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Ancient Greek and Latin: study strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 25 of 48 01 May 2011 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
I think it is not anyone's goal to make fun of you. But you lack an important bit of information, which is that factual learning can bring you only so far when it comes to language acquisition. It certainly won't hurt you to acquire factual information fast, but in order to be able to use that information in a meaningful way you will have to transfer most of that information to your wealth of procedural knowledge, a process that has been referred to as internalization or automatization in recent threads. This requires practice. Lots of it. Edited by Bao on 01 May 2011 at 1:36pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5720 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 26 of 48 01 May 2011 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you're interested, this man named Evan Millner has a podcast & YouTube channel on Latin:
http://latinum.mypodcast.com/ http://www.youtube.com/user/evan1965 His YouTube account is mostly concerned with Latin and doesn't have any Greek as far as I know. He has started to make videos in literary French. He has a podcast on Ancient Greek, too, but it doesn't seem to be his focus: http://ancientgreek.mypodcast.com/index.html He generally uses public domain books. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5977 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 27 of 48 05 May 2011 at 5:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think it's inconceivable that someone could start reading Greek texts after five months if they had perhaps the memorization skills to cram 100+ words a day, or the previous experience of studying many languages. However it's difficult to put an artificial time frame like "5 months for Ancient Greek" and "3 months for Latin" not having done any previous language study. Barring all else, discipline the most important factor. Having a programming background probably complements this type of endeavor. It might and it might not, I vaguely recall a programmer on the forum who was dismayed that he couldn't study languages in the same systematic way he studying programming languages, and had to completely overhaul his study methods.
I haven't studied Greek before, but this is a paper from the 1930's about Latin education, which will probably be of interest to this thread. It provides an alternate approach to learning grammar for the explicit purpose of reading Latin texts, as well as a frequency list of words to accommodate the method. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5077 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 28 of 48 05 May 2011 at 7:29am | IP Logged | ||
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If you can actually learn Greek in 5 months and Latin in 3 months, please ditch the programming thing as you are a language prodigy. :P
However, you can certainly make progress in that time. I studied ancient Greek for 8 months and found it quite difficult although certainly manageable. Not to reach any kind of fluency, but if you work hard for 8 months you will be able to fight through some of those texts with the help of a dictionary. And, I have a fairly strong math/programming background myself, which should help you a lot. Just don't make the mistake of thinking natural languages are the same as programming languages. Near-perfect C++ in 5 months is a lot less amazing than even a passable fluency in a natural language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4948 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 29 of 48 12 May 2011 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Keep everyone here posted over the next 5 months, because I too would like to learn Ancient Greek and Latin, so if
it really is possible to do in that short period of time, then you will really be able to help Classic noobs like me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vini Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 5099 days ago 24 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: Latin, Dutch | Message 30 of 48 22 May 2011 at 3:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I hardly believe one can learn to read in Latin in such short period of the time. I have been studying Latin for nearly one year and I cannot really a text without having to translate it (I can read some standalone sentences, but that's all...) and you may also consider that I am a native Portuguese speaker (a Romantic language, technically making it FAR EASIER to learn Latin)... Edited by Vini on 22 May 2011 at 3:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5424 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 31 of 48 24 May 2011 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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sofi,
I too am a programmer and was (am) a monolingual native English speaker without any language learning experience when I decided to learn Greek & Latin. (Not counting pitiful high school acquaintances with Spanish, Latin, & Russian.) I've been studying Greek 18 months or so (1hr a day, religiously) and have only recently been able to sit down and just read without serious parsing and regular dictionary lookups. And even then, the text is something I am very familiar with and relatively easy (the Bible). I too consider myself a very quick learner. (I aced my computer science degree while sleeping, doing an anthropology minor on the side, self-studying New Testament textual criticism for "funsies," and interning, all while also taking care of my wife and 2 kids, for example.) To make your time frame, expect language study to be your full-time job and then some (as I suspect you've realized by now, 1 month in). You may get up and running by then, but you'll be fighting the "long tail" of Zipf's Law for awhile. Although, I admire your ὕβρις. That said, you certainly can get into "authentic" texts relatively quickly as there are many resources that use authentic material in the exercises and examples. Regarding your specific questions: Q1: I chose Greek first primarily because I was more interested in it. However, I also took into account that the Romans borrowed a lot from the Greeks culturally so it made sense to me to start there. I think there are better resources available for Latin though (Latinum podcast & Lingua Latina books come to mind.) Q2: As has already been suggested, I'd also encourage you to start with Attic Greek. It equips you for the bulk of the literature sooner (some of the vocab and morphology in Homer is specific to him). Pharr's book makes a decent argument for starting with Homer, but given your time frame as it is I'd suggest saving Homer for later. It hasn't been suggested, but I'd explicitly warn you away from starting with Koine-centered materials (ie. New Testament-specific), such as Mounce's book. Q3: Skip linguistics for now. Did you study the Chomsky hierarchy before you studied your programming language(s)? "Speaking authentically" is really opening a can of worms, especially for Greek. There are various pronunciation methods and several threads discuss it in this forum. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of great recordings out there outside of the Greek NT. Lots of little snippets, but few audiobook-length readings. Most textbooks don't even have good audio. If conversational proficiency is what you are referring to, it seems that Latin has the upper hand against Greek here too. The modern community of Latinists who speak it seems bigger to me than Greek. The only Greek one I'm aware of is Koine-specific (read: New Testament religious, not Classical secular) Q4: Given your fanciful time estimates, you should definitely research a bit more on language study methodologies. There's lots of good info in the forums, but I would especially suggest some of Prof. Arguelles's YouTube videos (or here) and forums posts, such as this one where he "crunches the numbers" as it were and this one where he suggests a Latin study and reading program. Q5: I've used Athenaze & both Teach Yourself Greek books (Ancient & New Testament) by Gavin Betts, and sampled many others. The Teach Yourself books are very dense but all the readings and exercises are authentic Greek. Once you've got one or two grammars under your belt, Google Books is your friend for plenty of content. I've recently become enamored of 19th century interlinear classics. Give us an update on how it's going so far! d. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Meelämmchen Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5074 days ago 214 posts - 249 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 32 of 48 25 May 2011 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, updates, please! Only four (or a maximum of eleven) months to go with mastering Ancient Greek. I hope, your subconscious does/did not let you down.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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