What asian language has the best literature...

What asian language has the best literature? I would assume chinese for having the longest history because to be honest I don't give a shit about animu.
Does anyone here have experience as a westerner learning such drastically different languages? Is it reasonably possible to get fluent enough to read their classics? I'm a native english speaker who has always regretted being monolingual. I'm trying to remedy that with french first, then move onto something harder.

>Chinese
>literature

Honestly, I would recommend Japanese over Chinese. Chinese is significantly harder to get accustomed to, and you'll struggle with the tonal system and the uncommon phonology. The several spoken Chinese forms are another difficulty you would like to avoid, and its literary history has a hole, namely communist China. It means the written Chinese of the classics are already different than the one you will study and that the modern literature still offers little to compare with Japan. Thanks to its syllabary, Japanese is more friendly and a bilingual English/French speaker will have a homely feel when it comes to pronunciation. Japanese is very close to French and Italian, and has some sounds found in German. It also gives a “musical” accent, similar to French, which has little importance, unlike Chinese. A European can effortlessly read a Japanese sentence. On a literary note, Japan is younger than China but has demonstrated more consistence through the ages, and a positive incorporation of European influences. The contemporary and modern literatures are still highly active. Chinese is a perfect second language choice for Japanese speaker since early Japanese literature involves Chinese, and that Japanese characters are directly borrowed to China. Actually, I speak French, Japanese and Chinese so feel free to ask questions.

Thank you user. How did you learn japanese? Do you have any tips for that or language-learning in general? I'm reading through /int/'s language guide and I've signed up for a french class in the fall for uni, but my school doesn't offer japanese that I know of.

You may learn Japanese for the next decades so I hope you're 100% sure you want to learn an East Asian language.

First, you have to get rid of our alphabet. The basis are the two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, that you should acquire before going any further. It takes roughly a week to be comfortable with most characters. It's an important step so don't skip it and don't postpone it. Whenever you read a Japanese sentence, it must be written within a Japanese script. It isn't required but I found one will learn much quicker by leaving his computer and working with a book. It is better to remember an information because the medium's inherent lack of convenience “force” your brain to store the information itself instead of the path which led to it. If you consider to seriously study Japanese to a literary level, you should acquire the following:

※ an English - Japanese dictionary;
※ a Japanese - English dictionary;
※ a dictionary of characters;
※ a solid, formal grammar;
※ an appropriate notebook;
※ ideally, a fountain pen.

Some dictionaries are both translating into Japanese and English, but it's much uncommon, and there's a risk it will be either incomplete or painful to use. If you're wealthy enough, you can have a second, bigger dictionary to store while in home, with multiple tomes, a deeper explanation and a wider lexicon. The character dictionary is important, too. Make sure it has a translation to English and has enough characters recorded. You can replace it with a Casio portable electronic one, which has the nice ability to let you draw an unknown ideogram on the screen. It's expensive, however. Prepare to pay 150$ to 200$. The grammar should be complete and intended to a beginner. Since it isn't a textbook, don't study it but use it as a tool you will refer to when wondering about some unknown construction. A notebook is important to learn new characters, remember some rules or getting used to Japanese handwriting, and this way you get accustomed to stroke order. The domestic Campus brand produces a notebook that have a Japanese script intended ruling suitable to write down characters, but any notebook will do the trick, though. A fountain pen is also a nice acquisition. Writing characters again and again with a ball-pen is a chore, and you'll find the strokes to come out far more fluidly with a fountain pen.

