![Chinese-writing-history[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/zDjykzh.jpg "Chinese-writing-history[1].jpg")
>"i'm really into history"
>"i only speak english and maybe one other europoor language"
Come back when you actually learn a difficult language like Chinese or Arabic, I don't even consider you people to be bilingual. Learning everything through the lens of English is embarrassingly stupid.
I don't know Chinese doesn't seem all that difficult (at least compared to Japanese).
being an ancient language the word usage isn't all that complicated desu
I see how Chinese is useful for understanding history, but Arabic?
Literally what else can you read about besides the Quran and a few, very questionable texts on the early caliphates?
>>1299298
English language speakers don't need to learn another language. Anyone that can't speak English is an uneducated pleb anyway.
>He hasn't even read the bible in Gothic
When will manlets ever learn?
>>1299298
>he doesn't even speak Latin
>>1299333
>English language speakers don't need to learn another language. Anyone that can't speak English is an uneducated pleb anyway.
Depends on the country. It is safe to assume Swede or a Finn who doesn't speak English is an uneducated pleb, but many smart and educated Japanese don't speak much English, for instance.
>2016
>not knowing how to read hieroglyphics
Fucking uneducated normies.
>>1299339
>>1299348
>learning dead languages
>>1299354
>not wanting to speak with the dead
Casuals, out.
>>1299354
Latin isn't dead with how many autists speak it desu
>>1299321
Chinese is a lot more difficult than Japanese. Twice as many characters and tons of pronunciations that aren't found in English. Grammar is easier, but Japanese grammar is already really easy compared to most languages.
>>1299369
Chinese has a larger character set
but Japanese has like three of them
English is definitely more difficult than both of them what with being two different languages with their own rules sewn together.
>>1299343
>many smart and educated Japanese don't speak much English, for instance.
They may be smart but if they can't speak English they are uneducated.
>>1299354
>not being able to read source material in it's original language
>>1299395
Fuck off Nigel
>>1299393
>3000 chinese characters
>50x2 simple phonetic characters
vs.
>6000 chinese characters
Yeah you need twice as many characters for Chinese even with kana.
You can't say English is easier or harder though because we are talking from an English perspective. If someone were to learn English then their perspective could be from any language and that would very much change the difficulty level. Learning English if you are native Italian is incredibly easy compared to if you are native Chinese for example.
>>1299402
Pls don't bully me.
>>1299298
Anglo contributions to modern scholarship - The majority
Asiatic contributions to modern scholarship - few eg. Chinese we wuz sensationalism
>>1299423
>making excuses for being a pleb
typical american pretending his lack of education is somehow superior
top lel m8
>>1299393
Kana are not difficult to learn at all. They all stand for easily pronounceable sounds like Ka or Shi. Japanese vowels never morph depending on the word and there aren't any horrible tonal differences like there is in Chinese. Where depending on the inflection the word can change meaning entirely.
>>1299414
Most Japanese people receive a cursory education in English but aren't actually conversational or able to read it much at all. Actually being fluent in English is in fact thought of as a somewhat rare and cool skill.
>>1299434
>Where depending on the inflection the word can change meaning entirely.
To be fair this is also partially true for Japanese, and arguably a negative thing that it isn't more common because of the way Japanese adopted Chinese characters and converted plenty of phonetically different characters to the same pronunciation in Japanese creating tons of homophones. Lack of homophones (compared to Japanese) is definitely a pro for Chinese.
>>1299438
>Most Japanese people receive a cursory education in English but aren't actually conversational or able to read it much at all. Actually being fluent in English is in fact thought of as a somewhat rare and cool skill.
Exactly, they're uneducated.
Well, I can read Norwegian, English, German, French and Ancient Greek.
And I spend my time reading a lot of history in different languages.
>>1299456
They have a lot more educated society than us anglos true word senpai. Not sharing any borders with English speaking countries and all of their media being in Japanese rather reduces the motivation to learn it.
>>1299464
I don't care what their excuse is. Knowing English is the most important skill in life.
>>1299477
Fuck off Lindy
>>1299298
Greek and Latin for western culture.
Indic languages such as Sanskrit and Pali for Indian culture.
Classical Chinese for eastern oriental culture.
Persian for Persian Poetry
Arabic for Islamic jurisprudence and Hebrew for Jewish Halakha
>>1299479
Don't be mean.
>>1299329
This. There's far more literature in Persian than in Arabic. Even the "Golden Age" material was almost entirely works that were originally written in Greek, Latin, or Indo-Aryan languages anyway.
>>1299298
Actually in Chink/East Asian Sources you'd need knowledge of classical Chinese.
Which, according to Native Chinese Speakers, is hard as fucking fuck and is the purview of Archaeologists, Historians, and Buddhist & Taoists Monks.
