latin alphabet or worse? Pictographs are interesting but I can't really imagine how there could be wordplay