Next is a well-known software called “Anki”, with a proper course. I usually defend people from using a software, mainly because I view them as a terrible time allocation. By the end of the first volume of “Rosetta Stone”, one could have gone through twice as much material. “Anki” is pretty effective, light and straightforward. However, there are some golden rules to strictly follow if you want it to be efficient, rules which applies whenever memorization is concerned. I'll talk about it later. If you have a smartphone, get the free Android version, or buy the 20$ one on the Apple Store. Create an account on Ankisrs in order to synchronize your computer and your smartphone. The application will allow you to draw characters with your finger, which is better than a simple guess on a computer. Also never, ever download a deck. Making up your own one with your own cards is itself a huge part of the memorization process. The aformentioned rules are that, you'll have to format the data efficiently, and avoid too much information. A card concerning a character shouldn't have its pinyin reading, ten compounds or its frequency. It should sound like this: “What is the on reading of 「酒」? — It's 'シュ'.” or “What does 終焉 means? — It means 'demise'.”. Too many fields will make the creation an unbearable chore, and it will completely water down the software's point. Believe me, you will drop out. Stick to the minimum principle. As a whole, to remember a character correctly, you should consider it as a collection of smaller parts. Consider 「明」 as the addition of 「月」 and 「日」. 「価」 is 「覀」 plus 「亻」, and 「裁」 is made of 「土」, 「戈」 and 「衣」. This way, you will significantly reduce the number of strokes orders and numbers to learn. It's easy easier to search a kanji in a dictionary. Officially, you're bound to study 1,950 kanji. Another common figure of 3,000 is accepted in order to read a newspaper without too much trouble. Actually, this number has to be strongly revised when considering reading a book, engaging in academia or whitin some specialized sectors, writing with a decent, fluid style or merely reading whatever you find without struggle, so 4,000 to 5,500 characters is a much more realistic estimation. Breaking it down will help you a lot. Regarding the computer, install the Microsoft IME so you can write directly in Japanese. It may differ from your actual keyboard configuration, so it's better to buy a Japanese one if possible. The IME comes with a poor dictionary and a handwriting character recognition program that rarely works properly. On your smartphone, “Imiwa?” is among the best dictionaries, albeit it has no synchronization with “Anki” nor handwritten symbol recognition.

There's an archive called “Japanese Language Learning Pack” with 25 Go worth of files, with courses, dictionaries, vocabulary builders and few stories that goes around on many websites. Broadly speaking, it's a disadvantage to concurrently use too much references, so be careful about it. I've read and physically own most of them and I'll talk about what I consider valuable enough. In “Japanese Writing System”, almost all titles are garbage. Two titles are interesting; “Basic Kanji Book”—two volumes, then “Intermediate Kanji Book”, two others, each with a completely different method but still highly valuable—and “Remembering the Kanji”. The last one should be a secondary reading, though. On “Audio Courses and Textbooks”, you should select “Genki”, the well-known manual, along with “Minna no Nihongo”—beware, the method is much exotic. The textbook is entirely in Japanese, and you need to work simultaneously with an English-translated folio—and the Berlitz “Basic Japanese Course”, yet uncomplete in the archive and much slower than the others. While taking off to lower-intermediate, “Chūkyū kara Manabu”, “Bunka Nihongo Chūkyū” and “Genki 2” are pretty good.

In “Grammar, Workbooks and Usage”, the series “A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar” is excellent. It's mostly uncomplete, and the Intermediate/Advanced distinction is ridiculous, but many relevant features are depicted along with examples, notes, counter-examples and a solid formalization. The volume's introduction has a very good insight about things we rarely look for, like the way Japanese people show they're listening when talking, how to make metaphors and so on. Very instructive. Another good reference is the Oxford “Japanese Grammar and Verbs”. Very concise but among the most useful ones when beginning. I strongly advice you to find it in its physical form.

In “Vocabulary, Expressions and idioms”, few files are interesting. The “VocabuLearn” series has a good lexicon and an audio aid, but it has been built with no sense—nouns are mixed up for no reason—and shouldn't be taken seriously. Check the verb and adjective sections in the three volumes, they are solid and will help you get an extensive knowledge to express an idea without a noun. “How to Sound Intelligent in Japanese” is also nice. It's actually a small builder with six, seven chapters and a rather deep insight about a half-basic, half-technical Japanese vocabulary. Overall, don't rely on a book to build your vocabulary. You will read, instead. The sixth section gives nothing but badly written children tales. The seventh is also sterile, with the exception of “Making Out in Japanese” and “More Making Out in Japanese” which are a small companion to slang and unacademic speech. The remaning files are mostly non-related to languages and cover history, tales, folkore, religion or politics.

