What's the best language for a native English speaker to learn (for literary purposes)?

Any European language is fine because they all have decent literatures hiding in the dark from the monolinguist who usually only knows about great literatures that have been translated well enough to attract the attention of his language's public. With non euros it's more shaky, but you will always find good literature in any country that's been in contact with Europe for a long time or any top fellow today like Japan or Korea.

Japanese

This is only because what we call Latin is literary Latin, preserved by a literary canon and liturgical services; we really have little idea what it would be like to talk to the average Latin speaker.

Latin, French or German my fren, the choice is yours, keep in mind french is a derivative of latin.

forgot chart

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True for Latin, absolutely false for Ancient Greek.
In the words of my Latin highschool teacher: "I have little trouble translating most Latin writers, but with Greek texts it's like facing a new difficulty everytime."

Catalan, welsh, romansh, sámi, basque, galician, breton

Based bait retard.

Learn French or German, Spanish is easy mode so can very well learn it as a third language later on.
Learning foreign languages broadens your vocabulary better than anything else, shows you different approaches to conveying meaning, and provides valuable hints about the impact on language in forming different societies: English creates different conditions of communication than Russian. You'll thank me once you're on the other side.

Spanish>Russian>gap>French >gap>German

hilarious

Whatever you do, do not learn russian. Russian is not my native lannguage and I regret ever learning it. It's such a bad, disgusting, illogical language. It's the reason why Russia is doing so poorly, despite its awesome economic potential, and why russians are so scornful and salty.

this

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Why is Chinese considered harder than Japanese? I'd assume it would be harder to learn, at least the speaking/listening part.

Is Romanian cat I? And is it useful to learn for lit purposes?

I'd say French or German.

Japanese is easier to speak and likely easier to comprehend for a european. The fact that they have at least one alphabetical system similar to ours (but with syllables instead of letters) whereas chinese is literally just moonrunes and words that sound the same but ‘sung’ differently

Romanian is a Romance language so it’s quite easy to learn for anyone who speaks Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, French too to a lesser extent. Should be fairly easy for English speakers too although they might not get the accent right. And it helps that it’s got phonetic spelling.

That said, it’s pretty useless for literature, unless you’re specifically interested in it for some reason.

German and Latin. You can find Wheelock's Latin pretty easily online.

Easier you mean? Japanese is ranked harder on this chart.

Hiragana is easy but having three different writing systems is mental, one of which is basically just the Chinese one. On top of that Japanese grammar can be very complex whereas people say Chinese doesn't even have grammar, you can often just literally plug in characters into a sentence to convey meaning with no care for grammar. Pronunciation is definitely much harder in Chinese (especially Cantonese) though.

The languages I want to learn are French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Ancient Greek, and all of them are for their literature and/or cinema (anime is only an added bonus)
My mum's Ukrainian so I can understand her fine, but because I was an idiot child I can barely speak it, so I'll get to the point where I can speak that well and then Russian should be a breeze, I can already often get the gist looking at Russian comments online and I know the points where the alphabets differ.
I did German at school and got an A* at GCSE, it's been a while but getting back into the swing of it didn't take long.
I did French and Spanish at points in school but remember so little that I'll be starting from scratch.
I have no experience with Japanese but I do know the set meme phrases from anime, I'm dreading the kanji but I'd rather Japanese than Chinese
I have no experience with Ancient Greek but Homer and Plato are dope

>40h/week
Holy moly that's a lot

Don't learn a foreign language until you've read a few books on the subject of grammar alone.

those courses are designed for professionals (diplomats etc) who need to learn the language quick. it's completely unrealistic for the average person.

Why? I couldn't imagine anything more dull.

>professionals getting the best teachers and studying 40 hours a week
>still takes them over a year to get proficient in Japanese etc
What hope is there for a normal person? Seems like it'd take an insane amount of time.

is there a rush? it'll just take some years.

But my question with Chinese is, ok there's 'no grammar' and you can plug in characters into a sentence, but there is a conventional way of saying things, so you might sound like an idiot and there's no rules to guide you. Hard grammar might be better than 'no grammar'. And again, at least with Japanese you can learn hiragana, the words and pronounciations and be able to express yourself somewhat, then take the time to learn kanji. With Chinese you're just thrown into the deep end, it's a completely illogical (by European standards) language.

you have no idea what you are talking about lmaaao

the more you learn other languages the better you get at your native language.
I love anglos that have opinions on this matter, they haven't studied any languages however they hold all the truth and have absolute authority on the matter, unlike the plebeians that know 2~4 languages.
Once again burgers manage to impress me.

French, no other language has such a strong literary tradition, there are more than 100 French authors really worth reading.

no there ain't.
French only has victor hugo, proust and montaigne lmao

This.
Also, my favourite book ever, Les Deux Étendards, isn't translated in any language.