First sentences in Attic Greek!!!!!
Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 3:11 am
So, I've got a bit of history with language learning. German undergraduate bachelor's, five semesters of French . . . All of that occurred 20+ years ago. My pandemic hobby has been re-learning Deutsch, and about six weeks ago, I decided to try to learn to read Plato in his native tongue. I've been working on Hansen & Quinn since, and today, I read complex sentences in Greek for the first time. I've got a 20-word vocabulary, and an understanding of the roles that words play in their different declensions (thanks, German!), and today I put it to good use for the first time (Homer's brother is educating the men in the markets by shipping books down the road).
So, this post is mostly just a celebration of my silly accomplishment. But I also realized today that there's a huge difference between my goals in studying French and German and my current goals with Greek. With both French and German, the goal is communication. The goal is reading and discussing Baudrillard or Adorno in their native tongues. With Greek, on the other hand, I never need to speak it. I don't need to be able to produce a vocabulary - I'm content just recognizing it. An ability to read and understand a language seems right now to be so much easier to master than an ability to converse. I'd love to hear folks' thought . . .
So, this post is mostly just a celebration of my silly accomplishment. But I also realized today that there's a huge difference between my goals in studying French and German and my current goals with Greek. With both French and German, the goal is communication. The goal is reading and discussing Baudrillard or Adorno in their native tongues. With Greek, on the other hand, I never need to speak it. I don't need to be able to produce a vocabulary - I'm content just recognizing it. An ability to read and understand a language seems right now to be so much easier to master than an ability to converse. I'd love to hear folks' thought . . .