Now, the reading part. It's a tricky question. You shouldn't read classics and “high literature” right now and head for short stories, ideally genre fiction. Thrillers, romance, mystery, science-fiction. The most common pulp format is called shinsho, which measures about 17.5 cm by 10.5 cm. A simple, appropriate book should contain approximately 0.7 sentences per line, along with three to five spoken ones. Longer sentences will be hardly manageable and you will likely drop out. For example, here are the two opening lines of Higashi Mori's “The Sky Crawlers”:

夢の中で、僕は大切な人を守るために戦った。彼女は地球上で最後の物理学者だ。

Short, isn't it? That's exactly what you need as a new learner. Elementary grammar, common vocabulary and a clear, defined theme able to catch your attention with no effort. I warn you against the manga, however. Many people advocate in its favour but honestly, I don't think it's a reliable reading source. Since the dialogues are generally the only written part, the speech is never regular, and it doesn't help to familiarize yourself with politeness, grammatical correctness and longer sentences. The characters themselves rarely speak as a Japanese person would, even in private or drunk. It's mostly exaggerated and filled with manners of speech nobody has. Please avoid.

Overall, you need to live in a Japanese environment. Read a newspaper's title each day, try to translate some sentences, go to the NHK website and listen to a broadcast set on “slow”, and so on. The very limit is that you have to understand what's going on; don't put the radio in Japanese then think you'll magically get it with time. It doesn't word like that, and it's the reason I don't approve going to Japan before having learnt Japanese. Passive learning cannot compare with the good ol' study. Beware of the /int/ guide. It has many wise advices and neat features but also a lot of errors, incoherences and terrible guidelines. Keep in mind whatever you read around here could be produced by some clueless anonymous users. Another reason I'm not fond of virtual resources. You'll also have to find a way to train your pronunciation; the major flaw of self-teaching, especially in Japanese where there are few opportunities to talk and where people value politeness over honesty, is that you'll virtually never speak it on a daily basis. I can't help you on this point, you'll have to come up with your own method. As for myself, I “teach” alone in my room before a mirror.

To sum it up, you will have to come with:

※ a lot of motivation and patience;
※ regularly working and never missing a lesson;
※ a proper learning material that isn't too dense/rich but still diversified;
※ “Anki”;
※ appropriate sources to read, included pulp, newspapers headlines, advertisement and so on;
※ a grammar and three dictionaries, ideally in paper format;
※ daily dose of speaking/listening/writing/reading training;
※ more motivation and patience.

Once you reach an upper-intermediate or an advanced level, you should be able to slowly attain your goal and read a real piece of literature in Japanese. This will also open the doors to further studies, Shinto, Buddhism, old/classical Japanese written chronicles, comparative and historical grammars, philology and so on. If you manage to get to this point, Chinese will naturally be the next step to develop your characters' knowledge and grasp the subtle relation between China and Japan in their early literatures. Anyway, that's not something you should be bothered with right now.

Good luck and feel free to ask whatever you like!

learning ancient Chinese, you get access to old Korean/Japanese literature.

you shouldn't be slacking here if that's possible.

And regarding the other question, I more or less followed this study line. I've had courses back in college but it was too slow. The sole good point was the ability to speak Japanese. It was the first non-European language that I learnt—as I said I've been to French prior, and later German—and the difference in learning is substantial. French was a decent asset since English really has nothing to do with Japanese on a linguistic perspective. Like any language, the key is regularity, effort and good study material. Patience is also a fundamental quality. Being “fluent” in the most genuine meaning requires decades. It's a lifelong project.

bump

based long-poster.
I was considering learning French and then possibly japanese, as OP.
what's the best way to attack it?

Wow, thanks man. You obviously know your shit. I'll cap all this and keep it for reference

bump

You don't need to bump threads on Veeky Forums user, it's a very slow board. This thread can probably die anyway, that one guy probably gave me all the information I could need

If you want to learn a language for the sake of literature, just learn Spanish, a lot of incredible work is written in Spanish, Quijote for example.

how old are you?

