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

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

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jan 01, 2022 6:30 pm

You serve yourself a full plate. Well done.
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2022 Goals

Postby Herodotean » Sun Jan 02, 2022 4:01 am

I’m glad to have found this forum in 2021; it’s really a fantastic place. In particular, keeping a log has made me reflect on my processes more than I would have otherwise and thereby make (I think) more consistent progress. In this post, I’ll lay out some goals for 2022; some of them I expect to achieve easily, while others will require special effort (that I may or may not expend). For some languages, I have more of a feeling of what I want to achieve than a concrete plan for getting there. Comments are welcome.

Latin
For Latin, I want to broaden my active vocabulary and write more elegant prose.
  • Deliberate practice: finish Bradley’s Arnold (doable if I make consistent progress).
  • Reading: finish Erasmus’ Colloquia (doable) and the Vulgate (ambitious but doable).
  • Listening: I’ve got lots of audio that I really should work into the mix.
Greek
I’ve signed up for the 365-day challenge for Greek because it’s my favorite language and I can feel it slipping. I think the challenge will help me be consistent.
  • Deliberate practice: at minimum, I need to write regularly. Some conversation would be good, but speakers of ancient Greek don’t exactly grow on trees.
  • Reading:
    • finish Xenophon’s Hellenica
    • read all of Plato’s Republic (not ambitious if spread over the year; it works out to about 1.2 pages per day).
  • Listening: there are far fewer good recordings of ancient Greek than there are of Latin. Stratakis’ are excellent but expensive; I purchased his recording of Plato’s Ion and will get as much mileage out of it as I can, probably through shadowing.
German
I’m happy with the rate at which my German is progressing. I’ve got several books to finish before I need to reevaluate.
  • Deliberate practice:
    • Finish A-Grammatik (Buscha and Szita).
    • Finish the Routledge Frequency Dictionary Anki deck: I’ve already suspended 1,200 cards and expect to suspend more as I encounter them. Currently there are about 3,500 unseen cards.
    • Maybe work through parts of Dodd and Cole’s Reading German. At some point I’ll work through B-Grammatik, which I also have, but I expect to want a break from workbooks after finishing A-Grammatik.
  • Reading:
    • Finish Dichter, Denker und Erzähler (Heller and Ehrlich)
    • Resume Schwab’s Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums
    • Keep reading academic prose as necessary for research
  • Listening: YouTube and podcasts ad libitum
  • Speaking and writing: maybe one day; right now grammar practice and reading are all I have time for.

Spanish
I would really like to have one – just one! – modern language at C1 or so for all skills. My reading ability might be close, but listening is probably B1 at the highest, and speaking and writing are much lower from years of disuse. 2022 will most certainly not be the year that I reach C1 in Spanish. But I’d like to make consistent progress in speaking and listening.
  • Deliberate practice: perhaps the Gramática de uso del Español: B1-B2 (after finishing A-Grammatik for German)
  • Reading: Strangely, I’m more interested in developing listening and speaking skills. I’ve got plenty to read in other languages.
  • Speaking: iTalki? Some kind of language exchange?

Persian
Finish Sobhani’s Persisches Lehr- und Lesebuch für die Umgangssprache (1971). If I do finish Sobhani, I might be able to justify purchasing Assimil Persian, which I suspect would be a useful review and consolidation (especially with the audio).

Italian
Since Dante is my major goal for Italian, and since he’s still too hard to enjoy, I’ve decided to work my way backwards from later Renaissance prose to medieval poetry.
  • Step 1: Machiavelli. I have a Kindle edition of Il principe “spiegato capitolo per capitolo” in contemporary Italian by Giovanni Bresci. I don’t expect to need the paraphrase very often, but it will double my reading volume and perhaps show me some differences between modern and 16th-century Italian that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
  • Step 2: Ariosto. I have Bigi and Zampese’s edition of the Orlando Furioso in Kindle format; between that and the Kindle dictionary, I seem to understand almost everything. Unfortunately, the Kindle dictionary does not recognize early modern forms that differ from standard contemporary Italian (e.g. adoprar for adoprare).
  • Step 3 (if necessary): Boccaccio. I have another Kindle edition with good notes for the Decameron.
  • Step 4 (finally): Dante again. I’ve also subscribed to an Italian podcast or two; we’ll see if I end up listening to them.

