What languages are you learning for literature, Veeky Forums ?
What strategies do you use when reading in languages you aren't fluent in ?
I've been using a combination of Wiktionary and Google Translate to find the meanings of words I don't know when reading Spanish and it's going pretty well, but it's slow as fuck and doesn't seem like the most efficient method.
Ancient Greek (learning Attic but also plan to learn Homeric and Koine) and Japanese.
I would also like to learn Portuguese, French, German, Latin, and Nahuatl.
Spanish, with a kindle dictionary (the one which I think is natively packaged into spanish kindles). Going fine.
>Ancient Greek (learning Attic but also plan to learn Homeric and Koine) and Japanese.
Both of those are languages that I started researching around the same time. Ancient Greek got boring fast and I just stopped with Japanese for some reason, but I'm still planning on going back.
What's your progress on both of those ?
Do English Kindles have that ? I have one that I haven't touched in years, but it might be useful if it gives definitions of Spanish words.
>Do English Kindles have that ?
I don't think so, but I got it from mobilism. It must be this one
forum.mobilism.org
(obviously it's a dictionary in spanish, which is even better as far as I'm concerned)
So it defines Spanish words in Spanish ? I suppose that would be somewhat useful, but I'm still at a beginner level, so English translations are much easier.
>attic
hic est patricius. I'm a classics minor and I'm learning Ancient Greek. Even though I have a pretty decent understanding of Latin, Greek is almost absurdly difficult. Those verb forms, man.
I want to try learning Greek but I mostly want to read Aristotle and nothing else. I think I might just get some bilingual editions of Aristotle and dive in. Maybe if I drop acid it'll all make sense at once.
Just picked up Latin: An Intensive Course and I hope to obtain a decent reading level by sometime next year. I'm hoping to practice with some Catullus poems then move on to philosophical texts or poems written in Latin.
I'll try giving updates more or less monthly if this thread becomes a recurring one.
Hoping to learn Ancient Greek and German after. Good luck to the other anons here!
I don't think the verb forms are that difficult. I mean, it's just grammar. Once you know the rules and see the patterns, the only difficult things are the exceptions and the vocabulary.
I just started with Greek, and I'm liking it a lot. I think that in two years, at this pace, I will be reading Homer more or less fluently.
As for Japanese, I've been studying it for almost three years. I still got a long way to go, but the grammar is the easiest part. Remembering kanji and vocabulary, though. That is fucking hell.
I just print off self-formatted Borges stories. I read it once in Spanish, missing most of the meaning, then go over it with a pen and a dictionary marking any word I don't immediately recognize, then I read it again, and THEN I type up a rough English translation for good measure. It helps that his stories are usually fairly short.
>German
Good luck, user. You might want to read Twain's essay on learning German before you commit to that one.
Kanji actually seems like the most fun part of Japanese. I find the characters a lot of fun to write, but I can't imagine what it would be like to have to memorize all of them.
That doesn't sound very fun. I'm reading Borges, too, but looking up the words as I read them (otherwise I would understand pretty much none of it).
>As for Japanese, I've been studying it for almost three years. I still got a long way to go, but the grammar is the easiest part. Remembering kanji and vocabulary, though. That is fucking hell.
Japanese is hell, I estimate about 90% of the words I look up are to make sure I get the reading or rendaku right even if the meaning is completely obvious and I'm already familiar with the kanji.
Oh, don't get me wrong, kanji are fun as fuck, and I love to learn them and look up their history while also seeing how they stand for images of the world a la Ezra Pound.
Memorization is hard because of the sheer number of them, not necessarily because they are difficult in themselves, though there are some so similar to each othee that you are prone to mistake them if you dontread carefully.
But just like any other language, practice is key to master kanji.
There are also a lot of resources on libgen and internet to help with Japanese. There's even a thread on /a/ entirely devoted to learning the language.
Force yourself not to look them up.
Personally, I much prefer when there is no furigana, simply because it's distracting when you are trying to read fluently. The downside is that if there's no furigana then looking up the words becomes much more difficult or at least tedious.
