alaart wrote:Mandarin if you want to access other Chinese languages.
Including ancient Chinese... And similarly Korean for Middle Korean, and Japanese for Old/Classical Japanese.
I was once told by someone studying Pali that learning Burmese is also a very good idea if you want to get into Pali. Apparently, a lot of texts these days are primarily or best published in the Burmese script, and so is their associated commentary.
Modern Persian is essential if you want to get into classical New Persian (as in, that of the 10th-12th centuries), but I'm under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that for Old and Middle Persian people are better served by English/German due to being better described by Indo-Europeanists.
Among indigenous minority languages spoken by few people around the world, it sometimes happens that the documentation is primarily carried out by linguists of a certain nation, and so the language of the documentation becomes essential. English is best for most of Oceania, but there's some like Mwotlap for which learning French is important (in this case due to the work of a single linguist, Alexandre François).
tarvos wrote:nooj wrote:I remember one time there was a Czech person living in Ireland who was learning Irish and they said that they wished there was any Irish-Czech material. I felt very sorry for the man, having to learn Irish from English, a foreign language.
It's sadly a prerequisite for most speakers of a lesser spoken language. I'm not sure you'll find Dutch-Irish textbooks either, outside of formal EU documents
An older American guy who started learning Irish a good two decades and a half ago, after having studied a good deal of German and Spanish+Catalan, told me he once knew of a guy from Catalonia with a similar frustration, and the Catalan guy took it upon himself to write a Catalan-Irish dictionary for his own use. He put it online as a website, and the American guy told me he himself used to use it too all the time, as it was actually pretty decent. The Catalonian guy at some point disappeared from the Internet and his website is now down though, apparently having never gotten to publish his dictionary in dead-tree form...
I remember once reading someone in a language forum say that, years before, he had made his own trilingual wordlists for Punjabi, Urdu and French, at a time when he was actively learning the first two (of which he was an unskilled heritage speaker) along with French at university.
I am very amused by this sort of unusual dictionaries... This is getting off-topic, but I've heard the oldest large dictionary of Minnan Chinese was written by a Catholic missionary priest centuries ago, in Spanish, a near-complete copy of which was discovered less than a decade ago.
