Herodotean's log (Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, etc.)

[Herodotean]

Rather than restarting Persian, and after almost starting some variety of Arabic instead, I'm taking a fresh run at Classical Hebrew using Aleph with Beth. I'm about ten videos in. The production values are high for YouTube, the content is engaging, and the pacing (so far) is excellent -- though I'm wondering where I'll fall off the comprehensibility cliff that plagues inductive methods. I watched a few of their videos back in 2020, I think, but they seem to have improved since then; along with what I think is better pacing, I don't remember the online quizzes they have now or their grammar notes for each video, but I may have missed them. My goals for Hebrew are fairly modest: to be able to read a few verses to a chapter of the Hebrew Bible per day with the help of a reader's lexicon or reader's edition. I hope this attempt sticks.

[Herodotean]

Greek
Most of my reading lately has been 20 New Testament verses or so a day in Codex Vaticanus. I'm very slowly working my way through the Vatican's fantastic introduction to Greek paleography, which is infinitely more helpful than the one-week course I took years ago at a fancy European university. Since I'd like to read Greek MSS with relative ease, I'm trying to spend quite a bit of time with one MS before moving on to another. Vaticanus' uncial script is generally quite clear, but I think reading many pages with an easy script builds good habits that will help later on, even with miniscule.

Hebrew
I'm almost at two weeks of Aleph with Beth and have yet to fall off a cliff. So far: lots of animal and nature vocabulary, "there is"/"there isn't" ("Yesh there is and no there ain," commented a YouTube viewer), the construct state (which is far easier to understand in context than I ever found it in a textbook), but no verbs yet.

Latin, Spanish, German
Not much, other than some travel documentaries in German.

[Herodotean]

Greek
A bit of Theophrastus' Characters, an amusing work which devotes a paragraph or so to stereotyped personalities: the toady, the babbler, etc.

Latin
I read the first book of the Rhetorica ad Herennium a week or so ago.

Hebrew
Still working at Aleph with Beth, though the pace has slowed. I bought a reader's edition Hebrew Bible and have found if I know a passage well enough already, and if the Hebrew is exceptionally easy, I can just barely make it out.

French
For some reason I've felt drawn to French recently, so I've actually done a bit of listening -- I hardly ever listen to French -- and started reading St. François de Sales' Introduction à la vie dévote, the style of which is surprisingly plain for seventeenth-century European literature (in the preface he explains that he intentionally avoided the typical literary flourishes in order to make the work more accessible). And just tonight I read Mérimée's brilliant short story "Mateo Falcone" (favorite quotation: "L’emploi d’une bonne ménagère, en cas de combat, est de charger les armes de son mari"). I had no idea Mérimée founded the Musée de Cluny, of which I have very fond memories from visits years ago.

German
I'm forty or so pages into Eduard Norden's magisterial work Die antike Kunstprosa (1915). Its frequent quotations from both Latin and Greek help explain why I haven't felt it necessary to read much else in either of those languages recently. A sampling:

• A self-deprecating caution (emphasis mine): "Vor allem werden wir Moderne, speziell wir Deutsche, uns hüten müssen, unsere ästhetischen Begriffe von Formenvollendung im Stil der Prosa zu identifizieren mit denen des Altertums: wir müssen versuchen, da, wo wir nicht mitempfinden können, wenigstens nachzuempfinden" (p. 11).
• On Herodotus: "In Wahrheit ist Herodot noch viel mehr als Hekataios ein Kind der neuen Zeit, und der Hauptreiz seiner Persönlichkeit sowohl wie seines Werkes nach Inhalt und Stil liegt ja gerade in der wundervollen Mischung von altväterlicher Strenge und moderner Subjektivität, von Naivität und Reflexion" (p. 39).
• And on Gorgias: "Aus dem Gesagten ergibt sich, daß Gorgias, wenn er seine Folgerung Prosa der Poesie annäherte, nichts absolut Neues schuf, sondern auch hier das abschließende Glied einer naturgemäßen Entwicklungsreihe bildet. Der Fehler, in den er aber auch hier verfiel, war die Übertreibung: nicht die einfache Hoheit des Epos, sondern den Enthusiasmus der dithyrambischen Diktion und den pathetischen Kothurn der Tragödie führte er durch überkühne Wortkompositionen und Metaphern in die Prosa ein; das war es, was das ganze Altertum, soweit es nicht auf seiner Seite stand, tadelte, soweit es in seinem Bann stand, ihm nachmachte; da die letztere Partei die Oberhand gewann, so ist Gorgias, der Begründer der antiken Kunstprosa, an ihrem Ruin schuld geworden."

[MorkTheFiddle]

I like your post, though maybe I don't understand the German so well. Good to see you're still kicking.