Look for a high quality online dictionary, such as this one for Polish:
Supplement with Wiktionary and Google Translate when needed, or get a Kindle that has a dictionary built in like the other user. It will be a slog no matter what if you're not fluent, but on the bright side, reading books in another language is by far the quickest way to growing your vocabulary. I like to write down every word that I don't know on a flash card. It makes the reading slower, but the learning more effective.
LATIN AND GERMAN, DEFINITELY. JAPANESE MAYBE. WHEELOCK. WHEELOCK. WHEELOCK. WHEELOCK. WHEELOCK. 5 GERMAN READERS, MORE. JAP APPS TOO.
This meme has gone too far. I got a good chuckle though.
literally where did this "german is a hard" meme come from?
the grammar is complicated when you learn it but thats quick and finite. the hardest part of learning a language is 1. vocab, 2. irregularities
the vocab of german is no a lot less than english (not counting compound words), and much clearer. after a while you start (consciously or not) seeing patterns in the irregularities and strong verb vowel changes and get it automatically.
in terms of difficulty
english>french>german>italian
>in terms of difficulty
It all depends on your mother tongue. If you are a native Spanish speaker, Italian is the easiest, followed by French, then English and then German. English seems and is easy to learn nowadays because its being the lingua franca.
Agreed. I learned German to a conversationally fluent level and the vocab is probably one of the biggest struggles I still have with it.
Why ?
I'm a native German speaker and can converse perfectly fine in the language, but since I've only ever had to speak the language with my family, formal German is like a different language entirely and I can barely understand any of it. German may not be the hardest language to learn, but it's certainly one of the most diverse. The individual dialects are generally considered to be independent languages themselves because someone from Switzerland and someone from Köln aren't likely to understand each other if they aren't speaking Hochdeutsch.
non phonetic languages are just objectively more difficult to learn
Persian. I just wish I could find more readers.
Everyone has a strong opinion on this. I always found Greek much easier myself. Morphologically it's more complex, but syntactically it's way more logical.
Tbh I don't think you need Greek to understand any Greek philosophers, least of all Aristotle. But to enjoy Plato as a writer, Greek is good.
Yeah one nice thing about Homer is that besides being the greatest Greek poet he's also the easiest to read. Simple syntax, lots of stuff repeated word for word, etc.
>wheelock
Wheelock should be illegal.
>wheelcock should be illegal
You don't know anything about Wheelock, and that's an immature thing to say.
What do you mean "non phonetic languages" ?
How so? It's the same thing that you're doing, just with a bit of extra work at the end (really for my own enjoyment). I just like to go over it once in Spanish to see what I can glean. It's no less "fun" because when I start annotating the words in the stories I'm more or less reading them the same way you are.
Also, use WordReference instead of Google translate. Trust me.
If I have an interest in poetry and I have my options between Chinese and Japanese, which should I learn?
>reads books in English
>writes on imageboards in English
>doesn't bother to learn the simplest English punctuation rules
Francophones always stick out when they type in English because they add extra spaces ahead of exclamation points and question marks.
Are there any other languages in which similarly-simple but rarely-corrected faux pas regularly occur?
Francophone here, I've never used spaces before punctuation and only learned about this usage from people like you who always point it out online
Some italians here keep calling novels "romances" but I think they're trolling
Some Germans are easy to identify but I can't remember why
German is harder than French if you are a native English speaker.
In fact, German is probably something that no, or very few, native English speakers will ever be able to comprehend in a fluent manner. It's a very difficult language
I was being somewhat dramatic, and I'm sure there are first rate Latinists who started with it, but in my experience it is gravely inferior to more immersive methods, like Cambridge or Orberg. People come out of a year of wheelock and then approach actual Latin lit in a very unnatural way (painfully parsing and "decoding" every sentence) that has to be unlearned.
I believe firmly that reading Latin properly means reading it in its natural word-order. I've seen people who got so good at decoding that they read almost as fast as one would naturally, but you're still missing something vital by not reading and approaching the classical authors as a Roman would have. The syntax doesn't just reflect the nature of the language, it reflects the way they thought.