There are at least a dozen languages you should learn before any East Asian language if your goal is to read Veeky Forums. I only learned Japanese for muh weebs hit and I can't imagine why anyone would want to learn it for any other reason, unless maybe they had to for their job.

I want to see what the most difficult language I can handle is without it being a complete waste of time. Learning another romance language after french seems like it'll be largely review. That's not to say I'll never try it, but I'd like to learn something asian for the sake of variety and as a challenge.

Worth learning Japanese if you're not a weaboo? I like getting into different cultures, languages and areas and I want to branch out to Asia and then Africa maybe (I read English, Spanish, French and Arabic). I want to read the literature of an eastern Asian culture but I think China is more obvious, even if Japanese might be easier because of no tones.

The only way Japanese could not be a complete waste of time is if you wanted to read untranslated VNs. If you want a challenge learn Russian.

That's another option. My brother's ten years older than me and is fluent in russian and pretty good at like five other eastern european languages. He's also the guy that got me into reading as a kid.
I was mostly leaning towards chinese/japanese/korean because I know a lot less about their cultures than I do russian culture and wanted to learn new stuff. Some of the earliest real books I read were russian authors loaned from him.

Just Quijote. Everything else is garbage. And it's not worth learning Spanish for Quijote alone.

Literal translations of Chinese read like fragmented toddler babble in all caps.

"YOU ARE DOG KOREAN, PIG DISGUSTING"

I don't doubt their capacity for cold, calculating mathematical logic but their verbal IQs are in the gutter. The Japanese are the only truly literary Asian people.

>Chinese

I should have more specifically said Mandarin, idk anything about Cantonese, if it's actually a wildly different language with its own canon or just a variant.

That's just the kind of shitty feudal peasant language Chinese is, you don't need anything more complicated than fragments and tone of voice to get your message across. Suck for literature though.

Dude, your shit taste is showing.

>it's a Chinese Veeky Forums thread
>DISGUSTING COMMUNIST SCUM NO LITERATURE SUBHUMAN ANIMALS DING DONG CHONG LOL
>it's a Japanese Veeky Forums thread
>so sugoi senpai, Japan is the most cultured country in the world, I want Mishima to stick his sushi roll up my butt desu

General advices applies but there's still some subtleties with French. French is actually harder to get into than Japanese, in my opinion. I've always heard of it as the closest language to English, and many people give figures as low as 600 required hours of study to get fluent, but this isn't what I experienced nor what I saw around me. French has among the strictest grammars I've ever seen, and overall a keen attention to orthography and “correct” speech. There's a legal institution overlooking its evolution, and thousands of rules, exceptions and obscure points for those who pay attention. Several hours are required to understand its verb conjugation, and hundreds more to fully make sense. I assume your wish is to be fluent to a literary extend, of course. More time should be allocated to grammar. In my opinion, conjugation is best achieved through hearing and repetition. Progress through each tense and each verbal group, with a lot of drill in-between. Regarding Japanese in addition to French, I don't have a clear-cut opinion on dual-language learning. I always learnt mine concurrently but never on the same level, I think there's as much pro's as con's.

Spanish never attracted me. What are other famous authors besides Miguel de Cervantes?

Twenty-eight.

You obviously has little idea of how deep Japanese literature is. I've never read a manga and have no interest in Japanese animation, but there are thousands of epics, poems, court diaries, not mentioning the fantastic way it merged through the years with the Western influences without corrupting its soul, whether it is French realism, Belgian surrealism/symbolism, Tennyson, Gray, Longfellow's poetry, pessimism. How can you deny the literary masterpieces of Natsume Sōseki, Hideyo Noguchi, Yasunari Kawabata, Kafū Nagai, Motojirō Kajii? Between almost 600 years, China failed to deliver talented writers with a few exceptions (Wang Che-tchen, Tsao Tchan). I've been studying Japanese and Chines for almost twenty years and I'm wondering on which basis you attack a country with such an obvious literary merit. Jimbōchō is the second largest booksellers, editors and literary circles place in the world.

Chinese has all the ancient edgelord texts.

Japan by a mile.

