Josquin's Classical Log - Graeca non leguntur

[iguanamon]

Josquin, it's a pleasure to read your log. I wish you good health and good learning in the New Year!

[Josquin]

SATURDAY, 6 JANUARY 2018

So, it's 2018, isn't it?! Happy New Year, everybody!!!

I had fantastic Christmas and New Year's celebrations and I hope 2018 will be a significantly better year than 2016 and 2017 for me. Some good news are already on the way, but it's too early to really tell them here. So, I'll inform you in due course of my personal developments...

Languagewise, the new year started off well. I've decided to take a break from Irish and fully concentrate on my three classical languages for the time being. This is what I've been doing:

Ἑλληνική

I'm on lesson 22 in Kairós now. The past lessons covered the imperfect tense and personal pronouns, the next lesson will introduce the aorist tense. I already know most grammar points from Reading Greek, but I've noticed that Kairós uses more complicated syntax right from the beginning. So, I'm already having trouble translating more complicated sentences although knowing all the single words.

Unfortunately, there is no answer key with translations of the texts available (it's a book for public schools, after all), so I will have to muddle through despite not understanding every single nuance of the texts. I hope this won't become a major problem in the course of the book.

עברית

I have reached lesson 35 in Lehrbuch Bibel-Hebräisch. I've finally covered all imperfect conjugations and moved on to the joys of the passive participle and the absolute infinitive. Well, compared to the manifold forms of the imperfect, this is really easy.

Lesson 35 deals with the narrative syntax of the Bible, because Hebrew lacks a lot of syntactic conjunctions of the Indo-European languages. Instead, it works with the word for "and" and the form of the verb in order to express consecutive or contradictive subclauses. Quite interesting, but I'm waiting for lesson 37, which will introduce the nif'al stem and its conjugations. I guess that's when the real fun with all the different binyanim begins...

संस्कृतम्

So, I contacted Mrs Ruppel for the answer key to The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit and it turns out she's a very friendly person. Not only did she send me the answer key and the errata list, but she also invited me to the online study group for the CIS, which is tutored by herself. This way, I'll get weekly assignments for Sanskrit and I have someone to ask questions to. Also, there's a Youtube channel with videos on all the chapters of the book. This is really a great resource!

Concerning my progress, I'm on lesson 6 now, which introduces a-stem nouns. Sanskrit a-stems are equivalent to Latin and Greek o-declension nouns and they really decline very similarly. The only major difference is that Sanskrit has eight cases where Latin has six and Greek has five. And yes, you've guessed it, Sanskrit also has a complete paradigm for the dual number, so memorizing the entire paradigm will take some time. I've already mastered the most important parts though.

So, now I can already conjugate verbs in the present tense and decline the most important class of nouns. What's still tripping me up, is verbs in the dual though. While "we two" and "you two" is pretty easy to grasp, remembering to use a different verb form for "they two" is pretty mind-boggling, e.g.:

सिंहः व्याघ्रः च नरस्य गृहं प्रति गच्छतः ।
Siṃhaḥ vyāghraḥ ca narasya gṛhaṃ prati gacchataḥ.
The lion and the tiger (both) go towards the man's house.

Here, I have to remember to use the dual ending -taḥ instead of the plural ending -nti. But I gues I'll get used to it sooner or later...

Okay, this is it for today. Wishing you all a successful new year with lots of fun and discoveries in all your languages!

[Josquin]

FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY 2018

Okay, slight change of plans! I have been invited to a wedding in Portugal in July, so I will actively revive my dormant Portuguese. I have already started repeating things with Langenscheidt's Portugiesisch mit System and I will also get Assimil's Portugiesisch ohne Mühe and Buske's Lehrbuch der portugiesischen Sprache. After that, I might go into native materials if all goes well. This time it's for real!

By the way, this means in no way that I will stop studying classical languages. It's just a change in my priorities for the next six months. Maybe, I'll even start a separate log for my Portuguese endeavour. Veremos!

Até logo, meus amigos!

[Josquin]

Josquin, it's a pleasure to read your log. I wish you good health and good learning in the New Year!

Only noticing now that I never replied to your good wishes. Shame on me!

So, thank you very much, iguanamon! I do wish the very same to you. I hope you find some new security in the new year and I'm looking forward to follow your excursions through various exotic languages, especially if you should decide to take up Catalan!

Até mais e boa sorte!

