How can I properly learn the history of a country whose language I don't speak or read?

A lot of the answers above come from people who clearly are firmly embedded in English-speaking contexts. While it is of course possible to learn a lot about the French revolution without speaking French, more current and more fringe history subjects are a different story. I wonder how English native speakers would feel if a whole bunch of experts appeared on TV talking about US or UK history and without speaking a word of English themselves. Yet this is currently the case with Ukraine and a common occurence with a lot of former colonies. We watch whole documentaries about countries where not a single native person is featured. I think the person who asked this question is making a valid point.

One thing to do is to try and find out who the experts and generally recognised figures are in a certain field. While you may not be able to read their works, they usually have spoken and public events or been interviewed for podcasts; those can provide great insight into histories that are too fringe or too current to be included in translated books.

Knowing multiple languages to learn the history of a given country depends on just how deep you want to go in your learning. The first consideration is whether you want to go beyond the secondary sources & consult the primary sources.

(In a few words, primary sources are the eye-witness accounts of the time, such as contemporary newspapers, private letters, official records, etc. Their value depends on just how well one understands what they are saying. Secondary sources are the accounts that use primary sources to recount the events of the period covered, & their value depends on the skill of the person who writes them to explain what happened.)

Take the example above, "to properly learn history of England". While @RayButterworth mentions the various kinds of English one needs to learn, more likely to read primary sources for any period before 1600 one would need to be proficient in Latin, & perhaps Norman French. (Norman French was the language used in law courts from 1066 to the middle of the 14th century.) Or if one wanted to study diplomatic history, the primary sources would not only be in English, but of the other country -- or in French, which was the most commonly used diplomatic language until recently.

On the other hand, many primary sources have been translated into English, but with varying degrees of skill: an amazing amount of primary sources about ancient Greece & Rome, for example, have been translated into modern English. So the answer here is "it depends."

Now if you want to limit yourself to secondary sources, you could get away with knowing only English. Many histories are written in English, even by scholars whose native language is not English. It depends on what you are trying to learn about the period, & how deep you want to go. However, even here it might not be wise to limit yourself to just one language. In the case of the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, this is a subject of interest to many different countries with many different languages. I imagine many important histories about that war have been not only written in English, but German, French, Polish, Czech, Danish & Swedish -- just to mention the countries that played a major role in that conflict. And it's not unimaginable that thoughtful analyses have been written in Russian, Italian, Finnish, Chinese & Japanese. So it all depends on just how far one wants to dive into the secondary literature.

As a consolation, consider that even experts on the period of the Thirty Years' War are proficient in only a few of the languages I mentioned above. As a result, experts are more likely to publish in more familiar languages such as English (the first choice), German, or French.

So it all depends on just how deep you want to dig into the subject. If you are reading about history just for pleasure, don't be embarrassed about sticking to only English-language materials -- although it might be rewarding to read primary sources in their original language. If you have a need to know more about a specific topic in a historical period, the best first step is to find out which languages will help you most to learn what you want to know, then learn those languages. That way you aren't blocked with fear you need to know a dozen languages just to answer a few specific questions.

Speaking the language of a country is in most cases neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for understanding that country's history.

However, learning the language can help a lot with understanding (current or recent) culture and social dynamics. E.g. because you become more likely to get into closer contact with people from that country. And understanding recent culture and social dynamics can help a lot with understanding recent history. It makes it easier to quickly sanity-check some of the less valuable secondary sources. It gives you a better idea why people would act in a certain way, of what is socially acceptable and what is not, etc.

Of course learning a language also takes a non-trivial.amount of time (much more time than just the few days it takes to learn, e.g., Arabic letters), so there definitely is a trade-off. If you want to make a living from your deep understanding of Middle Eastern history, learning Arabic, and possibly Turkish and Persian, might be quite important. If it is just a hobby, you might as well do without it.

Last not least, certain details (say, Egyptian eye witness accounts from the Six-Day War, but this is just a guess) might only be covered well in the local language and not in English. And speaking a bit of the language can be really practical when visiting a country. So while not strictly necessary, it can still be quite useful.

There are 2 very different cases:

1. Do you want to learn, even as a professional, about x country history? You don't need to learn any language, as long as there are enough studies and research published in your language.

2. Do you want to research, contribute in academia or become an expert in x country history? You certainly need to learn any number of languages needed.

Unless you're a linguistic polymath, obviously you can't study such things from primary sources. Even if you were, there are nuances of language that change over time, so it would help to also be an expert in the language dialect for the period and place. Tunisian Arabic is different from Syrian Arabic, and 17th century Syrian Arabic is different from modern Syrian Arabic.

