Languages

Let's have a language thread Veeky Forums.

Can you give reasons to learn Russian, Hindi or Mandarin?

I've been meaning to learn a language from a new culture for a while now, and I'd rather learn one that is at least somewhat relevant.

Mandarin is obviously more useful, but I wanted to know if you could provide some reasons to dabble on any of the other two.

Russian is in the way of decline while being very appealing aestheticaly/phonetically, while Hindi is almost completely redundant with English despite having a fuck-ton of native speakers and being the most exotic.


I already know French, Spanish and Japanese.

i'd do Hindi since Russia and china have measures to curb their population growth

India on the other hand will do no such thing and we will see many many migrants in the future

True usefulness is access to knowledge not available to non-speakers. Which is most found in languages not "relevant" in your opinion but in the "relevant" ones too sometimes.

Learn Korean so you can make the trip from Japan to the Best one and speak to everyone. Then everyone will want to hear about it directly from you.

I'm going to be taking a lot of trips internationally for some student UN stuff and was told everyone at the conferences already know English, which I think is pretty interesting. The delegate that was speaking told me "English was the language of diplomacy". I still want to learn how to speak the languages of the countries accompanying us however I want to understand how it is the English language came to have that responsibility. I already know that Europeans and Asian countries have a good amount of respect for learning other cultures, and that it's typical to learn their languages.

After reading some Chekov I got the impression that in certain social sects, knowing more than one language gave off the impression that the speaker was more intelligent or refined.

Where you from lad? And how well do you think you speak your languages? I see many people that "know" spanish or german a nd when i open a conversation they can't respond properly.

>Russian
When searching for media like movies or music you will find some stuff only on Russian sites. You might get a good laugh when some bad guy in a movie shouts some "Russian" sentences to his accomplices, kek.
There are also some historical works that have never been translated into another language (like stuff about the colonization of Siberia) and literary works that you could read in their original language (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, etc).
Oh, and nothing beats insulting Russians in their native language in csgo when they act retarded which happens too often.

>Hindi
Useless, unless you want to become a Daler Mehndi impersonator.

>Memda- "No one is stupid enough to learn Chinese, they know they will be shipped off to our chinese subsidiaries, right?" -rin
Useless, unless you really want to go to China.

Oh yeah, I forgot. One plus going for Russian is the ability to read classic authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in their original languages. I've done so for some French authors like Dumas and Camus.

I don't think I'll ever be able to read Chinese classic literature like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin or Journey to the West in the original Chinese, and I don't think I'm particularly interested in Hindi literature.

Yeah, that would be a good reason to learn Hindi if Indians didn't learn English by default as a lingua franca within their own country.

I'm actually Latin American so I guess I was cheating when counting Spanish.

I speak English and Japanese fluently, and French at a manageable level as I'm still working on it.

I can only read Japanese at a middle school level though, but learning Chinese would make that stop being a problem forever.

I believe Tunak Tunak Tun is in Punjabi, not Hindi.

>and literary works that you could read in their original language (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, etc).
I guess this counts as getting ninja'd by Veeky Forums's speed standards.

>they know they will be shipped off to our chinese subsidiaries, right?
I know that meme, but it's perfectly possible to refuse transfers, you know?

I'd sooner quit than go to China for anything other than tourism.

Go for portuguese if you are in south america lad.

Well, I'm technically not in South America, but I've actually been to Brazil several times.

While I can't speak Portuguese for shit (I just end up speaking weird Spanish with Portuguese words), I've finally become able to understand what they say after lots of practice (and they've always understood what I said so two-way communication is possible).

I tried studying Portuguese once, but I rage quitted when I failed a placement test due to míssíng mány âccénts bécãuse Portuguese orthography rules differ from Spanish ones (and are less logical) despite the fact that I completely aced the grammar part.

Also, Portuguese makes my French very confused, so at the very least it won't happen in the near future.

