Re: Importance of foreign language in paleo

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> With two or three years of school study and an adequate dictionary, you
> should be able to pick up and read any scientific papers in those 
> languages,

Yeah, except Chinese, where you will hardly be able to read a newspaper 
after that time, let alone a scientific article, which contains different 
vocabulary and therefore plenty of characters you will never have seen 
before. Learning to read that is a full-time job. Using a dictionary --  
finding the characters in it -- is very time-consuming.

Speaking it is much easier, provided you manage to remember the tones.

Oh, 19th and often 20th century scientific articles in German have such a 
style that you are not likely to understand all of them after 2 or 3 years 
of school study, no matter what the dictionary is like.