Fortunately, very few people actually learn history directly from primary sources. There are professionals who spend their careers doing that, and then digesting it for the rest of us to understand.

What I generally suggest is to learn things first from a macro view. Historical Atlas resources like Colin McEvedy's Penguin atlases for me do a really good job of giving a rough idea of the relations of various historical events along the dimensions of both time and space. Then if you have something specific that interests you, you will have the knowledge to know how to zoom in on it, and at least some ability to keep the overall context of what you're reading about in mind.

And then you have to realize that there's probably important stuff that happened that we will never know about, because no recorded sources referring to it have survived to this day. There's also stuff we just have wrong, because our surviving sources had it wrong.

History is a lot like physics, in that its likely not possible to ever truly know it. The deeper you look at one thing, the more new detail there turns out to be. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and ultimately probably can't with our human limitations.

So don't beat yourself up over your limitations. Learn to accept them, be humble, and measure yourself by the standards of improvement, not perfection.

Let's suppose you want "to properly learn history of" England, and that you do speak and read English. How far back will you want to research?

A thousand years? Then you'd certainly read Beowolf in its original English:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas.

Well, perhaps you're not that interested in history that goes back that far after all.

How about only 400 years ago, when the Early Modern English language was at its prime with Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible.

Such as Hamlet's soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe
No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end
The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes
That Flesh is heyre too? 'Tis a consummation
Deuoutly to be wish'd. To dye to sleepe,
To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; I, there's the rub,
For in that sleepe of death, what dreames may come,
When we haue shufflel'd off this mortall coile,
Must giue vs pawse. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would beare the Whips and Scornes of time,
The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd Loue, the Lawes delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurnes
That patient merit of the vnworthy takes,
When he himselfe might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardles beare
To grunt and sweat vnder a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne
No Traueller returnes, Puzels the will,
And makes vs rather beare those illes we haue,
Then flye to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of vs all,
And thus the Natiue hew of Resolution
Is sicklied o're, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprizes of great pith and moment,
With this regard their Currants turne away,
And loose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The faire Ophelia? Nimph, in thy Orizons
Be all my sinnes remembred.
— Hamlet (Folio 1, 1623) :: Internet Shakespeare Editions

Or Paul's description of charity:

And though I bestowe all my goods to feede the poore, and though I giue my body to bee burned, and haue not charitie, it profiteth me nothing.
Charitie suffereth long, and is kinde: charitie enuieth not: charitie vaunteth not it selfe, is not puffed vp,
Doeth not behaue it selfe vnseemly, seeketh not her owne, is not easily prouoked, thinketh no euill,
Reioyceth not in iniquitie, but reioyceth in the trueth:
Beareth all things, beleeueth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charitie neuer faileth: but whether there be prophesies, they shall faile; whether there bee tongues, they shall cease; whether there bee knowledge, it shall vanish away.
— 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 KJV

The Bible was deliberately translated with simple words to make it more accessible, so it's much more understandable than the Shakespeare. But, some of those words have different meanings now than what they had when this was written. The first line for instance no longer makes sense: If I give everything I own to feed the poor … but don't have charity …. Doesn't "charity" mean giving to feed the poor? Yes, it does now, but it didn't when this was written.

If you read a word whose meaning has changed, and don't realize that it has changed, you'll totally misinterpret the text.

Many words in the KJV no longer mean what they did when they were written.

And think of the words that are retained in songs that we still sing today: "don we now our gay apparel" means something quite different from what it meant only a century ago.

And what does "Naught be all else to me, save that thou art" mean? All those words are used with their current meaning, but the structure of the sentence is like nothing one would say today.

(See what to do when words change in meaning.)

The point is, that being fluent in a language is only of limited help in studying history. If you want to make use of it to study original documents, you're going to have to learn all the ancient version of it too. It's much easier and, unless you study so much that you become a famous scholar in ancient languages, more reliable to simply trust the work that others have done to translate the original works into the modern version of the language. But if you're going to do that, why not read works that have been translated into modern English, and not bother learning the modern version of a language that isn't going to help understand the original works anyway?

You read what reputable (usually peer reviewed) authors have written in a language that you can understand. It's a common fallacy to eliminate contradictory views by stating that you have to have certain knowledge or quality before you have an opinion.

Muslims sometimes claim non-believers cannot have an opinion about the Koran, as they can't read Arabic. There are non-Muslim people fluent in Arabic (Palestinian Christians or Assyrian Iraqi, for example) but they are also disqualified, because they lack a required level of understanding of the Koran. That required level of understanding does not apply to adherents of the faith. Likewise, feminists claim fairly often only women can have an opinion about certain matters. (These are just examples, there are plenty more.)