Chapter 1 Literature Review of Language Learning Strategies 1.1 Introduction. 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. 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. 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.”. Throughout the canon of greats, British writers loom heavily around the top echelons. China’s economy is going to be the biggest in the world – the only question is when. There are many such songs in Catullus, whose elegant poetry I had spent a whole term plodding through. First of all, learning any foreign language helps you understand all language better—many Anglophones first encounter the words “past participle” not in an English class, but in French. So which one should you, or your children, learn? Half a century ago, when Tom Lehrer wrote his satirical song, the idea of a German rocket scientist counting backwards to zero in Chinese must have sounded both exotic and rather sinister to his American audience. The 100 best novels Books. The European Union speaks little else. A literary language is the form of a language used in its literary writing.It can be either a non-standard dialect or standardized variety of the language. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. In business, if the team on the other side of the table knows your language but you don’t know theirs, they almost certainly know more about you and your company than you do about them and theirs—a bad position to negotiate from. Hardly any of them are places where French is everyone’s native language. Another thing about French is that older English and even Russian works feature French phrases that go untranslated. And for this reason he is not going to be amongst the five names you are about to read. Any visit there is greatly enhanced by some grasp of the language. It is home to the world’s largest standing forest, the Amazon. 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. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. It is a vivid presence in English and French, it is the mother of Italian and Spanish, and it even seeps into German. With less and less need to recall the characters cold, the Chinese are forgetting them. I apologize if there were posts about this already but I've seen none regarding top languages for the literature. By all means, if China is your main interest, for business or pleasure, learn Chinese. Students have an enviable choice of stimulating places to hone their Spanish skills, from Venezuela to Argentina to Spain itself. Ten years ago, for another article, I had to read the proposed European constitution. 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. But if I was asked what foreign language is the most useful, and given no more parameters (where? Impossible to ignore. But ranked above it are languages like Telegu and Javanese that no one would call world languages. China is the most populous nation on earth. Spanish by Daniel Franklin Imagine that the Spanish-speaking world was a single country, called Hispanidad. Egyptians, Syrians and Palestinians, moved that you have troubled to do battle with their tongue, will shower you with praise. So is Japanese the world’s third-most useful language? With new pronunciation and a few new words you’ll get around in Portugal and parts of Africa. It probably served me right. English is not only the first language of the obvious countries, it is now the rest of the world’s second language: a Japanese tourist in Sweden or a Turk landing a plane in Spain will almost always speak English. It deters most foreigners from ever mastering the system—and increasingly trips up Chinese natives. 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). 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. 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. If you speak Spanish, French or Italian, you’ll find half the work is already done — and if not, why not try? Probably not. Fluency may long elude you, but there will always be a fascination in picking your way through Arabic’s intricacies. Learn Chinese, not to impress your future boss, but to understand what she is saying. Latin offers no hiding place, no refuge for the woolly. If you were to learn ten languages ranked by general usefulness, Japanese would probably not make the list. Learn Spanish? Now if you really want to learn an Eastern language, learn Persian. Also in the top 15 are Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, major languages to be sure, but regionally concentrated. If such gripes are common to most languages, there is something more to it in Chinese. So it's an ambitious goal. 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. Now that China is ready to take over from America as the country that sends men to the moon, surely there can be no doubt that it talks the language the rest of us should be learning. Which 5 would you recommend? With Portuguese under your belt you’ll fly along. The dearth of Spanish-language literature translated in America is especially baffling given the high numbers of Spanish-speaking people here, as well as authors living in the U.S. who write in Spanish. The following four books are the best currently available for content review and practice problems. Paul Pimsleur—creator of the renowned audio-based language system that has helped millions of language learners. It teaches you grammar and syntax, better than your own language, whose structure you will have absorbed before you are capable of noticing it. In America, the numbers are equally sorry. Here, we have listed 10 of the best international language you can learn in India if you intend to remain competent and relevant in today’s job market. 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. Press J to jump to the feed. Of course, there are many languages in China, too. But if you want another truly global language, there are surprisingly few candidates, and for me French is unquestionably top of the list. The words we take from Latin tend to be long, reflective, intellectual (the short, punchy words we didn’t need to import: live, die, eat, drink, love, hate). It’s never too late, but where to start? I want to read the classics, I guess. Poetry and lyrics suffer particularly badly in translation. 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. The weather is great and so are the beaches. Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. There are great authors (old and new ones) in French, Spanish, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian etc etc. Its literature has stood the test of millennia: Ovid is diverting, Lucretius is stimulating, Cicero is riveting. So if you are in business, into the arts or just want to join la conversación, the sheer size of Hispanidad is a powerful reason to learn Spanish. Long live literature! Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. 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. But “standard Chinese” (putonghua, aka “Mandarin”), or something close to it, is understood almost everywhere, as it is taught in schools. So there is no need to agonise over which dialect to learn. Management-speak and Euro-blather are Latin at its worst, but learning it will still help you cut through them to find clarity. Shakespeare’s dead. 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. So here we go. Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. In this model, the class reads fiction or poetry as part of th… First of all… why exactly should you teach literature? Business and academia, two worlds with little else in common, both rely more and more on long Latinate words. This article is more than 17 years old. With French, vous ne regretterez rien. Soon enough, someone will helpfully inform you that Latin is a dead language. The first years of Arabic are frustrating, like doing a jigsaw of a cloudy night sky. Remember Japan’s rise? I think you already have the five. 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. Which period(s) do you want? What makes them so popular? Students interested in pursuing a degree in English language and literature can find programs at colleges and universities throughout the United States, but these schools offer some of the best. It was a long turgid parade of Latin-derived words. If you want six, I'd add Italian to the list. 10 Best Foreign Languages to Learn in India. When it refers to a specific collection of books, papers, etc., related to a given subject, it is often used as a countable noun, and you should say “the literature”, referring to the literature of the given field. And you really should see an Almodóvar film without subtitles. Let's go over the pros and cons of each. But instead, breathe deep, and plunge into Arabic. Read the review A telling description of modern power … Somewhere between the Daily Telegraph copytakers and the subs, “Catullan” was changed to “Catalan”. 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. One with close relatives, so you have a head start with your third language. When I grew up in London, there were no Chinese tourists, and nothing we owned was made in China. If you work with words, Latin is the Pilates session that stays with you for life: it strengthens the core. After English, it is the most used international language. Or both; learning one makes the second quite easy. But really, "Western literature" is still too vague. And the key reason for Japanese’s limited spread will also put the brakes on Chinese. 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. Knowledge of Arabic, however slight, will impress not only the monoglots and dullards who plumped for Italian, but native speakers too. 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. 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. All of the foreign tongues listed here are vital. And certainly middle-ages/ecclesiastical Latin. However, I could not agree to saying that any language offers the "best" literature. The French especially have some beautiful literary idioms, especially in their 19th century classics. If your interest is Latin America, Spanish or Portuguese is the way to go. Hm, it is, I know. In one way, sure, but in others it lives on. If ever there was a time to play the Latin card, this was it, so I described Sting’s wedding song as “Catullan”. Learning German grammar can be difficult and a good textbook can help you with the fundamentals. ¡Cómo no!, as they say in Hispanidad. 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). 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. They range from the intellectual to the economical to the practical. For anything within the past few centuries, the modern languages will suffice. Once a mark of the cultured, language-learning is in retreat among English speakers. Literary giants who shape the way we think, write and live today. And lest we forget its heartland itself, France attracts more tourists than any other country—76.8m in 2010, according to the World Tourism Organisation, leaving America a distant second with 59.7m. Continue Reading. French ranks only 16th on the list of languages ranked by native speakers. Literature is always best read in the original. If you want six, I'd add Italian to the list. However, “literature” also has a different meaning. 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. And you really should see an Almodóvar film without subtitles. Hispanidad also has a rich literature, from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez, that is best enjoyed in the original. And now? With that ambition, why limit yourself to 5? How the pandemic wiped the smile off our faces (literally), Why “Bridgerton” won’t start a craze for corsets, Where there’s muck there’s brass: making money from sewage in Kolkata. 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. Moreover, Python is developed under an OSI-approved open source license, making it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use (www.python.org, 2019). (Or if the user types in wo shi zhongguo ren, “I am Chinese”, the software detects the meaning and picks the right characters.) Why learn a foreign language? Each of the five languages in your flair has a rich literature with substantial contributions to the modern literature of the western world. 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). As a writer, it is important not only to think about what you say, but how you say it. Only English and Chinese are more widely used on the internet than Spanish. The practical reasons are just as compelling. It was the world’s second-largest economy for decades (before falling to third, recently, behind China). This is a subreddit for anybody interested in the pursuit of languages. 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. But the struggle is a worthy one, and the rewards start with your ego. And the pleasure will never dim. And learning another tongue helps the student grasp another way of thinking. 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