French
I suppose I’ll just continue reading academic prose as necessary, perhaps with the occasional novel (currently Han d’Islande). I see no need to set goals here.

Languages I want to study someday, but not in 2022
  • Hebrew
  • Arabic
  • Old French
  • Old English
  • Old Norse
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Re: Herodotean's log (Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, etc.)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Jan 02, 2022 6:44 pm

Latin is always on the back burner for me, but from time to time I take a gander at Tacitus and Horace. If I were going to put Latin into my regular mix, it would be Horace, whose poems mean a lot to me.
Hellenica appeals to me much, much more than Anabasis, and I’ve barely glanced at Cyropedia and the “Socratic” pieces. The only part of The Republic I read was Book 1, a compendium of irony and interesting thoughts. You hit the nail on the head about Stratakis. I have his Ion, too, but have so far done little with it. It should go on this year’s to-do list for me, I suppose.
My last bout with with my very weak German was bullying my way through 4 novels by Erich Marie Remarque about, in one way or another, WW2 refugees, each taking place in a different country: Liebe deinen Nächsten, Arc de Triomphe, Die Nacht von Lissabon, und Schatten im Paradies. The last is a masterpiece of novel writing and of observation about American life, still valid and valuable, but I am the only person I know on this earth who has read it.

Spanish and language exchange: our webmaster rdearman has great luck with language exchanges.

Good luck with all.
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1–8 January 2022

Postby Herodotean » Sun Jan 09, 2022 4:32 am

Latin
  • Terence, Heauton Timorumenos 175–330
  • Erasmus, Colloquia (various)
  • Daily Vulgate readings

Greek
  • 100% so far for the 365-day challenge. I’ve been reading Plato and Josephus (see below). On at least a couple of evenings, I certainly would not have read any Greek if it hadn’t been for the challenge.
  • Τὸ μαρτύριον τοῦ ἁγίου Πολυκάρπου (Martyrdom of Polycarp)
  • Plato, Gorgias 458e–470d. Socrates has now made Gorgias look a fool by trapping him in a contradiction: after claiming that the teacher of rhetoric can’t be blamed if his students use rhetoric unjustly, Gorgias was forced to admit, under Socrates’ interrogation, that the rhetor himself must be just – so how could a rhetor use rhetoric unjustly? Now Polus steps in, spluttering with rage at Socrates’ rudeness towards the great Gorgias, and demonstrates the truth of the saying attributed to Lincoln: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” So far, Socrates has established (or has at least forced Polus to agree to) the following:
    • rhetoric is to the mind what cooking is to the body (I know, I know; you have to read the dialogue)
    • when people incorrectly believe their actions will result in something good, they’re not doing what they really want
    • everything can be assigned one of these three classes: inherently good, inherently bad, and inherently neither good nor bad
    • to suffer injustice is better than to commit injustice.
  • Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews. I’m reading this in a 19th-century edition on my iPad. Josephus’ version of Abraham’s life puts a better spin on some events than the writer of Genesis does. A PR move for his Gentile audience, who certainly weren’t reading the Hebrew Bible and probably weren’t reading the Septuagint?

German
  • Dichter, Denker und Erzähler, pp. 96–110. Best reading so far: Reinhard Lettau’s “Herr Strich schreitet zum Äußersten,” in which a professor whose article on a certain poet – identified only as C. – has been rejected by all the journals mounts an armed assault on a radio station so he can broadcast his views. He and his students train for it with a six-week course of shooting lessons, using editions of poets they don’t like for target practice. I’ll stop there to avoid spoilers, but it’s worth a read, and only a few pages long.
  • After a seven-month hiatus, I have returned to Wilamowitz’ small volume Geschichte der Philologie, which I am pleased to find easier than I remembered.
  • A-Grammatik pp. 86–95. German possessive pronouns and adjectives are obnoxious, and this book doesn’t seem (to me, at least) to explain them well. It would also be helpful not to expect students to choose the correct case for prepositions until after the section on prepositions. Coming from Latin and Greek, I find the cases taken by German prepositions very odd. I’m also used to dictionaries that clearly state which case(s) each preposition takes; German-English dictionaries don’t seem to do that consistently. Sometimes the case is named, sometimes a form of jemand is included – but often the user is left to infer the case from the example sentences, which is particularly obnoxious when a preposition can take more than one case. If I’m missing something, or if anyone knows of a German-English dictionary that is clear and consistent about prepositional case usage, please comment.

