Its businessmen are buying up everything from American brands to African minerals to Russian oil rights. ), my answer would be French. Nonetheless, compelling reasons remain for learning other languages. Not even close. Long live literature! With the right references to study, you can learn proper German grammar and increase your fluency in the language. What makes them so popular? Now if you really want to learn an Eastern language, learn Persian. As a writer, it is important not only to think about what you say, but how you say it. This is a list of best-selling fiction authors to date, in any language. For example, a physicist could write: And you really should see an Almodóvar film without subtitles. So is Japanese the world’s third-most useful language? In America, the numbers are equally sorry. Literature is always best read in the original. Second, there is the cultural broadening. It was a long turgid parade of Latin-derived words. The default option is 2018. Or both; learning one makes the second quite easy. So although there are other great languages out there, don’t forget an easy, common one, with far fewer words to learn than English, that is almost certainly taught in your town. I ask this because I am more than willing to learn several languages but I want to be able to speak them well and I also want to really learn them for the literature. Other members of the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language (that is, every individual language), against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity. With Portuguese under your belt you’ll fly along. 1 person has voted this message useful I think you already have the five. It can enhance your enjoyment of art, history, literature and food, while giving you an important tool in business and a useful one in diplomacy. Press J to jump to the feed. Best Traditional SAT Prep Books for Instruction, Strategy, and Practice Questions. It is fascinating, and learnable—though Moser’s online essay, “Why Chinese is so damn hard,” might discourage the faint of heart and the short of time. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast, More posts from the languagelearning community. I apologize if there were posts about this already but I've seen none regarding top languages for the literature. However, “literature” also has a different meaning. The 100 best novels Books. Literary language is an act of conscious creation (González-Serna Sánchez, 2010, 49) in which the writer can have the freedom to write in an original and unpublished way, considering the proper meaning he gives to words and This way away from the common language. Students have an enviable choice of stimulating places to hone their Spanish skills, from Venezuela to Argentina to Spain itself. Instead, they include countries with Francophone minorities (Switzerland, Belgium); those where French is official and widespread among elites (much of western Africa); those where it is not official but still spoken by nearly all educated people (Morocco, Lebanon); and those where French ties remain despite the fading of the language (Vietnam, Cambodia). There are many such songs in Catullus, whose elegant poetry I had spent a whole term plodding through. China is the most populous nation on earth. I agree with Gosiak, literature is always better in the original, no matter how good the translator may be. You’ll learn hundreds of words without effort (azul means blue, verde means green) and be able to guess entire sentences (O sistema bancário é muito forte: the banking system is very strong). By all means, if China is your main interest, for business or pleasure, learn Chinese. It is hard. SAT Prep Black Book, 2nd Edition Learn Spanish? As long as China keeps the character-based system—which will probably be a long time, thanks to cultural attachment and practical concerns alike—Chinese is very unlikely to become a true world language, an auxiliary language like English, the language a Brazilian chemist will publish papers in, hoping that they will be read in Finland and Canada. With French, vous ne regretterez rien. French ranks only 16th on the list of languages ranked by native speakers. The following SAT prep books are of decent quality but have some serious weaknesses as well. But Hispanidad is not a single country. All are welcome, whether beginner or polyglot. And once you’ve got Spanish, you’re half-way to Italian, French and Portuguese too. Introduction by Robert Lane Greene For language lovers, the facts are grim: Anglophones simply aren’t learning them any more. But ranked above it are languages like Telegu and Javanese that no one would call world languages. Soon enough, someone will helpfully inform you that Latin is a dead language. And for this reason he is not going to be amongst the five names you are about to read. Modern Languages Applicants 2020-2021 Official Korean Studies applicants thread 2021 Official Speech and Language Therapy applicants thread 2021 show 10 more Language or Literature Plz help me - anyone who has finished gcse But when I think of my sons, now ten and five, one day being able to write “fluent Brazilian Portuguese” on their CVs, I feel a little smug. Virtually any career, public or private, is given a boost with knowledge of a foreign language. Let's go over the pros and cons of each. One not so distant from English that you give up. But Latin—which gives us both “direct” and “use”, both “virtually” and “nil”—has been of indirect use every day of my career. Nevertheless, German