*Chinese
*ten
Sorry, I was in a hurry. I'll elaborate in the afternoon.

Gabriel García Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorrge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, and many more

can you post the screencap?

Puisque tu parles français je me permets d'écrire en ma langue natale, désolé que de te demander ça après tout ce que t'as déjà posté mais j'apprécierais que tu développes un peu l'apprentissage de l'allemand (points d'entrées, difficultés éventuelles, logiciels ou livres recommandés), pas mal d'auteurs et de penseurs qui m'attirent profondément et j'ai une certaine crainte des traductions.

chinese language student here

what are some good modern chinese books (i.e. post-1990, preferably in simplified), and what good websites are there to download the ebook versions?

>french
>harder

What

Sorry, I just went back home. I was working.

Indeed, I haven't considered South America. I'm concerned with earlier literatures, and frankly, I rarely open a book published before 1900, and haven't even read a living author for years. Spanish is a wise choice, though. I guess I simply don't have the same vibe I had with French, German and the Eastern world.

Pas de problème. Je n'ai pas la même expertise sur cette langue que sur les autres pourtant je la juge plus simple à apprendre. Dans son approche, l'allemand est assez semblable au français, notamment au niveau de sa conjugaison, aux formes et caractéristiques proches. C'est un atout sensible pour un locuteur francophone. Le point le plus exotique et également le plus essentiel est son système de déclinaison mais vous ne devriez pas rencontrer de difficulté si vous avez été initié au latin. « Anki » est aussi utile. Prenez soin de faire figurer le genre, le pluriel et le génitif de chaque substantif. Certaines personnes estiment l'inclure superflu mais je ne partage pas cette opinion, et la négliger est une erreur pour qui souhaite en porter la connaissance à un niveau littéraire. Quoi qu'il en soit, des règles informelles se dessinent rapidement et permettent à terme de deviner avec une précision recevable le genre ou le pluriel d'un mot inconnu. L'allemand est aussi plus souple dans son orthographe, à l'instar de l'anglais. Un « e » surnuméraire ne choque pas, quoiqu'on l'évitera autant que possible.

Pour son étude, je renouvelle la même liste. En plus du logiciel « Anki », la disposition d'un dictionnaire me semble toujours être le cœur de l'apprentissage de la langue, auquel vous ajouterez une bonne grammaire. J'ai une médiocre connaissance des titres francophones sur l'allemand mais j'ai utilisé une grammaire publiée par Heinz Bouillon, très bonne bien que lacunaire par endroit. Je possède aussi comme ouvrage pour débutant un célèbre lexique des éditeurs Langenscheidt qui couvre 4.000 termes de base. Renseignez-vous aussi sur la réforme de l'orthographe. Sur les problèmes à surveiller, en plus du système de déclinaison, l'allemand est riche en prépositions, conjonctions et autres particules verbales, et sous cet aspect se compare à nouveau au latin. Vous trouverez des verbes à particule mobile ou fixe – assez proche dans l'idée des « phrasal verbs » – qui appellent selon le sens et la particule l'un ou l'autre cas, souvent un accusatif, parfois un ablatif ou un génitif, chacun exprimant une nuance particulière.

En dernier lieu, j'ajouterai que les compétences orales doivent être particulièrement sollicitées. La phonologie de l'allemand exige de nombreuses heures pour parvenir à une diction fluide et agréable. On s'en consolera en trouvant son orthographe assez transparente, c'est-à-dire que les lettres correspondent souvent à un seul son. Je ne l'ai pas évoqué dans le passé mais la connaissance de l'alphabet phonétique international est un avantage de taille pour toutes les langues. Il est de plus en plus utilisé dans les dictionnaires et permet de réaliser correctement n'importe quel son et le savoir qu'il apporte sur l'appareil phonatoire de l'homme ajoute une plus-value supplémentaire. Dans l'ensemble, le reste de la langue suivra avec aisance. Les nouvelles et l'actualité fournissent des sources de lecture très respectables à consulter au quotidien. N'hésitez pas à me poser des questions, je suis dans l'urgence et je ne vais peut-être pas en profondeur comme je le devrais.

