Is studying languages an ultimately pointless feat?

Is studying languages an ultimately pointless feat?
Even if you become fully fluent in a foreign language, you still think and filter it's rules through your native linguistic paradigm, you don't really 'read' foreign literature as much as you just skillfully decode it.
Sure, you can spend 20 years in a foreign country, speaking nothing but their tongue and naturalize yourself, but that just means losing your original language.

That's it, I'll never read anything except Finnish literature ever again. Thank you for making me realize the error of my ways.
It was utterly pointless all along.

>he internally translates/subvocalizes foreign languages into his own native language
No fluent person does this.

ok?

>Even if you become fully fluent in a foreign language, you still think and filter it's rules through your native linguistic paradigm, you don't really 'read' foreign literature as much as you just skillfully decode it.
>Being this monolingual.

You still do, it's unavoidable. Your fluency, however, enables you to do it quickly enough to not even notice

I study linguistics because I find it interesting, not because it's useful.

Are you trolling?

>monolingual
Senpai, I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm burrowing my way through the original of Ovid's Metamorphoses at the moment. There's nothing wrong with studying languages for funsies, but I think it's delusional to think that it allows you to appreciate foreign literature on a 'deeper' level than just reading a good translation

Poetics gets lost in translation though. You only need a very basic understanding of a language to be able to discern musicality and poetry from writing

>not thinking in your target language
>not dreaming in your target language

Never gonna make it.

>you still think and filter it's rules through your native linguistic paradigm, you don't really 'read' foreign literature as much as you just skillfully decode it

Why not go deeper down the solipsistic rabbit hole and say all reading or consuming any kind of art is pointless because it's filtered through your own experience and not the artist's?

Or maybe OP is a faggot?

>Even if you become fully fluent in a foreign language, you still think and filter it's rules through your native linguistic paradigm, you don't really 'read' foreign literature as much as you just skillfully decode it.

t. Nigel Brown from Wercerfordshireham, England.

That is not how learning languages work.
When you learn a word, it gives you an impression, and you associate it with certain thoughts/feelings depending on what the speaker is trying to say. It's just a noise/pattern that you see and associate whatever feeling with. There is no decoding or whatever the fuck you seem to think there is, unless you're trying to translate one language to another.
(I will admit though, trying to translate from one language to another is hard. Or maybe my feelings on the topic are a testament to my own communicative abilities, meh.)
In dealing with grammar/rules, not at all true as well. Personally when I learn a new language I start with the grammar rules, so it becomes natural for me, when speaking in the tongue, so form sentences correctly. Talking to other people in that language, even if it is not your native one, also influences how you construct your words. (Since you have a reference right there!)
Source: poly+learns them for fun.

It would appear that you are monolingual. Maybe learning a new language would help you understand the dynamics behind it.

I'm a native Spanish speaker and most of the time I'm talking about history I have to translate to Spanish from English because that's the language I read my books. Fifty percent of my dreams are in English too.
I'm sad for you user. Being that dumb must be hard.

It's not delusional, you just lack a good understanding of the target language. In other words, you need to study harder.

OP = Amerilard.

i don't think languages work that way, senpai. as someone who don't know shit about languages and barely is able to speak his own native one correctly i will give you my opinion

most languages are very similar to one another; if you know the root of most of the words and are able to work out the basic structure of the sentences, you can pretty much understand anything you read in that language

if you are from an european country learning the basic roots of the other european languages is easy shit, with a single romantic language you can figure out almost all the others -- it takes a bit of time to learn how one differs from the other, but after that, you can read without a thesaurus most of the time; languages that are very different from your native one are a bit more tricky to get at first, but when you start to get a bit of experience and begin to figure things on the flow (without having to search or translate to understand a word you don't know), when you start to emotionally connect with the words and trully associate with the meaning and the sounds, you notice that that bunch of simbols and sounds are what they are and nothing else. you can't replace a word with other (if you could translation hating faggots would not lose their time complaining), many words don't actually translate correctly to other languages; when you learn a new word you don't just gain a new symbol and sound, you gain a new perspective to understand and make meaning of it

or that is how i feel about it

before someone says that people who don't like translations don't like it because of the lyricity of the words that are lost, i think that the sounds and lyricity you can get from a expression is part of how you understand and connect to it

Has anyone here learned a language to fluency as an adult? Every time I try it feels like an effort in futility.

Just learn enough to get what you want. If you want to read, just learn till you can make sense of what you read, if you want to speak or write, learn to do so. More than this is futility.

Im more interested in learning to speak to travel desu. I got pretty far self teaching latin (enough to struggle through bello gallico) but right now I really want to learn spanish. Rosetta stone makes my eyes roll back though

I don't like when foreigners try to learn my language just to travel to my country, i know some people do like it but i feel disgusted. English is enough to travel and when it is not people are able to comunicate quite well without speaking, just use your hands or something.

But i see what you mean, i just can't bother to do it

In the US you are frequently told that it is offensive to expect others to speak english, and that you should try to make it easy on others during international travel

Have you ever worked at a job where many of the employees were immigrants who didn't speak your language? Learning to communicate with them can be pretty useful even if you have translate in your head

People in my country treat foreigners as some kind of god, they just care to not seem disrespectful to the foreigner, everything a foreigner do is interesting and cool.

where are you from?

30 years old, still learning whatever I feel like and that includes languages. No problem whatsoever as long as I'm motivated.

>he thinks other languages are just english with the words swapped around
>being this much of a pleb

really horrible reaction image, honestly, one of the worst I've seen, but you're completely right, every sentence in OP's post that doesn't end in a question mark is false

I think OP was making exactly the opposite point actually.

>chinese
>a single language

It sort of is. Chinese is similar to arabic, in a away that written form will be understood by everyone, but the spoken dialects may be mutually unintelligible

most of the modern chinese varieties other than mandarin aren't written

No, you don't. You'd know if you were fluent in a language other than your own.

Spanish bro how much is lost in translation from spanish to english? Who are your favourite authors

>328 milion people speak english
>182 milion people speak hindi
That doesn't even make any sense.

I'm not an expert but I like how it translates. It really depends on the work. You can read Pedro Paramo or The Invention of Morel in English and don't miss much, but the same can't be said for Martin Fierro. That's a work that doesn't translate even to languages like French that are closer to Spanish and generally translate really well.
Concerning literature in Spanish that is popular here, off the top of my head, Quijote and Borges works don't translate well. One Hundred Years and 2666 don't miss much. Poetry doesn't translate no matter source or target language so amazing poets like Rubén Darío is something non Spanish speakers can't enjoy and that makes me sad.
This is just my opinion and I'm talking about books I've read in Spanish and had a look in English.
If you're asking for favorite authors that write in Spanish, I say Borges, Rulfo, Darío, Neruda and Marechal. If not, I should add Stendhal, Tolstoy, Goethe, Dante and Shakespeare.

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