Thread 24821632

Who is the Chinese Dostoevsky?

>>24821632 (OP)
Luo Guanzhong. Also:

>learn Chinese
Why would I need to speak Chinese when they already speak English?

Lao She

>>24821632 (OP)
Why are sinoboos such retards? Imagine thinking fuckin' Chinese carries more weight than French and German, or that Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Vietnamese have any importance whatsoever lmao

>>24821779
Right? Who the fuck is learning fucking Hindu? Or Chinese? If you want to learn a second language better learn German or French

Lao Gan Ma is famous for his great work Bing Chilling

>>24821632 (OP)
Yu Dafu

>>24821796
He's great.

>>24821632 (OP)
没有

>>24821779
>>24821792
I think Chinese might be very useful to learn. The thing about German and French is that Germans, Austrians, Swiss people and the French already speak English.

Dunno why anyone would want to learn Hindi. Japanese should be higher since Japanese people tend to be terrible in English.

>>24821673
>Why would I need to speak Chinese when they already speak English?
Less than 5% of China speaks english and that is a "speaks english" speaks english mind you.

>>24821632 (OP)
>moortugal
>Chinese shill
Why are they like this?

>>24821632 (OP)
This is cope, only English and Russian is S tier importance

>>24821632 (OP)
Portuguese has the wrong flag. The most important portuguese by all metrics is the brazilian one...

>>24822295
This was my first thought aswell. The twitter poster is from Portugal lol

>>24821779
French and German are nice to learn because they are beautiful and come from nice countries to visit and because of the cultural weight, but learning them does not open you to any new literary and cultural tradition -- the amount and quality of crossover with English is high.

Learning Chinese, though it's not a beautiful spoken language (written, it's the coolest in existence) and it is not a country you'll likely ever visit and doesn't have lofty cultural capital, does open you up to the greatest non-Western literary and cultural tradition, the vast majority of which is untranslated and in literary forms that you have no idea of.

>>24822312
How long to learn Chinese good enough to read it?

>>24822340
NTA, but longer than for any other major language. Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce it, and you will have to painstakingly draw it in google translate because you can only do pinyin input if you know the pronunciation. Or you can look it up in a confusing radical based dictionary.

It's possible to learn but it's annoying. Also, proper nouns are hard to distinguish from regular nouns, and parts of speech are also opaque so it's hard to tell what's what at a glance, unlike say Japanese where the morphology is clear.

>>24821632 (OP)
Arabic is clearly more important to know in the 21st century than French, the entire first quarter of this century is almost exclusively downstream from foreign campaigns in the middle east

>>24822312
>open you up to the greatest non-Western literary and cultural tradition
implessive
Japan lit is amazing and they didn't go on a communist rampage

>>24822420
>they didn't go on a communist rampage
There's still time, they can still steer out of that skid.

>>24821990
they all have to take english as part of their schooling. the younger generation all speak english to some extent.

>>24822385
>Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce it, and you will have to painstakingly draw it in google translate

Do you not know that you can take a photo of something with your phone and have Google run a search on it? You can also just upload it into ChatGPT and it will tell you the character.

Learn how to learn, anon

>>24822385
>Every time you find a character you've never seen before you will have zero fucking idea what it means or how to pronounce it
Not entirely true; most characters consist of a phonetic component giving approximate pronunciation and a semantic component giving general category of meaning. If you're already familiar with the word from spoken language you may well be able to connect the character to it.

>>24822505
The ones you meet in Western countries, maybe

>>24822505
"To some extent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the Americans who take Spanish or French in school, how many can order a coffee in it ten years later?

>>24822491
>>24822420
holy cope

>>24821779
You're at a massive advantage in STEM if you can read Chinese because many of the papers being published are in Chinese. Plus a good 50% of the STEM forums for technical questions and discussion are happening behind the Mandarin curtain on the Chinese internet.

What German was to the early 20th century, and what Russian was to the late 20th century, Chinese is to the early 21st century.

>>24822767
>and what Russian was to the late 20th century
Who outside of the USSR spoke Russian in the late 20th century? Like do you have any examples of great thinkers or scientists learning Russian

>>24822776
To my understanding it was widely taught in schools in Soviet-allied countries.

>>24822776
Western engineers in the 1950s-80s could often read Russian, as they'd need to read technical papers coming out of the Eastern Bloc. They could often read German too. A lot of the aerospace engineers of the 1960s were able to read Russian.

I said reading, not speaking. It's somewhat easy to learn a foreign language just to read it, especially if you're only dealing with a narrow range of words in your technical domain.

>>24822803
Would technical papers from the Eastern Bloc generally be in Russian rather than Polish, Hungarian, etc even if they were from those countries?

>>24821792
German and French will be dead languages in a few decades.

>>24822816
Yes, they were basically all written in Russian. The Soviet Union hosted all the aerospace shit and military technology, so all the research that was on the periphery for STEM was being written in Russian. I think East Germany may of been somewhat of an exception.

NASA used to host Russian language learning courses for their engineers. Although by the time the 80s rolled around it was becoming rarer as Russia was just that far behind. But you could find Engineers fluent in Russian well up into the 00s.

I do seriously think that studying STEM in a Chinese university will become a bit of a flex in a decade or two, and I think the diaspora Chinese have such a massive advantage over other westerners. Getting access to both technical information on western forums and eastern forums.

>>24821779
France and Germany are politically irrelevant

>>24822420
Japanese literature pales in comparison with, say, French literature, and as for Chinese literature, let’s not even talk about it.

>>24823383
>Japanese literature pales in comparison with, say, French literature
of course, but after euro lit it's the next best thing, much better than Chinese lit.
Their approach to lit in the 1920 to 1960, inspired by the european tradition, is very interesting.

