/lit/ - Literature

>>19136827
>>19136835
This

>>18761217
I love this. It's such a smug flex on the part of the author. And it's an excellent way to put a brainlet filter in your book.

Realistically though, if you can't read and mostly understand some small excerpts in Latin, German, and French, then your primary education failed you. So stop waiting for someone/something and take things into your own hands.

>Latin<
There is no shortcut to Latin. You have to just get a grammar textbook (Wheelock is standard in America, Kennedy in the UK) and work through it to learn the declensions and constructions.
Also get an intro reader. Lingua Latina per se illustrata by Ørberg is the best choice. You can start reading the first chapters of Ørberg immediately, even after barely starting the grammar.
After you finish, read the entire Bible in Latin, then you can read Caesar, some Cicero, etc. Continue reading to build fluency. If you still struggle with Roman authors, then read some medieval authors first. Do not be dejected if you can't understand Virgil.

>German<
Duolingo will get you started. There is also a free course on DW. Don't waste too much time on DW though, because their focus is speaking/conversation, while our focus is reading/literature. But it is still a good introduction.
Hammer's German Grammar and Usage for reference and grammar. German is not quite Latin, but there are still a fair amount of forms to memorize.
German vocab is not too difficult, and you can build up your vocabulary quickly relying on the many compound words and English cognates once you recognize the basic sound changes. Soon you can start reading the short stories of Franz Kafka.

>French<
Clearly there are some autists behind the Duolingo French course, because it is almost endless and they are still adding to it. It's childish (turn off the audio part if you can) but you can start with that and continue to use it as a source of drills and vocab repetition. Personally I don't think you need a reference grammar for French, especially if you are learning this after Latin and German. Duolingo will get you to the point where you can read Camus or really a lot of simpler/YA literature. Then just immerse yourself. French is more irregular than Latin/German, so I think you should consume real French and build up an intuition for what things mean.

>>17549175

The conceit was primarily meant to humorously illustrate the danger of dealing with such an absurdly tall bookshelf. I had no one reference in mind, but cobbled several together, in a pastiche. Since you ask, I will give a very dull explanation of everthing I had in mind.

-"Jeeves" refers to the idea of a butler or servant, from the Jeeves and Wooster series.
-fancy wooden ladders are well known in older bookstores and libraries. The room would require a much taller one.
-spiral staircases are associated with tryhard library and gentleman's study rooms. In particular, The Haunting depicted an unstable spiral staircase in a library.
-I saw a scissor-lift at work the other day. I've been in several workplaces with them, but never got to operate one.
-Free-climbing refers to indoor climbing gyms with knobby-things on the walls, a bit like those columns.
-"Jeevesy" is a pure reference to Jack's addressing of Grady in The Shining.

Gonna take foreign language classes this school year but idk which language to choose, so I'm deciding based on which has the best literature. Any advice anons? I'm already very comfortable with German and Russian.

Also shying away from Spanish and French since most students will be taking them purely to fulfill the foreign language requirement and I don't wanna have lame classmates

>>10334243

This picture is a poor bastardization of the much funnier genuine article. Not less than four local bookstores have a reproduction of this somewhere in their shops:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bookworm_(painting)

I have seen pic related on the walls in more than one of the above locations.

>>6510298
>not embracing the /lonescholar/ life