The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.
(Epistemic status: I don't actually know anything about Chinese literature, and I welcome correction on this point.)
Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Wukong#Influence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang
Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.
Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:
• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.
• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.
• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).
• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.
Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
How about other non-English language authors?
Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Vocabulary_size
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.
Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.
What does this mean?
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?
(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)
The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).
I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
My point was about breadth, which is factual to the best of my knowledge.
I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.
I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
You are right about translated literature, though that was not my primary point.
The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.
Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?