>wheellock should be illegal
What is wheellock?
>5 GERMAN READERS
>Persian. I just wish I could find more readers.
What are readers?
Disagree with this entirely. From my experience, as an English speaker, French was leaps more difficult.
Inb4 you meant nothing more than the vocabulary similarity between English and French. I see that a lot in these discussions.
>For college students
>tfw you came from an extremely poor family and could never afford college, or a half-decent early education for that matter
>tfw you love language and self-teach yourself on a few but will never be able to comprehend and learn as well as college students do
damn
>college
are you american? just do 2 years at a CC and transfer, it's not that hard
Native English, can read fluently and speak proficiently in French, learning Spanish, would like to learn German and Russian
Lots of short passages or stories in the target language usually accompanied with English translations, notes, and a gradual difficulty.
Are you aware of all 4 books in the Wheelock's series? Whenever I see criticism it's always about just the first textbook only.
>are you american? just do 2 years at a CC and transfer, it's not that hard
I have been thinking about doing so. Though I'm pretty sure most places want at least a high school education, which I don't have. There are probably programs and equivalencies I could access in order to overcome this though--I'm just sort of feeling sorry for myself as I never got that high school or college experience, and I've probably passed my prime in age.
I think I will try this though, In that case I will at least get a chance to learn about things I find interesting and enjoy
thanks for the advice
italian and spanish sound how they are written. english french dont. see bologna
you learn languages better on your own. dont think you need a teacher.
t. every polyglot fucking ever
I would say that is only true if you have access to transportation in order to access locations where others speak the language you are trying to learn
just practice talking to yourself. i talk to myself in whayever lang im working on like 4 hrs a day. once you get into a speaking environment youll be fine but its not necessary to become reasonably fluent. just listen to practice ur accent.
good luck finding latin communities. excuses are bad to make, you're not the only one who tried learning a language on his own and some..even succeeded!
But they're right. "romance" is a far more accurate word, cuz there's a difference (of extension but no only) between "novel" "nouvelle".
>between "novel" and "nouvelle".
Fix'd.
Get GED, go to CC, transfer. It'll take some willpower and effort but it's very very doable. No one gives a shit how old you are. Gets harder the longer you wait though.
Or, if you just want to learn a language you could audit classes or something.
I don't think there's much inherently harder about German compared to French, but the problem with German for English speakers is that it's not spoken outside of German-speaking regions, even if counting the Austrian and Helvetic ones, and I suspect even the French are more involved in German affairs today and that it is ultimately hard for English speakers to immerse themselves
And if there are two things that the German language has down, it's an orthography that generally 'makes sense' and a pretty consistent pronunciation. Being Danish, I can say that our daily/weekly news broadcasts sound like an esoteric mumble compared to German TV, so German would actually have a few things going for it when it comes to acquisition
Im reading El Aleph too senpai
I'm learning english. Easy grammar. Easy syntax. But damn I'm getting in trouble with the vocabulary. There's a lot of words that I don't know if I'll read again, so I keep being pushed to this central predicament: to memorize or not to memorize.
Mine has the Oxford dictionary
If I started learning Greek, will I gain something from the ancient Greek plays, the Bible and/or modern Greek literature that would otherwise be lost on me being an English speaker?
I love this dictionary for French: linternaute.com
Aside from giving you definitions for the word, it also has expressions containing that word and quotes from important authors with the word. It really helps you understand the meaning of the word and memorizing becomes so much easier.
My question is, does anyone know of such a dictionary for German?
Duden
where are you from and how long you've been studying?
native Persian speaker here.
>I still got a long way to go, but the grammar is the easiest part. Remembering kanji and vocabulary, though. That is fucking hell.
Kanji and vocabulary are just mindless memorization. Grammar looks easy because it's simple, but precisely because of its simplicity and freedom it becomes a real tough challenge to grasp its natural flow. Well, that's only if you care about speaking. Though, how can you be studying for 3 years and finding kanji a challenge? The vast majority of people good at japanese I know are just concerned about words rather than if they know the kanji or not. I'm not gonna get into the "hurr learn vocabulary/learn kanji first" but at one point inevitably you only care about vocabulary.
