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Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
I’d go with:
Russian
Mandarin
Korean
Spanish
Ancient Sumerian as a casual own to thr archeologists.
linear B
proto indo european
Humpback Whale
english
Universal Language (27th Century EE)
I just read the new book on Proto-Indo-European, and naturally it includes several unnecessary asides about the Ukraine War, which is, after all, "a war about language." But it says that's because Putin wants to recreate a Russophone empire, and doesn't mention anything about Ukraine banning the Russian language in schools or their Nazi mercenaries murdering civilians for speaking Russian. Anti-Soviet hangups show up elsewhere in the text. (The author did visit Russia for research, and does bemoan the fact that we're in for some delays on exciting scholarship because Russian academics are banned from conferences.)
brainworms aside i would be interested to learn more about PIE. what was the book called?
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney. Other than those brianworms it's a really good book. I had been reading David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language but got bogged down in pottery types. Started Proto and immediately learned just how much has changed in the field even since Anthony's book was published in 2007.
Although there's talk of the historical linguistics aspects and how linguists know how to chart the changes that took place, it also makes use of genetics and anthropology to examine how a language of steppe herders managed to dominate Eurasia without (necessarily) involving massive campaigns of conquest. (No need to be wary of the genetics aspect - it's to figure out chronology and not to imply anything untoward or nationalistic.)
Edit - As for Linear B - The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick is excellent. Chadwick must have been a great teacher; it's as definitive as any "definitive introduction" I've ever read.
I just read Proto recently also. I second the recommendation, great book.
Pro-Ukraine, “pro-sovereignty” libs have a seething hatred for the USSR, without which there would be no such thing as an independent Ukraine. They will never shut up about Ukrainian sovereignty but will never ever forgive the USSR for, in 1939, taking back Ukrainian land that was stolen by Poland (which committed ethnic cleansing) instead of gifting it to the Germans. In fact any in depth discussion of September 1939 with the Ukrainian sovereignty fan club reveals that they either have near-zero knowledge on the history of Ukraine, or apparently believe that western Ukraine belongs to Poland.
If “sovereignty” libs could literally rewrite history, Ukraine would be an ethnically cleansed German settler-colony.
linear B
monkey's paw: you can speak it but not read it
for a serious answer, it would probably be spanish, mandarin, thai, brazilian portuguese, and either farsi or levantine arabic
Yes, I lack creativity.
Shang Dynasty Chinese
Akkadian/Old Aramaic
Sanskrit
Ancient Egyptian
Ancient Khosic
Refuse to elaborate to linguists and historians.
That's okay you and I both know your plans to open the Stargate
1, 2, 3 - Mandarin, Spanish, and Arabic - for practicality
4 - Korean - I actually just really like the language. Also Starcraft.
5 - (redacted) - My family would be disappointed if I didn't spend one of my magic languages on learning the language of the homeland. And it's a fine country that I'd like to visit, and mutually intelligible with some other better languages, so, sure.
What's the old coding language the US uses for its nuclear weapons again? 
English 
Latin 
Japanese 
Mandarin 
The language of dance 
In addition to English:
Mandarin Russian Spanish Arabic Japanese
4 to maximize the amount of people I can communicate with and 1 because I cannot deny my weeb nature completely.
And then I'd start learning Spanish (after all I'm French, it'd be dumb to waste my magic fluency on a language so close to my native tongue)
vanity, "I choose this because of my autistic fixations": koine greek coptic biblical Hebrew
then Spanish and Mandarin for practical real life stuff.
Mandarin
Russian
Spanish
Arabic
Sinhala
what languages will optimize putting the most brainworms into my head the fastest?
Russian is definitely #1 after english but idk beyond that
five? i'm barely fluent in one.
mandarin
spanish
assembly
the correspondence
cat
Mandarin, Russian, Arabic and Spanish seem like gimmes to me.
After that I'm not sure.
French maybe?
I’m already fluent in English and Spanish, and mildly proficient in German and Mandarin.
The next languages on my list, after improving my fluency in German and Mandarin, are:
Latin, French, Portuguese
Ancient and Modern Greek
Sanskrit and Hindi
Irish (language of many of my recent ancestors and endangered language)
Guaraní (I plan to live in Paraguay would actually use this regularly living there).