Spanish
  • Listening: ~10 minutes/day of podcasts

Persian
  • Sobhani lessons 7–16 (and reread 1–11). I’m enjoying myself immensely. What could be better than reading about ducks’ tails (are they long? are they yellow?), hot water, thieves with saws, thieves giving lessons in thievery, the worth of one’s soul, and the gates of hell? Really, though, after a slow start, the lessons are now highly motivating, because I can actually understand (extremely simple) Persian. (I also realized that the previous owner of my copy, Carsten Colpe, has his own Wikipedia page.)
  • Some BBC Persian on YouTube, even though I can catch only a word or two per minute.

Italian
Whoops. Better luck next week.

French
  • A few chapters of Hugo’s Han d’Islande
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Re: 1–8 January 2022

Postby Caromarlyse » Sun Jan 09, 2022 1:43 pm

Herodotean wrote:[*] A-Grammatik pp. 86–95. German possessive pronouns and adjectives are obnoxious, and this book doesn’t seem (to me, at least) to explain them well. It would also be helpful not to expect students to choose the correct case for prepositions until after the section on prepositions. Coming from Latin and Greek, I find the cases taken by German prepositions very odd. I’m also used to dictionaries that clearly state which case(s) each preposition takes; German-English dictionaries don’t seem to do that consistently. Sometimes the case is named, sometimes a form of jemand is included – but often the user is left to infer the case from the example sentences, which is particularly obnoxious when a preposition can take more than one case. If I’m missing something, or if anyone knows of a German-English dictionary that is clear and consistent about prepositional case usage, please comment.[/list]


I don't have A-Grammatik and am struggling a little to understand what is troubling you, but if you wanted to give examples, I'd be happy to try to help.

B-Grammatik (which I do have) has lists at the back of verbs and the cases they govern and, separately, verbs + prepositions and the relevant cases. In my experience such lists are quite common in German textbooks - perhaps they don't want to overload you at the beginning? I had a very similar problem in my early days of Russian. The online dictionary Leo gives you the name of the case used when the object is an "etwas" or "sich" but not when it is a "jemand" - because the forms are distinctive here: jmdm = dative, jmden = accusative... My Langenscheidts dictionary for foreign learners of German does something similar. Again, an example would help me to help further. I might be missing the point!

If you wanted a comprehensive German grammar that takes quite an academic approach (and gives thorough English explanations), I'd recommend Hammer's. It's my go-to for looking up points that confuse me, and it always seems to have the answer even to points of grammar that natives consider to be nuanced.
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Re: Herodotean's log (Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, etc.)

Postby BeaP » Sun Jan 09, 2022 2:43 pm

Relatively new grammars are usually written as a supplement for course books, that's why they don't care what has been taught in the previous chapters and what hasn't. Most of the time an A1-A2 grammar is written either for A2 speakers who want to consolidate their knowledge or for classes instructed by teachers. Clear presentation is very rare, and you have better chances finding them in textbooks (especially older ones). I've never had problems with dictionaries from this aspect, but I learned German 30 years ago, and grammar teaching was very thorough then. If you look at the website of big publishers (Hueber, Klett, Cornelsen), you can find a lot of dictionaries with sample pages, and see which one you like. An example: https://shop.hueber.de/media/hueber_dateien/Internet_Muster/Red7/9783191017361_Muster_2.pdf
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Re: Herodotean's log (Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, etc.)

Postby Herodotean » Sun Jan 16, 2022 4:11 am

Thanks, Caromarlyse and BeaP. My rant was perhaps ill-considered; I have not been able to find the entries I thought were ambiguous, so maybe I just wasn't looking closely enough. Part of the problem may well be that I'm looking in dictionaries for information that's better found in textbooks. I've seen Hammer's, and I'm sure I'll acquire a copy one of these days.
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9–15 January 2022

Postby Herodotean » Mon Jan 17, 2022 12:27 am

My time is already eroding as the new semester is about to start . . .