As you can expect from my previous post, I'm vigorously against on-screen material—and also illegal downloading—so I honestly have no idea where you can get an eBook. Regarding the other request, I'm afraid I won't help a lot, too. I'm more versed in older authors, as the original poster was as far as I know—which is why I engaged in this thread—but you can check Hú Shì, Liú Dà Bái or Máo Zédōng—no joke—as accessible and moderately fine poetry, and Guō Mòruò, Lǔ Xùn, Yù Dáfū, Máo Dùn or Chéng Fǎngwú as decent prose writers. A notable woman around here was Dīng Líng. When comfortable enough, try to read more subtle authors like Aì Qīng, who cited Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman among his sources. I consider him the Chinese Stéphane Mallarmé. Hope it helps!

I think I've already back my point up but since I told I was going to elaborate, I will talk further about it. Japanese itself is an easy language. The particles are sticking much naturally to the part of speech they define, the conjugation extensively covers many features ranging from polarity—whether you want to express “I do (…)” or “I do not (…)” is reflected in the flexion in Japanese and doesn't require an additional word—to politeness, with little to no exception, and an incredible regularity. Once you know how a verb is working, you can virtually conjugate every single verb you met. With two irregular ones, we could say English itself is harder. As I previously said, Japanese has a very loose grammar and orthography. Nobody overlooks the way a word is written; there's no strictly fixed order either. It relies so much on the context the verb is the sole requirement for a sentence to be right. Imagine “eat” would be enough to express “Indeed, I'm eating right after” as well as “He does eat tomorrow”. No, the very troubles and headaches Japanese gives come from its infamous writing system. 1,950 characters learnt in school, nearly 2,000 more to read a newspaper, almost 3,000 additional ones to comfortably read any novel. However, my argument is that… Well, you don't have to study 6,500 characters straight in you first course. Actually, many don't even include a single one in the first year, and although I'm strongly advocating for an early approach to Chinese characters, it doesn't represent a workload higher than 300 to 400 ones in the very extreme case. On the other hand, in French, the most difficult point is its grammar, and it strikes you as soon as you sit before you teacher. A verb form in Japanese may have three equivalents in English. In French? Eleven. I think there are less irregular verbs in French than in English, but whereas you're bound to learning a triplet in English, in French, it means tables with dozens of entries you should master. Unlike an ordinary word, you're expected to switch between the conjugations within a second when speaking, and there's no shortcut or trick to avoid it. It freezes the whole communication and forces you to spend hundreds of intensive study hours into its grammar. This is the main reason I think French is harder to get into, and I had this feeling back in school.

Please let me know if you would like me to go deeper. I'm tired and would probably be more precise on a regular day. Sorry for that.

>No, the very troubles and headaches Japanese gives come from its infamous writing system.
Work on your English m80.

>1,950 characters learnt in school, nearly 2,000 more to read a newspaper, almost 3,000 additional ones to comfortably read any novel.

This is a massive exaggeration. 7000 kanji is post kanken 1, and only a few hundred (native Japanese) people pass that exam each year. You can read anything you want with 3000-5000 kanji easily.

Ceci est maintenant une rubrique a la sauce amphibienne.

Oh, and also, kanji aren't even that difficult, you almost start acquiring them effortlessly after a certain point. Onomatopoeia are probably a bigger challenge to mastering the language.

My buddy on IRC taught himself fluent Japanese in about 3 years with light novels and little girls cartoons. I watched him do it and mocked him the entire time.

>As you can expect from my previous post, I'm vigorously against on-screen material

I have 4 years of mandarin so i'm not studying the books, but reading them for leisure like in english.

>—and also illegal downloading—so I honestly have no idea where you can get an eBook.

I move around a lot, so I'm unfortunately unable to keep a big collection of books. I much prefer physical books, but it's too inconvenient for me at this time.

>Regarding the other request, I'm afraid I won't help a lot, too. I'm more versed in older authors

well, are these older authors still popular today?
i'm basically looking for books that most people would have read or heard of, maybe material from a high school chinese literature class.

C'est déjà bien plus que je n'espérais, merci à toi.