>Romance languages and Japanese
As you said, go for Mandarin. Be prepared though, while Japanese phonology is babby tier, you're gonna get a steamy shit of a deal in trying to speak Chinese.

To be completely honest, I've already studied a little the phonology of both Mandarin and Russian, and while telling apart and producing Mandarin's (pinyin) zh and j, sh and x, ch and q, b and p, etc. while also minding the tones is definitely hell, I actually find the Russian phonetic system a little more confusing.

For what it's worth, while I've never had to actually distinguish between both sounds, I am at least already able to produce both aspirated and unaspirated p's, t's and k's.

>I am at least already able to produce both aspirated and unaspirated p's, t's and k's.
If you have an affinity with languages, then choose the one you hope to be using in your future career choices. If you are OK with french grammar and not overwhelmed with Japanese grammar and are willing to delve deeper into becoming fluent, then, you're gonna do it. Just make sure to consume a lot of foreign media, from the countries whose language you want to learn.

I never gave a chance to Chinese because I find the idea of "tonal languages" too overwhelming, like I could never learn to do that.

I would study Russian over Hindi only because it has, as far as I know, a much better literature. Also, many Indians simply use English, and you would need to learn Sanskrit for their sacred texts.


Also, if I were you I would consider studying German.

Besides published literature, most movies have scripts and most songs have lyrics. Not that that makes Hindi better but it's to be considered.

Korean and its countless polite forms can suck a dick.

>middle school reading comprehension
>fluent

Fluent measures how well you speak the language, dingus.

Well, I happen to be a weeb and a frenchaboo, so you can bet I consume media from those places.

I've reached a point where rather than learning a language for my career, I'm doing it as a hobby. The thought of learning a language for work would probably suck all the fun from it.

Actually, tonal languages aren't as impossible a hurdle as usually considered. It's just a matter of trying to imitate the sounds you hear rather than the ones you read, which is something you should be doing for any language anyway.

I studied German for a while early in college (it is perhaps one of the most useful languages for my major, after all), but I just don't like the way the language works at all.

You can be fluent and illiterate, or able to read perfectly yet not fluent.

There are millions of pages of historical documents in Russian that chronicle some of the most monumental historical moments of the last 100 years.

That in itself is a good reason to be able to read Russian.

I have no idea what those records are and yet you almost convinced me with just that.

Be chink middle schooler
Feels the emotions in poems from b.c. times.
read millenia of official histories, edicts, letters and essays on influential events at the time.
Able to communicate with anybody el chink, a population that is generally more interested history than European nations.
Also the blue sea of chinternet, largest weeb contents second to English.
Not mentioning able to outswag nips in Japanese using Chinese proverb/idioms which is awesome

Well shit I guess you are right, thanks Satan. I was just guessing and making a silly joke.

Unless you;re planning on moving to another country, these days there's no real reason to learn another language. Books are available in translation, and machine translation technologies are extremely accurate and becoming more so day by day.

>Books are available in translation, and machine translation technologies are extremely accurate and becoming more so day by day.
A translation, no matter how well made, is always going to be inferior to reading the original, simply because some things are untranslatable.

If you refuse you'll get fucked. Toe the line and hope they send you to a nice city like Hong Kong.

this is accurate.

This argument is always made on threads like this, and it always ineffective. I'm guessing it's usually made by monolinguals.

Learning a language is fun by itself. I think I already mentioned already that I'm doing this as a hobby at this point, that just happens to be a good time investment when it comes to gaining new abilities.

Then there's the fact that by learning new languages you're able to expand your perspective through new cultural idiosyncrasies that are just stuck in the language after thousands of years of linguistic evolution. This is tied to what said: a translation of a book is a different book that happens to have most of the meaning of the original, but trades one cultural significance for another (if the translator was good).

>machine translation
lol

For anything other than word to word translation or simple phrases within closely related languages, machine translators are decades away from becoming consistently accurate.

>being a corporate slave
Thanks, but no.

If I can't get a job on my terms I'd sooner work for myself or for academia.