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Lingua Latina Semper Vivet!: A Latin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5656 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 6 24 July 2012 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Salvete omnes!
This is the beginning of what I hope will become my log for conversational Latin! So, without further ado, here's a brief outline... Why?:I think it would be a fair question to ask first of all, why Latin? And on top of that, why conversational Latin? To be honest, I'm just a bit of a Latin geek. Latin has always seemed very beautiful to me, and I really enjoy the structure and sound of the language. I've also enjoyed reading some Latin literature. But more specifically for conversational purposes: whenever someone asks, "Oh, so what languages do you speak?" I always mention Latin, but even after 6 years of studying the language, I don't actually speak it. At most, I read it pretty well. I studied it in a classroom setting where the emphasis was on learning to read works by authors such as Vergil, Horace, Catullus, etc. as well as orations from Cicero and Caesar. But we rarely wrote in Latin (only at a beginning level) and absolutely never had conversations. Thus, after 6 years, I find that I can read Vergil et al. decently (albeit not fluently like one might read other foreign languages -- it takes a lot longer, as I'm sure any fellow Latin learner would understand), but I have no ability to speak the language. But does anyone speak Latin?: Whenever I've told anyone about my desire to speak Latin, most people immediately point out that it seems like a sort of useless goal seeing as how most speakers of the language have been gone for roughly 1700 years or so (I know there are still some speakers, and upper class Europeans spoke it later than the Roman Empire...but still, there aren't many people around anymore). But to me, 1) that isn't really the point, and 2) given that there are ANY people that speak it, it still seems like a worthy goal to me. Also, please note that I am doing this solely for fun and self-gratification; I'm not pretending that this will be useful in a career, for traveling, etc. I just want to really master the language since I've already studied it for so long. So this is not meant to be "useful" in the general sense of the word, just a fun experiment. How?: Although I've flirted with the idea of learning to speak Latin for a while, I've never really known where to start...understandably, there don't appear to be many resources for people with this goal, and those that do exist generally assume that the student starts with no prior knowledge of the language (vocab, grammar, etc.), which isn't true in my case. However, two weeks ago, I ordered the book "Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency" (the second edition) by John C. Traupman. The book just arrived today, and I'm very excited. Essentially, it contains dialogues on a variety of everyday subjects with accompanying vocab lists. Also, there are three dialogues for each subject that become progressively more complex (in terms of both vocab and grammar). There are a total of 24 chapters. Study Plan: So, with this book, I'm planning to study the vocab section of a given chapter before going over the dialogues so that I know the vocab very well and won't struggle on that score (since my main obstacle is becoming comfortable with colloquial phrases and spontaneous speaking, not looking up vocab, etc.). Then I'll proceed through each of the three dialogues and read them aloud, while noting any colloquial uses of words I'm not familiar with. I hope to go through them multiple times until I am very comfortable with the phrases, etc. and feel that I would be able to implement them on my own. I might even consider writing my own sentences to practice (since I don't have a conversation partner, writing would be the closest form of practice). This promises to be a pretty long process, but I'm very excited. Before I begin the book, I'm also considering reviewing verb forms, etc. since I haven't been forced to conjugate a lot of verbs in a while and am a bit rusty on some of them (especially for irregular verbs and different forms of the subjunctive). This Log: I plan to update this log regularly with my progress as well as anything I have found particularly helpful or unhelpful. I've also found some interesting links for studying conversational Latin, and I might post those as well (for example, there are some radio stations that broadcast in Latin). I'd also love to hear from anyone else who has traveled this path before, since I have met very few people with the same interest ;) Well, that's the end of my somewhat long introduction...Valete! Edited by jae on 24 July 2012 at 11:22pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5656 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 2 of 6 27 July 2012 at 3:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Question: Just to start off with a question...I already resolved confusion about the abbreviation "satin'" in another forum (it turns out that it stands for satisne), but I have another question that I've come across. Namely, the phrase "Est mihi istud auditu perquam iucundam." has been translated as "I'm delighted to hear that." Now, I understand where all those words come from, but I can't quite figure out why "iucundam" is in that case and gender (to me it seems to be singular, feminine, accusative?). Any ideas? I'd greatly appreciate any feedback!
I'll be back later to update when I've covered more material. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 3 of 6 29 July 2012 at 12:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Salve, jae! "Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency" is definitely on my wish-list, and looks like a great contender to follow the "Lingua Latina" course I'm currently studying. I'm looking forward to following your progress and wish you bona fortuna. :) Vivat latina! Edited by Teango on 29 July 2012 at 12:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5656 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 4 of 6 29 July 2012 at 2:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Gratias, Teango! I'm always excited to hear from another Latin enthusiast! Also, your blog looks really interesting!
--------------------------------- Update: I have studied all the recommended vocabulary for the first chapter, and I've also made a list of some other vocabulary terms that appear in the chapter but aren't specifically listed. One thing I've noticed about this chapter compared to others is that for the vocab list, it includes more idiomatic phrases and sentences to memorize than other chapters, which focus more on learning single words. Thus it's been a little hard to keep the phrases in check, since I am looking to learn the idiomatic expressions, but they sound a bit different than their English approximations. I also read all of the dialogues aloud and made sure I understood them all entirely in Latin (without peaking at the helpful English translations in the right-hand column). So far, so good. But I think the chapter are going to be getting a little more complicated once I finish with greetings and move on to more complex topics. Also, I'm definitely going to have to review verbs, since I have trouble coming up with some tenses, especially in irregular verbs (on my own -- when I read them, I understand it). Edited by jae on 29 July 2012 at 2:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5290 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 5 of 6 29 July 2012 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
It's a mistake, should be iucundum, of course, istud mihi iucundum est, only this way it makes sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5656 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 6 of 6 10 August 2012 at 2:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, lingoleng! Now that makes much more sense!
----------------------------------------- Update: Although I haven't posted on my log recently, I have still been continuing my Latin studies! I have finished the first two chapters of my textbook, and am planning to read through chapter 3 just once more before moving onto 4. As a summary of the chapter content: chapter 1 focuses on basic greetings and pleasantries; chapter 2 deals with family relationships (all the words relevant to family trees, etc.); chapter 3 is concerned with housing (and all associated vocab for houses and rooms within them). There was a lot of vocab contained especially in chapter 3, so what I ended up doing was omitting vocab from my vocab learning lists (on Quizlet) that I deemed too obscure to be necessary to learn on my first time through the book. That still left me with a lot of vocab, but at least now I can say "refrigeratorium" (refrigerator) ;-) I know that there are a lot of critics of this "neo-Latin," but I don't really mind it. In fact, to me it seems natural to develop new words for the language, even if they are more artificial than many words created for modern languages. And it certainly makes it more useful for describing the "electronica instrumenta" in my house :) But yes, I do realize that for most encounters I have with Latin, knowing that "tostrum" is the new word for "toaster" may not be super relevant. Edited by jae on 10 August 2012 at 2:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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