If you are to be an academic...

[Dogar The Brave]

What are the optimal top 5 languages you would need to know to have a grasp on Western centric studies?


Mine:

Greek
Latin
French
German
English


What about the top 10 for the whole world?

Add:

Chinese
Arabic
Russian?
Japanese?
Hindi?

[Solly]

>learn chinese as a language

Dogar showing off his academic skills already

[Solly]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese

huh, turns out there is some standard. Disregard last post.

[Dogar The Brave]

[Dogar The Brave]

If anything I have Hindi wrong, I have no idea what the academic tongue is in India other than English. Rayne?

[God]

What are the optimal top 5 languages you would need to know to have a grasp on Western centric studies?


Mine:

Greek
Latin
French
German
English


What about the top 10 for the whole world?

Add:

Chinese
Arabic
Russian?
Japanese?
Hindi?

this is probably close, but korea probably has a richer history than japan, despite japan being much more important since the 1800s

[ElijahWyatt]

Wait.... You don't need to learn Spanish for WESTERN CENTRIC studies?
What.....
Am i completely misunderstanding Western Centric studies?
To me it sounds like studies that center around the west.
unless you mean that you are only studying impacts of things that happen to the U.S. / Canada..... from the east...

[Kirby]

fuck other languages

[Rayne]

If anything I have Hindi wrong, I have no idea what the academic tongue is in India other than English. Rayne?

too many

[Rayne]

what youre looking for is sanskrit though

[Dogar The Brave]

this is probably close, but korea probably has a richer history than japan, despite japan being much more important since the 1800s

I can see where you are coming from.

Wait.... You don't need to learn Spanish for WESTERN CENTRIC studies?
What.....
Am i completely misunderstanding Western Centric studies?
To me it sounds like studies that center around the west.
unless you mean that you are only studying impacts of things that happen to the U.S. / Canada..... from the east...

Of course Spain had a big impact on the world, but most of it's great feats were during a time, at least that I am aware of, when Latin was used as the formal written language for academics. Plus Spanish to English or or French is not that terribly hard to translate so it wouldn't screw up the basic understanding of a document if done so.

what youre looking for is sanskrit though

Then Sanskrit it is.

[ElijahWyatt]

Then why bother learning most other languages than Latin?
Learn Latin to the highest possibility, study how peoples languages syntax is for each language (buy a first year book, grab a teacher and pay them like 100$ for a quick guide to all the congigations for all verbs/nouns+ how to order words in a sentence, then grab a dictionary and learn words. Butchering a language isn't the worst, and knowing all the words will help more than knowing 1/4th of the words but also knowing some neat little things about certain little weird things like how a few words interact weirdly to mean something different.

Really from an academic standpoint knowing the words for 99% of stuff is better than knowing the words for THE USUAL stuff + spending a crap ton of money to learn them + wasting tons of time.

Now i take this back if its not academic purposes. If you plan on speaking a language go to one of the learn a language quick websites that send you cd's, thats the best way to learn to SPEAK langauges.

[Dogar The Brave]

Because once the vernacular language of countries started to become the written language Spain and the ones I have not mentioned were not "as" important and French, German and English. And as I said, the translations into those languages are not all that terrible.

[ElijahWyatt]

Did you read my post..?
I just gave you an easy peasy way to learn the languages you wanted to self paced and for extremely cheaply.-_-

[Dogar The Brave]

DID YOU READ MINE?

It has nothing to do with whether I want to learn them. This is a list thread to figure out which languages you feel are most important in academic circles.

[ElijahWyatt]

Okay, i was just making sure you knew that going through "the system" is probably the worst thing you can do if you want to learn a language for academic purposes only. Unless you are simply trying to fill in credit hours with stuff that you wanted to learn anyway, or if you can only learn through structured plans. Many people cannot understand that learning how to write in a language doesn't have to be done through traditional methods, and often times traditional methods will slow you down and put in too much fluff and not enough meat

[Dogar The Brave]

ok elijah

[God]

top 5 in the whole word i would say would be:

english
chinese
arabic
sanskrit
korean

eastern languages dominate because all or the VAST majority of intellectual works of the the western world have adequate translations in english. not the same can be said of eastern cultrues.

[Kirby]

lets not learn spanish guys, its like like almost 2 continents and a country and Europe speak it as well as a ton of people in America

[Dogar The Brave]

top 5 in the whole word i would say would be:

english
chinese
arabic
sanskrit
korean

eastern languages dominate because all or the VAST majority of intellectual works of the the western world have adequate translations in english. not the same can be said of eastern cultrues.

hmmmmm