What's the best Asian language to learn for books?

>>8320540
english

>>8320546
thats not asian desu

>>8320598
its the best language to learn for asian books

>>8320540
Aeolic or Ionic Greek

>>8320540
probably Chinese, Japanese is good too. Korea is pretty much bereft in comparison to China and Japan.

learning a language just for literature doesn't seem practical, though - especially considering the Asian languages can be difficult for people only acquainted with western languages. with that in mind, Chinese is going to be more practical. The downside is that the Chinese are assholes and the language sounds shit.

>>8320759
>Chinese are assholes

Maybe if you only draw experience from their tourists and their oligarchs. Mainland Chinese were rather nice and extremely helpful in my experience.

>>8320775
You're gonna have to deal with those oligarchs if you work there.

Even in my experience as a tourist they were assholes. Keep in mind I only visited Beijing and Shanghai, but again, if you learn the language with the intent of working in China, you'll probably end up in one of the bigger cities.

is there literally any reason to learn korean (other than kpop or video games) over a different language?

ping pong wing long!!!!

>>8320801
Does Korea even make video games? I guess like shitty MMOs.

>>8320866
I meant more for the esports scene

sanksrit

>>8320775
agreed

>>8320540
Honestly Japan exports 100x the amount of cool art and music and cultural shit than China does. I know Mandarin but there is literally nothing to digest besides Party-sucking "literature" and shitty fucking telenovels. If I had learned Japanese instead I could read haiku, know why Japanoise exists, read vaporwave song titles, the works.

Japanese for beautiful Heian to Kamakura period epics and modern literature, as well as some of the more interesting and mindbendy Buddhist texts published in an Asian context. Contemporary Japanese literature is its own oddball thing that if it were a music genre would have some oddball name like "polite punk".

Ancient Chinese literature is much dryer, and modern and post-modern Chinese literature rely on an incredibly weird sense of humor or ironic pessimism that would confuse even diehard Kafka fans.

South Korea has an okay contemporary lit scene, but one which not many people outside of South Korea care about.

>>8320775

My Chinese classmates were pleasant people. They were passionate about a lot but their values and social concerns were pretty obviously wildly different from their peers in the way they thought about topics like sexuality, the nature of rights, and their definition of reason was a completely different planet than western discourses of rationality.

文言文 desu

>>8320960
What the fuck is wrong with Mandarin, seriously? Is their soul just completely dead?

>>8321051

Choppy, tonal language, so shorter and simpler.

>>8320960

You're forgetting about all of the critical modern writers and postmodern writers who subtly mocked or allegorically parodied the party line. Someone has never read Gao Xingjian or Mo Yan.

>>8321051
Yes, essentially. They have no appreciation of art and no creativity within them. It's a cultural disease. Makes sense when all the critical thinkers were killed or pushed out of the country.

>>8321062
Mo Yan is the exact guy I'm shitting on. Maybe I didn't get the satire. I mean yes he wrote about how fucked up the cultural revolution was but regular Chinese people pointed at Mao's face on the yuan and said "bad man" to me when I lived there so I'm not saying they're brainwashed -- just neutered.

>>8320669
Depends on what you're after, really. If you want a genuine primary perspective understanding of ideas wrought from places so far you're going to need to see the channel in which they were transcribed. Secondary sources in English, however, can still present an extent of understanding.

>>8320775
True

>>8320960
>Honestly Japan exports 100x the amount of cool art and music and cultural shit than China does
>What is socioeconomics

You've crossed the line between pseud and full on retard.

China doesn't have freedom of speech, everything is censored, and anything contemporary is propaganda.

>>8322689
>I've done no research and I'll just listen to what CNN tells me

>>8321027
did anyone read <The Vegetarian>? It won the Manbooker award

>learning any asian language
they all sound like shit and are full of bullshit

Classical Chinese was the lingua franca of East Asia for 2,000 years. If you begin with that then the rest is much easier (i.e. if you wish to branch out into Japanese lit or contemporary Chinese baihua).

That being said, my interests are history and philosophy, and not so much literature. But I can say that the vast majority of classical Japanese literature is recycled Chinese classics, written in Chinese characters, in classical Chinese style (kanbun).

Paul Rouzer's primer of literary Chinese is the best text for intro classical Chinese.

If it's south Asian you're interested in, then of course Sanskrit. Thomas Egenes' two volume set is the best Sanskrit introduction I found.

Not to be forgotten is Tibetan, which boasts the largest religious literary canon in the world. It's also a beautiful script, and easier to learn than Chinese or Sanskrit. Rockwell's primer is good for Tibetan.