I'm a native English speaker and I can't even remember not speaking German anymore. It's a very clear language.
L1 English; I speak B2 German and French and ~B1 (no official tests exist) Brazilian Portuguese. I'd like to start studying classical languages but my learning method is pretty heavily oral—I have no idea how to go about studying classical languages. What's the best starting resource for Attic Greek?
original text side by side with a translation is the best
If you're a beginner. If you have a good handle on the language, it becomes an annoyance. I also find that it slows the commencement of writing in a language, if you care about that.
Question for all the L2 English speakers here: how hard do you find our language, and how so? I have a creeping feeling that English : Germanic :: Haitian Creole : Romance.
Compared to my mother tongue (Persian), it's harder. but compared to Arabic, it's much more easier.
Where do you guys get Japanese books? I want to find some Murakami in txt format.
Same senpai
Hey I like Persian too. From NY. خدا هافعز
I'm learning Russian, can anyone recommend some entry level literature I could practice and improve my reading skills with?
Life and Fate by Vasiliy Grossman, Oblomov by Goncharov, Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn and Petushki's Moscow were recommended to me as entry level stuff that I'm looking to read once I have expanded my vocabulary a bit more
This is a good thread, translations are a crime anyone that translates anything ever should be shot.
El inmortal es la mejor historia en el Aleph
oh of course but i assume like me most of Veeky Forums do not give a shit about talking to germans but are learning the language only to read.
El inmortal es la mejor historia en el Aleph.
Seconding this.
does anyone here read hebrew?
whoever recommended Moscow-Petushki or Grossman to you as entry level (in terms of the complexity of the language) literature is an idiot
also Gulag Archipelago contains a lot of prison vernacular so idk if you want to read it
try something like early Pelevin or Bykov, they are not really high literature but will improve your language skills
Learning? I bought the Ithkuil manual, thinking I can have fun tackling a colang. I probably should have went with Esperanto. Otherwise, I would love to learn German, Finnish, Dutch, or just any third language.
Strategies? Persistence. Persistence is key.
Thanks user, I will check those out
How do I go about reading this
English has a large vocabulary because we steal words from other languages. But several words have patterns e.g. fence: a small wall. defense: a reaction to attack. Etc
from left to right
oh nice, do you learning Persian or just like it?
btw it's خدا حافظ actually(we have 3 kind of Z so it's kindda baffling)
Thanks user
Has anyone tryed learning hebrew I've been working on it with duolingo but not really getting anywhere.
What are some good entry level books in Spanish?
OP here, I'm not French. I just like to add spaces before question exclamation marks as well as colons and semicolons and two spaces after those symbols and periods because that's the correct way of doing it.
Not really hard, since it's a global language now, but the vocabulary range it's exhausting.
I did that for a bit but it felt like cheating. I'm not really reading it independently if I'm using a translation for reference.
Yeah, but these are easy words to get. I struggle the most with those words that are not that easy to put in context, words that abounds in poetry.
The majority of words in English are unknown to the majority of English speakers. Most people won't be able to read a book without having to consult a dictionary consistently, so that isn't something to be that worried about. The important words are the ones that you see frequently.
you mean a roman and a nouvelle
I don't.
>tfw mixing up my declensions in latin right now
i keep getting the 1st 2nd and 2nd neuter confused. It's beyond frustrating and i feel like a poopyhead.
Will reading a latin book with the english/latin side by side help at all at this point? Loebs for example
R(er)ead Orburg to internalize basics like this
I mean Wheelock.
I have the yale study book and workbook m8.
It's plenty comprehensive though i do go in circles sometimes while studying declensions.
Even if you're using Wheelock as your primary book, you should supplement it with reading LLPSI. What edition of Wheelock are you using?
7th. But I have the Workbook, Scribblers, 33 accompanying stories, and Latin Reader too.
Learning other languages is always easier if you start with books you've read before because you can guess by the context the words you don't know, so you could start from there.
Why are you using Wheelock's? You will not learn to read Latin but to translate instead