Though Latter works (read: Ming-Qing Shit) are easier.
English is the single language with the most of the worlds texts that have been translated into.
With the dialectal shifts and orthographical irregularities it's not convenient to spend time trying to learn ancient languages.
If anything you can read the translation and use a dictionary or a lexicon to decipher a passage of interest.
I'm trying to learn Russian but it's sort of hard. It'd be neat to speak another language though.
It's probably helpful to be bilingual before delving in the study of ancient languages, it really makes your mind open to the possibilities on how other languages may function.
>>1299298
>tfw learning weeb, catonese, and koine
>>1299298
>Learning everything through the lens of English is embarrassingly stupid.
There is no logical reason for this, you would be excluding the vast majority of historians. Sounds like an excuse to attack someone's person rather than their argument.
Learning moonrunes is not worth the effort. Anyone that unironically thinks it is has no actual expertise in the subject, and is absolutely delusional about what doing so actually entails.
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
>Inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers.
>Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."
>>1299604
>A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.
But how would they?
>>1299339
This. Thank the heavens I am not the only person that finds it amusing to meet historians that cant into Latin.
>>1299620
>"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.
>This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway.
>>1299604
Learning ancient, pre-traditional characters is not worth the effort. Learning modern standardized characters is not as hard as some like to suggest. They simply have a bad learning approach, and never learn to recognize primitives, and to see the building blocks of each character. People who don't learn incrementally in this way literally try to memorize thousands of undifferentiated shapes, without being able to use build mnemonic associations with component pieces.
If you try to "brute force" memorize characters, you will fail.
Learning Classical Chinese is one of those things that I'd like to do.... if I was immortal, maybe.
>>1299638
Wrong.
>>1299631
>Ancient Chinese Scholars are Meming Faggots
Its like a 1000 years later, Internet Archaeologists will ponder at all the Wojaks, Pepes, and Baneposts and make a Mythology out of them.
>>1299298
I'll learn another language when you show me a book only available in Arabic / Chinese.
>>1299339
>Speak
>Latin
>>1299638
Also a lot of difficulties about the characters that David Moser mentions in that article are less relevant today than when he learned Chinese. Handwriting is almost completely irrelevant and I understand that even native Japanese/Chinese speakers suck at it nowadays, which means that it is enough to know the characters passively. When reading on a computer the characters are a lot more manageable and looking up words is not difficult, for example I use a pop-up dictionary (Perapera Chinese) and Kanji-Tomo (can read Chinese in addition to Japanese).
>>1299298
Both those languages are horrible and sound barbaric, specially chinese. I mean, a fucking tone language, seriously? What's the next, fucking clicks? Arabic could sound good if it was less gutural.
If you want a nice sounding exotic language go and learn indo-aryan or iranic languages.
>>1299659
The quran
reminder that god intended it to be read in arabic
>>1299701
Weeb and Jihadist are my two favorite non western languages.
>>1299488
So greek and latin arent indo-aryan?
>>1299701
>Both those languages are horrible and sound barbaric, specially chinese. I mean, a fucking tone language, seriously?
The tones are the cool part about Chinese pronunciation. The irritating part is the insane amount of affricates, ie. zh, ch, j, q, z, c, which all sounds something like 'ts' or english ch.
>>1299647
It's more like in 1,000 years, people will be told they're uncultured if they can't decipher the meaning of dat boi.
>>1299647
>"Hmmm... I think it reads 'tfwnogf' but I have no idea what that means."
>>1299298
Translated:
Come back when you, too, bend over to sniff your own farts. I don't consider people, who don't hand-waft their own farts into their own faces, to be cool like me.
>>1299298
>Chinese
>Arabic
Come back when you learn a real meme language like Finnish or Polish.
>>1299836
Russian is more memey than Polish.
>>1299580
I think you missed the word "everything".
>>1299638
I wish the mnemonic meme would die already. Things like RTK/RTH don't actually help you learn the characters in any real way. There's a reason that Japanese and Chinese people have a super high fluency rate and they don't use mnemonics to learn, it's because learning to recognize Chinese characters isn't that difficult. You don't need to even remember the radicals, eventually you just see the character and know. Mnemonics are a beginner meme. People who make real progress in language do not use them.
>>1299705
Tanri uludur.
>>1299638
Chinese as a second language speaker here.
Your fun tricks are not gonna help you memorize a few thousand chinese ideographs. You'll have to bruteforce all of them into your head. And you'll hate every minute of it.
>>1300047
>You'll have to bruteforce all of them into your head.
Pretty much true, although you will probably learn to recognize phonetic and semantic components. The phonetic components are surprisingly helpful, considering that they are based on how the character was pronounced in some form of Chinese (of which many are basically different languages) many hundreds years ago.
>And you'll hate every minute of it.
Well I didn't.
