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. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. An English literature degree will incorporate elements of history, sociology, philosophy, critical thinking, visual culture and more, teaching students to place works in their proper context and providing an understanding of how societies create art and how ideas in great works of writing can create profound changes in society. They range from the intellectual to the economical to the practical. It probably served me right. Which 5 would you recommend? Learn Chinese, not to impress your future boss, but to understand what she is saying. So it's an ambitious goal. While you do have many options available, these are among the best German grammar books you can find today. Only about 10m Brazilians have reasonable English, and far more Anglophones speak French or Spanish than Portuguese, of any flavour. With the right references to study, you can learn proper German grammar and increase your fluency in the language. Chinese, with all its tones, is hard enough to speak. Management-speak and Euro-blather are Latin at its worst, but learning it will still help you cut through them to find clarity. Paul Pimsleur—creator of the renowned audio-based language system that has helped millions of language learners. It is home to the world’s largest standing forest, the Amazon. So is Japanese the world’s third-most useful language? 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. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. While those studying Spanish gallop ahead, chattering about beers they want and sisters they have, you must master a new script; one whose dots and dashes blur before your eyes, whose vowels fade into nothingness, whose letters change shape depending on where they appear in the word. When you understand how beautifully Arabic fits together – why the root meaning “west” leads to the words for “sunset” and “strange” – the sense of illumination is sublimely satisfying. It may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language and genre. In this model, the class reads fiction or poetry as part of th… Hispanidad also has a rich literature, from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez, that is best enjoyed in the original. Or both; learning one makes the second quite easy. 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. What makes them so popular? 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. The fact that it spreads across the Americas, Spain and even parts of Africa and Asia makes the case for Spanish stronger still. 1 person has voted this message useful 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 programming language can be easy to pick up whether you’re a first-time programmer or you’re experienced with other languages and hence the much uproar about it. This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. One factor behind the 9/11 attacks was the fact that the CIA lacked the Arabic-speakers who might have translated available intelligence. The first years of Arabic are frustrating, like doing a jigsaw of a cloudy night sky. Another 19 countries are observer members. In Britain, despite four decades in the European Union, the number of A-levels taken in French and German has fallen by half in the past 20 years, while what was a growing trend of Spanish-learning has stalled. If you work with words, Latin is the Pilates session that stays with you for life: it strengthens the core. If you want six, I'd add Italian to the list. But really, "Western literature" is still too vague. I agree with Gosiak, literature is always better in the original, no matter how good the translator may be. 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. The 100 best novels Books. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters: type in wo and Chinese language-support software will offer a menu of characters pronounced wo; the user selects the one desired. China’s economy continues to grow at a pace that will make it bigger than America’s within two decades at most. ), my answer would be French. With a hybrid poetic language creating the perfect spindle to weave their magic, from the modernists to the Angry Young Men, The Culture Trip London takes a look at some of the greats from over the last 100 years; writers whose output has assured them an everlasting place among the greatest of all time. Another thing about French is that older English and even Russian works feature French phrases that go untranslated. And if you stick at it you discover, after no more than eight or nine years, that this is a glorious language per se. Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. The French especially have some beautiful literary idioms, especially in their 19th century classics. Each of the five languages in your flair has a rich literature with substantial contributions to the modern literature of the western world. Nonetheless, compelling reasons remain for learning other languages. Also in the top 15 are Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, major languages to be sure, but regionally concentrated. The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. 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. It’s never too late, but where to start? All of the foreign tongues listed here are vital. But “standard Chinese” (putonghua, aka “Mandarin”), or something close to it, is understood almost everywhere, as it is taught in schools. Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. 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. I want to read the classics, I guess. On the downside, the effort required to speak, read and write Chinese will be about 3x that of picking up an Indo-European language with a Roman alphabet, so you need to be pretty determined. I did French and Greek too for years, and enjoyed them, but nothing quite matched up to the pleasure of reading the “Aeneid” in the original.■, Sign up to our free daily newsletter, The Economist today, Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Arabic’s three-letter root system for creating words – adding suffixes, prefixes, midfixes, to trilateral building blocks – will seem utterly alien. 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. Which period(s) do you want? The default option is 2018. 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. 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. In one way, sure, but in others it lives on. China is the most populous nation on earth. All are welcome, whether beginner or polyglot. 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. Throughout the canon of greats, British writers loom heavily around the top echelons. 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