>>8320540
japan has the biggest output out of Korea China and Japan for literature. Quite a lot gets lost in translation from Japanese to English.

written Chinese is nothing like oral Chinese... learning to read classical Chinese is something they go to university and study.

Learn Japanese for lit and never look back
>>8321051
the grammar of mandarin is pretty simple... there is a certain way ideas are expressed, just like in every language but once you've got those down there's not much to it. the tones are another matter

>>8320960
If that's the case, it's probably largely due to Japan having spent the twentieth century being (a) vastly richer, (b) more peaceful, (c) less politically crazy and (d) more linked to the west than China.

But I'm pretty sure you're also downplaying creativity in contemporary China. It seems to have some interesting lit (though I haven't read any to judge), and it definitely has acclaimed film directors and a thriving modern art scene.

>>8323470
To add on the reason it's seemingly not exportable to Western countries is because it's firstly not definitively in the civilisational phase of a post industrial economy (that's what the current 5 year plan is, which is also why we're seeing a lot of massive layoffs in China's metal industry) and is geared towards material rather than cultural export, while a good portion of Japan's GDP relies entirely on cultural export including tourism

>>8323059
Why does every retarded pseudointellecutal weeaboo...type like this...are you the black kid...from Malcolm in the middle...banzai Nippon sushi desu allegro Alzheimer's...

>>8323497
>triggered by ellipses

Japan is if I remember right the country that does the most reading. However much of this is Light novels (yaf) and manga as well as a population where 1 in 4 people is over 65. That said surely in a country with a lot of readers there are bound to be a few good writers.

>>8320540
You should learn Japanese , Classical Chinese & Dutch if you want to master Asian culture and history.

Contemporary literature of Korea and China derive from Japan.

>>8324107
I think most readers of your country read only YA novels.

File: RTSEE8A.jpg (299KB, 937x528px) Image search: [Google]

299KB, 937x528px

Inspiration for people in this thread:

28 year old woman began learning Korean 6 years by herself, manages to get proficient enough to translate a Korean novel and win a huge award for it.

Now obviously she's pretty special, but it goes to show what hard work can do if you're persistent. That's what language learning requires more than anything else: persistence.

>>8322660
>>Honestly Japan exports 100x the amount of cool art and music and cultural shit than China does
>>What is socioeconomics

>You've crossed the line between pseud and full on retard.

What is that even supposed to mean? Are you assuming I don't understand why it's that way? Cause that would make you da retart

>>8324278

forgot link

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-18/how-self-taught-translator-created-literary-masterpiece-one-word-time

>>8324278
Hmmm, good argument for learning a more obscure language, actually. I wonder which language has the best obscurity-to-literariness (or literary marketability) ratio?

>>8320540
>not obviously japanese
I'm reading snow country in english right now, and even though it's pretty entry-level, it's still amazing

>>8324345

what do you do for a living, just curious?

>>8321036
>topics like sexuality, the nature of rights, and their definition of reason was a completely different planet than western discourses of rationality.

Pls expand. I'm learning to read chinese because reasons and this is intruguing.

How difficult is it to learning Chinese if I'm a native English speaker with only basic understanding of Spanish and French? I have the opportunity to stay in China for 7 weeks all paid for, but I have to do intensive studies of Chinese language while I'm there. Is it doable for someone as monolingual as me?

>>8324691
Imagine if every word in English had its own letter. Chinese does

>>8324691
7 weeks isn't really enough to read anything I think, but maybe basic speaking

>>8324968
Yeah I don't suspect I'll gain any fluency in it despite them saying otherwise, and I honestly have little desire to learn it anyway, I just want the free travel.

I just meant in terms of the difficulty, is it possible to keep up with that expectation when your only roots are in the 2 easiest Latin-based languages? Is the difficulty of Chinese real, or over exaggerated?

>>8324691
when would you theoretically be going to china?

just focus on the spoken part of chinese, as well as the listening. you have pretty much no shot at learning enough of the characters in that amount of time. the basic understanding of french and spanish doesn't really help because Chinese doesn't have grammatical gender or tenses.

>>8325001
the difficulty of Chinese comes from the tones which you have to master to be understood. using the wrong tones for a word can completely change the meaning. when people speak at a native speed it can be difficult to differentiate the tones.

the writing system isn't that bad, it just takes quite a while to learn

>>8325001
if you put in the work and practice like learning every other language there'll be progress

>>8325001
The tones are kind of hard, and the characters are very hard,but the grammar is simple

>>8320918

This is the right answer, but I doubt it's what he's looking for.

>>8324879
lol
>>8324691
which city? it's definitely doable to become somewhat proficient in chinese over the course of just 7 weeks (with a little preparation beforehand). but imo it depends on which city you go to, who you stay with, how autistic you are, how easily triggered you are, etc.