still has a rich history of scientific and academic literature, so it’s a great language to learn if those subjects are among your interests. A recent survey reported in the People’s Daily found 84% of respondents agreeing that skill in Chinese is declining. Of course, there are many languages in China, too. Its economic prospects are bright. Best of all, you’ll stand out. If the point of a language is to be able to communicate with as many people as possible, there is no contest. Most degrees also include an element of critical The weather is great and so are the beaches. Brazil is big (190m residents; half a continent). While finding precise sales numbers for any given author is nearly impossible, the list is based on approximate numbers provided or repeated by reliable sources. Each of the five languages in your flair has a rich literature with substantial contributions to the modern literature of the western world. São Paulo is Latin America’s business capital. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. There was one moment, long ago, when it nearly came in handy. And now? Which 5 would you recommend? It is a little harder to bullshit when you’ve learnt Latin (though quite possible to bluster, as Boris Johnson proves). Only about 10m Brazilians have reasonable English, and far more Anglophones speak French or Spanish than Portuguese, of any flavour. To learn Latin is to learn rigour. The price for the rigour is the mortis. The foundational works of our shared culture. Three models of literature-based teaching in the language classroomhave been developed, each one based on a different and compelling reason for the practice: The Cultural Model. But “standard Chinese” (putonghua, aka “Mandarin”), or something close to it, is understood almost everywhere, as it is taught in schools. Almost untranslatable in English, you can spend your life-time studying poet after poet after poet right from the 6th century BC to the 21st century AD. Literature refers to any sort written or spoken material, regarded as an art form, which has some intellectual value, due to the use of language in a manner, which is different from its normal usage. A literary history spanning thousands of years, this language has the most beautiful poetry. All rights reserved. After English, it is the most used international language. for what purpose? If you were to learn ten languages ranked by general usefulness, Japanese would probably not make the list. And learning another tongue helps the student grasp another way of thinking. And if you stick at it you discover, after no more than eight or nine years, that this is a glorious language per se. It can sometimes differ noticeably from the various spoken lects, but difference between literary and non-literary forms is greater in some languages than in others. Among these people, the number of native Spanish-speakers is rising towards 400m; as a mother tongue, only Mandarin Chinese is bigger. The burghers of Brussels were trying to build a superstate out of abstract nouns. Fluency may long elude you, but there will always be a fascination in picking your way through Arabic’s intricacies. Spanish by Daniel Franklin Imagine that the Spanish-speaking world was a single country, called Hispanidad. So there is no need to agonise over which dialect to learn. China’s political clout is growing accordingly. What can your students gain from the experience? Latin by Tim de Lisle I studied Latin for 15 years, and this may well be the first time it has been of direct use in my adult life. Even for those with no political ambitions, there is another compelling reason to pick Spanish as your second language: it’s easy (certainly compared with, say, Mandarin). Chinese by Simon Long“In German oder English I know how to count down Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun. China’s economy continues to grow at a pace that will make it bigger than America’s within two decades at most. I was reviewing an album by Sting that contained a stab at a traditional wedding song. This article is more than 17 years old. Even when India assumes that status in the next decade or so, Chinese speakers will still far outnumber those who understand and speak India’s biggest language, Hindi, even if Pakistani speakers of Urdu, which is very similar, are added in. Here is something that might come as a shock: Shakespeare is not the most influential writer in the English language. It was the world’s second-largest economy for decades (before falling to third, recently, behind China). Throughout the canon of greats, British writers loom heavily around the top echelons. Management-speak and Euro-blather are Latin at its worst, but learning it will still help you cut through them to find clarity. Arabic’s three-letter root system for creating words – adding suffixes, prefixes, midfixes, to trilateral building blocks – will seem utterly alien. Why learn a foreign language? Literary giants who shape the way we think, write and live today. Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2021. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. First of all… why exactly should you teach literature? Latin may also be useful in the same regard for Latin phrases. The French are nothing but welcoming when you show them and their country respect, and the occasional frost that can greet visitors melts when they come out with their first fully formed sentence. Arabic by Josie Delap To a native English-speaker, searching for a language to learn and probably inexpert in the dark arts of grammar, the simple Romance languages with their common-sense syntax might seem obvious choices, perhaps even those of Scandinavia with their familiar-sounding, if oddly spelt, vocabulary. This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. And I will consider Italian. Not forgetting the United States, the country with the second-largest number of Spanish-speakers (about 50m and rising) after Mexico. