For those who have learned a second language, has it changed your experience of literature in general?

I sometimes imagine if I ever, finally, learn a second language, it might re-ignite some of my earlier interest in poetry. Not that that would be a prime motivation for me to learn another language.

I'm wondering what those of you who have learned a second language (or more than one non-native language) have experienced in this regard. How has your sensitivity to literature in English (or whatever your mother tongue is)? I'd especially be interested in hearing from people who mastered a second language in their 20s or later.

Just thinking about it seems to be making my syntax awkward.

Legit bilingual in the first five years of my life, I'm sensitive to false cognates and assonance.

The followup question I forgot to answer was how learning different types of languages might bring different results. Does learning a language very different from English (like Chinese or Arabic) make more of a difference in how you then read writing in English than learning languages that are closely related to English? Or vice versa? Or is there a just a difference, but not necessarily more or less of one?

I don't know if my second language counts, because there is so little literature in Cornish, and what there is, is mostly medieval, and the past is more of a foreign country than any other nation.

As to "re-igniting" any love of poetry, well, I never had any love of poetry to start with. I actually kinda hate poetry in many ways. But having sat down and talked to a couple of high-level Cornish Bards about what "poetry" actually means (as opposed to verse) it made the idea make more sense to me. I like poetry in Cornish in a way I never liked poetry in English, because Cornish forces me to puzzle through every word and its sense and meaning, both individually and in context. And also Cornish just *sounds* more beautiful and mellifluous and it is lovelier to listen to spoken aloud then English ever was. (I could listen to Mick Paynter recite poetry all day long.) I guess it helped me like poetry better because, as Cornish is not my mother tongue, I can slip more easily in and out of "hearing it as beautiful resonant sounds" (verse) and "hearing the meaning" (poetry) which I rarely do in English because English is such a slippery language.

But mostly it just re-confirmed a love of linguistics which never went away. It made me think about idioms and structure and how one says things in English without thinking about it, until you find a word or phrase where "there is no Cornish equivalent of this construction or meaning" you don't realise how much English is constructed. For example, causative phrases in English and the word "because", one uses without thinking, but the Cornish causative construction is so weird and different (and it involves the possessive a lot, it's hard to explain in English) it really made me rethink the process of causation.

Any second natural language counts. I'm sure that learning a language with no written literature could, and probably would, still alter how one reads English literature.

It makes sense that learning a very differently structured language would stimulate metaphysical or other philosophical thinking, and your example is striking (even without knowing the details involved).

with a weak second language you gain a new appreciation for the dimness and the detail of all writing that your ability and awareness as a reader brings to it / imposes on it. small achievements in comprehension impress you with their simplicity, they make you feel like you're still a beginner. and the amount of work you can put in, to get far less, but still something quite definite, out, makes you more aware of how much you literally work at making sense when you read: concentrate, invest and expend your energy, anticipate, imagine, draw connections, store up for later, try to hold on to. then you can go back to something (esp. something really great) in your first language and boggle at how much more of it you just -see-.

i got into rhymed poetry and regular meter in english poetry by reading simple songs in german.

i also read so much in translation, with only some understanding of how to compare against the original, that sometimes when i'm reading something originally in english i get anxious about checking it against its original, as if it were translated. sometimes i associate that with a sense that the things i'm reading are not up to a certain standard. like in my mind that standard is set by the absolute best english writing, and matched by what i've read in german (which is generally great in its own language), since my weak skills make it sort of automatically seem impossibly monumental, deep, every syllable exactly right. so when i read some whatever english, it obviously isn't up to the standard in -english-, so…