[Herodotean]

Having spectacularly failed to complete the 2022-23 Super Challenge, I am contemplating registering for the 2024-25 version. How foolish of me! But even though I didn't finish the last SC, I still read more Greek and Latin, and listened to more Spanish, than I probably would have without it. So that's how I'm approaching this one: if it means I read more than I would have otherwise, it's a success, whether I reach the official goal or not.

And because I ended up with severe tracking fatigue last time, I'm doing a full challenge for ancient Greek only, both reading and listening. I am not going to track my reading by the page or listening by the minute for any other language.

In order to avoid other, more pressing responsibilities, I am productively procrastinating by amassing audio material. The full challenge involves 150 hours of listening. Currently I have about 23 hours. So unless I find more, I'll be listening to everything I have between 6 and 7 times. We'll see how that goes. There's quite a bit of material at Julius Tomin's site (http://www.juliustomin.org/greekreadaloud.html) that I haven't yet downloaded. Tomin's reading is generally good, but he does miss accents now and then. If I were rich, I would buy all of Ioannis Stratakis' prose recordings.

What I've been doing recently: listening to German podcasts and reading the Berliner Zeitung, doing some German grammar exercises, reading Lucian's Gallus, and not much else.

[MorkTheFiddle]

The key word here is "spectacular." So long as it's spectacular, all is good.
If I were rich, I would pay Ioannis Stratakis to record everything he has not recorded so far. I've thought about doing some on my own, but it just would not sound right. An American English accent with a slight powdering of Texan. Oy.
Good luck with the full challenge.

[Severine]

I'm a lapsed classicist who's keen to follow your progress, if you don't mind. Expect me to be lurking about as the super challenge gets underway. My own will include Latin, though no Greek (this time). I seem to be the opposite of you in terms of favourites: Greek was fascinating, but if I'm honest, if never grabbed me by the throat the way Latin did. My primary motivation for mastering it was that any serious Latinist needs excellent Greek.

I love that you're using LaTeX, by the way. There's a lot to like in this thread!

[Herodotean]

I'm a lapsed classicist who's keen to follow your progress, if you don't mind. Expect me to be lurking about as the super challenge gets underway. My own will include Latin, though no Greek (this time). I seem to be the opposite of you in terms of favourites: Greek was fascinating, but if I'm honest, if never grabbed me by the throat the way Latin did. My primary motivation for mastering it was that any serious Latinist needs excellent Greek.

I love that you're using LaTeX, by the way. There's a lot to like in this thread!

Thanks for stopping by! Yes, I'm more or less the opposite: Latin is wonderful but will never, for me, quite measure up to Greek. But for a variety of reasons Latin tends to get more of my attention, which is partly why I'm doing the SC for Greek. Latin will just have to take care of itself for a while.

[Herodotean]

The first day of the Super Challenge is in the books: Plato's Apology (13 pages) and Randall Buth's recording of 1 John (20 minutes). Let's hope this is not the only day I'm actually ahead of schedule . . .

Other languages: I've spent a fair amount of time drilling German verbs on Linguno, thanks to Cavesa's mentioning it. It's fantastic! I only wish there were something similar for German nouns and adjectives (recommendations welcome). My interest in Spanish is slipping: I have trouble finding things I'm interested in watching or listening to, and I don't have much time to read. Maybe I just need to stop trying to make Spanish speaking and listening happen unless I move somewhere with more opportunities to use it in everyday life. I might start putting the (meager) time I was giving Spanish into French or Italian instead. Hebrew is stalled for the moment; in a week or two I expect to have more time and energy to start up Aleph with Beth again.

[Herodotean]

Greek
Still on target for the Super Challenge. So far I've read Plato's Apology and Clitophon and listened to thirty minutes of Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesiaca (read by Stratakis). Only the Clitophon is new to me. Its authenticity is debated, and (I think) with good reason: it's very short and features Clitophon, a very minor character in the Republic, complaining to Socrates about the effectiveness of Socrates' speeches on virtue. Clitophon claims to be convinced that the most important thing in life is to live virtuously, as Socrates argues, but he's frustrated at Socrates' purported refusal to say what virtue actually is. Clitophon ends by threatening, if Socrates doesn't change his ways, to keep spending time with Thrasymachus and Lysias -- who receive substantial Platonic criticism in the Republic and Phaedrus, respectively. The way the dialogue brings in Clitophon, Thrasymachus, and Lysias feels more to me like a later school exercise in imitation of Plato (by a virtuoso, to be sure) than Plato himself.

Latin
I'm resisting the temptation to sign up for a half-SC.

German
Some Linguno, some Berliner Zeitung articles. Disappointed to find that at some point in the past few months, while I wasn't listening to it, DW's Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten seems to have started using text to speech rather than a real human.

Hebrew, Spanish, French
Virtually nothing.