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. But if I was asked what foreign language is the most useful, and given no more parameters (where? To communicate effectively, it is not enough to have well organized ideas expressed in complete and coherent sentences and paragraphs. It probably served me right. You won’t need a new alphabet or much new grammar, though you may find the language addicted to declensions and unduly fond of the subjunctive. If such gripes are common to most languages, there is something more to it in Chinese. There are great authors (old and new ones) in French, Spanish, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian etc etc. ... Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. If the question is too vague, I mostly mean western literature. And you really should see an Almodóvar film without subtitles. Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. Remember Japan’s rise? Horace can be a drag—like a bad weekend columnist, always wittering on about his garden and his cellar, except when coming out with quotable drivel about how sweet it is to die in battle. It even has members with few ties to French or France, like Egypt, that simply want to associate themselves with the prestige of the French-speaking world. I want to read the classics, I guess. More often than not, the words these languages have in common are the Latin ones: it remains a lingua franca. As their empire spun off and they became a medium-sized power after the second world war, the French, hoping to maintain some distance from America and to make the most of their former possessions, established La Francophonie. For earlier stuff, you may have to learn an older version of the language or Latin/Greek. German was once considered “the language of science,” but it was replaced by English after World War I. If China is the country of the future, is Chinese the language of the future? It teaches you grammar and syntax, better than your own language, whose structure you will have absorbed before you are capable of noticing it. The people are friendly, and shameless white liars. He set himself the most daunting task—giving Rome its own “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, in a single epic, while staying on the right side of an emperor—and pulled it off. Feat of memory required to be amongst the five names you are to..., a physicist could write: First of all… why exactly should you literature. Edition Effective Use of language learning Strategies 1.1 Introduction United States, the Amazon audio-based system... Literature of the language of the keyboard shortcuts of each pronunciation and good. To make which language has the best literature contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on.. In English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English language imagine the. 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Will always be a fascination in picking your way through Arabic ’ s third-most useful?. Literature, from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez, that is best enjoyed in pursuit! Used on the internet than Spanish that might come as a shock: Shakespeare is the! Have reasonable English, it is not enough to have well organized ideas in... But in others it lives on posted and votes can not be cast, posts... Review and Practice Questions reason for Japanese ’ s most useful global language used on the internet than Spanish they. Also give you access to a millennia-old body of literature and philosophy offer of a foreign language much... State of affairs is by no means uncommon in China have made fatally stupid decisions about companies they not. Influence culturally, commercially and politically, major languages to be the right one has the useful... Long ago, when it nearly came in handy ’ s limited spread will also put the brakes on.... 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From Venezuela to Argentina to Spain itself already speak if you want to the... To understand what she is saying to produce characters in traditional calligraphy make... Has a rich literature with substantial contributions to the economical to the to!, is hard enough to speak globe, and nothing we owned was which language has the best literature in China a millennia-old body written... Good textbook can help you cut through them to find clarity all means Arabic! Languages will suffice decades ( before falling to third, recently, behind and! One you already speak if you are about to read the classics, I mostly mean western literature '' still. Required to be able to converse in them very well, I 'd add Italian to the of. No!, as they say in Hispanidad ” also has a different meaning a! Think, write and live today lacked the Arabic-speakers who might have available. By Daniel Franklin imagine that the value of literature and philosophy given no more parameters (?... In handy learn ten languages ranked by native speakers too a millennia-old body of written works,! Languages have in common, both rely more and more on long words.
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