Russian
Arabic
I know that’s more than 5, but these are all languages I have begun to dabble in at various points, and I feel like if I learned all of them to fluency or near fluency, my language learning obsession would finally be satisfied and I could retire from it, so to speak.
I would love to learn Hindi, but I came to realize my brain could not discern between several different sounds. I physically couls not recognize that the letters sounded different in any way. It was there that I found my limits and humbly backed off.
Don't let that stop you. Languages don't work as isolated sounds so don't overly focus on those. You have extra homophones to disambiguate, yes, but which examples are you actually worried about where context won't help you out, where you can't ask for a little clarification, or turn on subtitles?
I struggle with speech recognition generally so, while I've given up on the balanced approach of traditional courses, I've had success concentrating more on reading for learning (Japanese, which has lots of homophones) and using listening exercises as training for learning that way later on. I can describe what I've found helpful if you want the details.
You are actually not alone in this, it’s totally normal to not perceive the difference in sounds which are not phonemic in your native language. This can be overcome by training with minimal pairs. There’s a great bit about this in a book called Fluent Forever.
Edit: I just got out of a doctor’s appt and have time now so I’ll just paraphrase as I remember it. When we are babies our brains learn to ignore the difference in sounds that don’t cause a change in meaning. So a child growing up in an English speaking environment has no trouble differentiating the English language “R” and “L” sounds from each other. Japanese doesn’t distinguish these sounds, and has its own sound which is somewhere in between. So when Japanese speakers hear either sound, their brain just puts both into the same bucket.
If you play an audio recording for a Japanese listener and then ask them whether that said “rug” or “lug”, they literally can’t hear the difference. This is normal. But if you play audio recordings like this- “Rug” and “Lug” are minimal pairs, words that differ only by one phoneme - ask the listener which word they heard AND immediately give them feedback on whether their response was correct or incorrect, they learn to differentiate the sounds rather quickly.
Hindi has a lot of retroflex consonants that likely don’t exist phonemically in your language. It’s only natural that you cannot distinguish them. But by training your ear with minimal pairs, you will learn to hear the difference. You could try searching “Hindi minimal pairs training” or check out the book I mentioned, the author actually has compiled resources for various specific languages.
I genuinely think Russian is a very beautiful sounding language. I wish I had any practical context for learning it.
1- Mandarin
2- Mapudungun
3- Nahuatl
4- Arabic
5- Portuguese
This is assuming this is in addition to English; otherwise we can probably switch it for #5
1 Portuguese 2 French 3 Arabic 4 mandarin 5 Korean
Also I would like to learn more creole and patois
VERY GOOD thread
Nahuatl (all dialects if possible)
Mandarin
Aramaic
Quechua (if I can understand the knots)
RongoRongo 😔
Nahuatl (Pipil or Huasteca if I have to pick a dialect), Arabic (Egyptian or Levant), Mandarin, Swahili, Russian
Ithkuil would be cool, but I'd be the only fluent speaker on earth.
1: Arabic 2: Russian 3:Indonesian (only studied a few of it) 4: Mandarin 5: Welsh
Russian Mandarin Yiddish Gaelic Pashtun
Efit: Swap pashtun for farsi
Taking UN list of official languages as an answer.
Picking languages I've never studied so I don't accidentally remind myself that I have flashcards to do
Assuming the five languages are in addition to English:
Spanish
French
Russian
Mandarin
Japanese
Chinese and Russian are the two that I think would be most useful, anything further that I say would make it easier to dox me.
23/25 Hexbears (incl. me) who don't know Mandarin Chinese selected Mandarin Chinese, 14/25 Russian. Don't let .welt find out about this.
It would be fun to do a language learning class at some point, it is a lot of work though.
The language of magic. Done, now I can just cast magic to learn any other language I want.
Mandarin
Portuguese
Arabic
Spanish
Navajo
I know a bit of Italian and Japanese so that would be a waste
Mandarin, German, Russian, Sumerian, Akkadian
Mandarin, ancient Greek and Arameic, an indigenous language from North America that has like 5 speakers, spanish.