>>24821632 (OP)
he was mostly right

>>24823456
Honestly I'm not as well versed in Jap lit than in French lit but from what I've seen the Chinese one seems more rich? I only read some classics from both

>>24821632 (OP)
There are more foreigners learning Korean than Chinese, it's so funny when chinks think their language is relevant.

>>24821632 (OP)
Portuguese and Hindi are way more important than Russian though

>>24822312
The only reason why French is considered a beautiful language is because people associate it with the country it self. If a shithole in Southeast Asia spoke it then it would’ve been considered ugly

You should know at least 3 languages fluently anyway. Monolingualism causes your brain to atrophy and locks your perspective into a single culture shared by a language group (in the case of English where it is the lingua franca, the perspective of the global educated elites)

>>24822677
*silly trite cliche* back at you.

>>24822340
If you are good at memorizing characters then it won't take long. The grammar required for the basic meaning of most sentences is simple, so your main task is acquiring vocab.

In some ways Chinese is the simplest language on Earth. There are no declensions or conjugations. Just characters. You want to denote an event has been completed? You add a character. You want to turn a statement into a question? You add a character. It's beautifully simple.

>>24822385
I read on a computer and use the zhongwen pop up app which automatically translates characters for me. It's much easier reading Chinese than French which requires figuring out how a word is being conjugated on the fly.

>>24823280
>I do seriously think that studying STEM in a Chinese university will become a bit of a flex in a decade or two, and I think the diaspora Chinese have such a massive advantage over other westerners. Getting access to both technical information on western forums and eastern forums

You overstimate Chinese universities.
They focus on rote learning rather than on fostering critical thinking. That's why they lack creativity and practical skills compared to westerners.
They might publish more papers than western universities but they are ranked lower in citations.
In 2 decades, I predict that Chinese students will keep offering their pinky fingers to study at MIT while no one will bother to move to China. It would require a multi-generational shift to change their educational philosophy which requires more than 30 years

>>24824512
I'm not overestimating Chinese universities because I agree with everything you said in regards to Chinese universities. They have the same cultural tiger parent, imperial exam faults that they have always had, that Korea also still has. But I think it will dissipate somewhat. The lack of citations is due to China's rapid rise, it will take time. The same way that Americans lacked citations in certain fields in physics and Chemistry compared to the Germans in the early 20th century, despite America clearly being in the process of becoming the Industrial and technological leader of the world.

>That's why they lack creativity and practical skills compared to westerners.

This is where I fundamentally disagree, you're overestimating western universities. The Ivy Leagues have rapidly deprecated to being finishing schools for the mediocre children of third world elites, a Jewish nepotism bubble and a place for mediocre blacks to get diversity slots. The State schools, MIT and CalTech are still quality, but the latter two there are being driven hard by East Asian cognitive talent already. That talent could easily shift over to the Far East if China keeps on developing and America keeps on importing incapable populations.

Western universities have gone to shit and in many fields become intellectually closed slophouses, the standards have been repetitively lowered. It doesn't help that there's diploma mills everywhere in western countries that have horrendously low standards and are just a method for selling citizenship, visajeeting. That shit will eventually reflect badly on the west if it keeps up. Even today I'd argue western higher education is mostly coasting on past prestige.

>>24823501
>There are more foreigners learning Korean than Chinese
Where'd you hear that statistic? I'd be surprised.

>>24823529
In general, aesthetic judgements about languages are really about the people who speak them.
>>24823971
>In some ways Chinese is the simplest language on Earth. There are no declensions or conjugations.
There are other languages that fit that description, like Vietnamese, Thai, or Malay/Indonesian. Also a few African languages, I think.

>>24821779
>Chinese carries more weight than French and German
considering that China is considerably more important country in the global stage polically and economically , I would say that yes it does

>>24823502
SAAR

>>24821632 (OP)
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

>>24823456
japanese lit is an offshoot of chinese. your focus on the 20th century in evaluating a literary tradition is nonsensical.

>>24821632 (OP)
I don’t speak Japanese nor do I wish to but putting it in C tier but Chinese in C tier (and fucking Russian and Spanish in A tier lmao) is tremendously biased

>>24822776
It was mostly specialist things for particular areas. Only one that comes to mind was chess books. Between the 50-80 the soviets went hard into chess so pro chess players would learn Russian to read their chess books

>>24823456
I recently read a translation of Spring Snow and it felt like I was reading a European novel. It was really good but also really enlightening

>>24821632 (OP)
>B tier hindi, urdu
kill yourself OP, genuinely just gouge your own fucking nigger eyes out and pour gasoline directly through your eyesockets into that shit brain of yours and then throw a fucking lit match in it, if you're capable of lighting a fucking match you fucking shitskin nigger ape, you street shitting niggershit nigger

>>24824686
>polically and economically
Literally where the fuck do you think you are right now? Is this reddit worldnews? No one here will be convinced by appeals to bugman hive building.

>>24821632 (OP)
There's a Cold War joke that an optimist learns Russian and a pessimist learns Chinese.

>>24824686
>considering that China is considerably more important country in the global stage polically and economically
No one gives a shit about that here, and neither does it change the issues the language has.
Anyone who has spent time learning it and is honest about it knows it's an archaic language, and a writing system that is even worse; Ill suited to the modern world and literature.
It's like comparing Roman Numerals with our current system. There's a reason we dumped Roman Numerals, and there is a reason Mao wanted to modernise the language.

>>24828540
>it's the le current year
xD

>>24821632 (OP)
Clearly the best writer of China is MAO, no western country has the BALLS to force their country to carry around a little red book of Dostoevsky

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35744272-quotations-from-chairman-mao-tse-tung

>>24821974
he seems to have some liberal biases like muh freedom good which I assume came from his immigrant to USA out of chink gulag upbringing