Latin
No systematic progress. I’ve read some of Lhomond’s Epitome historiae sacrae and dabbled in Donatus’ Ars Minor (intriguingly, adjectives are not one of his eight parts of speech; he lumps them in with nomina).

Greek
  • 365-day challenge: still on track.
  • Isocrates, Πρὸς Δημόνικον
  • Isocrates, Πρὸς Νικοκλέα 1–28
  • John 1 (New Testament)
  • Shepherd of Hermas 1.1–3.4
  • Plato, Gorgias 470e–476a. Clearly this was not a priority this week.
  • 11 pages of Theon’s progymnasmata.
  • Plato, Ion: first thirty minutes of Stratakis’ recording. His reading voice is pleasant, but the accent will take some getting used to.

German
  • Dichter, Denker und Erzähler: I’m dropping this temporarily to read the next item on my list.
  • Deutschland: Grundwissen und mehr . . . Comprendre l'Allemagne et sa civilisation (recommended here on the forum), pp. 13–63. This is a textbook written for students of German in French classes préparatoires or studying German at university (it seems comparable to the Latin American culture and civilization textbook I used for a third-year university Spanish class). I’m pleased to find it right at my level: complex enough to be worthwhile but noticeably simpler than the academic German prose I’ve been reading. And the content so far is quite interesting, since I know very little about 19th-century Germany and only the basics for the 20th century.
  • A-Grammatik pp. 96–104

Spanish
  • Listening: some podcasts.
  • La Usurpadora E4 (no subs; after watching the show once with subs, I thought I’d understand more).

Persian
  • Sobhani lessons 17–20. The difficulty is ramping up, mainly because 10–15 new vocabulary words are introduced in each lesson and rarely reviewed. I hope I’m right that I’m sometimes meant to supply ezafe even when it isn’t written; I was warned that short vowels for words previously encountered would no longer be written, but it’s not clear to me whether that includes ezafe in novel combinations. Time to reread the last few lessons.

Italian
Nothing again this week. I guess I need to decide whether I will spend any time on Italian or not. I’d like to at least finish Machiavelli before dropping it for a while.

French
  • Hugo’s Han d’Islande: a chapter or two
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Re: 9–15 January 2022

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Jan 17, 2022 7:19 pm

Herodotean wrote:
Greek
  • 365-day challenge: still on track.
  • Isocrates, Πρὸς Δημόνικον
  • Isocrates, Πρὸς Νικοκλέα 1–28
  • John 1 (New Testament)
  • Shepherd of Hermas 1.1–3.4
  • Plato, Gorgias 470e–476a. Clearly this was not a priority this week.
  • 11 pages of Theon’s progymnasmata.
  • Plato, Ion: first thirty minutes of Stratakis’ recording. His reading voice is pleasant, but the accent will take some getting used to.

Regarding your last point. Agreed that Stratakis' voice is pleasant to hear, and am wondering which accent or accents you are used to.
I have listened to and like the voicings of David (?) Chamberlain reading Homer on his website Greek and Roman Verse,
Julius Tomin, reading, for example, Phaedrus,
and the various voices of Reading Greek.
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Re: 9–15 January 2022

Postby Herodotean » Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:57 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Regarding your last point. Agreed that Stratakis' voice is pleasant to hear, and am wondering which accent or accents you are used to.
I have listened to and like the voicings of David (?) Chamberlain reading Homer on his website Greek and Roman Verse,
Julius Tomin, reading, for example, Phaedrus,
and the various voices of Reading Greek.

When I started speaking, I modeled my pronunciation on Christophe Rico's. Here's a sample. It's not the most defensible in historical terms -- and he admits as much -- but I find it much more appealing than the standard American Erasmian. It also has the advantage of being understood by most speakers of ancient Greek, though there is a growing circle of Randall Buth's followers who seem to avoid Erasmian as much as possible. Thanks for the links; I'll give them a listen.
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