[Josquin]

SATURDAY, 13 JANUARY 2018

So, after the little announcement yesterday, I will go a little bit more into detail today. As I said, I've been invited to the wedding of a good friend, which will take place in Portugal as the bride is Portuguese. I will probably spend about a week near Lisbon, as I'm thinking of combining the wedding with a few days of vacation. This means I will need some touristy command of Portuguese as I hate doing everything through English, not being able to understand people, and not being able to communicate with anyone who doesn't happen to speak English. So, something around A2 or low B1-ish should do the trick.

As some of you will remember, I already studied some Portuguese back in the days of HTLAL, more exactly in 2014. I still remember a lot and it's quite easy to read Portuguese given that I also know Latin, French, and Italian, but I'm a catastrophe at speaking it. I remember a Skype call with the Russian TAC team where all I could say to Expugnator and fabriciocarraro was: "Eu não falo português." Apparently, my pronunciation was quite good, but I simply don't have any speaking practice nor real active command of the language.

Português

So, I'm going through Portugiesisch mit System again, which won't take me long, and then I'll procede with Lehrbuch der portugiesischen Sprache. Maybe, I'll also do some Assimil later. We'll see! I'm on lesson 3 in PmS now and, as usual, I have no problems understanding while I just can't use the language actively. Perhaps, I'll start writing in Portuguese here or on Lang-8 in order to change that.

Ἑλληνική

Other than that, I'm on lesson 24 in Kairós now, which deals with the aorist tense, the aorist infinitive, and the aorist participles. Quite a lot to digest, but I'll get through it. Understanding the difference between aorist and imperfect isn't difficult given similar phenomena in the Romance languages (passé simple/composé vs. imparfait) or in Russian (perfective vs. imperfective aspect).

עברית

No progress. Still busy with narrative constructions and consecutive sentences in Hebrew. My motivation for Hebrew is quite low again.

संस्कृतम्

I haven't made much progress in Sanskrit either. I'm still busy memorizing the plural declension of a-stems in Sanskrit and the relevant vocabulary. Yesterday, I got an exam paper from Dr Ruppel through the CIS onlince course, which I will take later this week. It's self-graded, so no need to panic! I still have problems with some devanagari characters, verb roots, and especially remembering vocabulary, so I probably won't score too high on the exam.

The problem is once again that I simply need to learn a language in context. However, this is difficult given that the surviving corpus of Sanskrit texts consists of highly sophisticated works of religious literature, which leaves beginners with made-up practice sentences that are boring as hell. Well, I'll somehow get through the beginner stage, I suppose. The CIS introduces excerpts of "real" Sanskrit right from the beginning, so it should be possible to transition smoothly into annotated native materials. That's what I'm hoping for, at least.

[galaxyrocker]

I'm jealous of how easily you found it to find a group to work on Sanskrit with! If something like that exists for Pali, I can't find it. Perhaps that's another reason I should switch to Sanskrit, apart from having more available resources/extant documents...

[Josquin]

I'm jealous of how easily you found it to find a group to work on Sanskrit with! If something like that exists for Pali, I can't find it. Perhaps that's another reason I should switch to Sanskrit, apart from having more available resources/extant documents...

I must admit I know nothing about Pali, so I don't know what kinds of resources are available. Finding this online course for Sanskrit was pure coincidence though. To be honest, I don't even know why the author of the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit offers it, but it's a good way to organize the study of the book.

I doubt there were similar resources for Sanskrit available before she wrote the CIS. All the other textbooks are pretty old-school if not 19th-century-like primers. So, I guess I was just lucky finding the book and the accompanying online course. I don't even know if something like this exists for Latin or Ancient Greek, let alone Pali.

[aravinda]

I'm jealous of how easily you found it to find a group to work on Sanskrit with! If something like that exists for Pali, I can't find it. Perhaps that's another reason I should switch to Sanskrit, apart from having more available resources/extant documents...

I'm happy to see another forum member who's studying/interested in Pāli. Of course, Pāli literature is almost exclusively Buddhist literature whereas Sanskrit literature is so extensive and varied, it can cater for any taste.
This is not exactly what you are looking for but hopefully, you may find them useful.
A Course in the Pali Language: Through direct study of selections from the Buddha’s discourses is based on the textbook, A New Course in Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha by James W. Gair & W. S. Karunatillake. I haven't done the course but used the textbook off and on. As implied, in each unit the book first gives you some original text, explains the relevant grammar points and then again gives another set of texts for reading. It might not be the best book to start depending on one's language background. However, after completing an easier book like Lily de Silva's Pāli Primer which is available for free online, it won't be that difficult. I listened to few minutes of the audio and unfortunately, Bhikkhu Bodhi's Pāli pronunciation is not the best but not that bad either.
Then there are a couple of online Pāli courses offered by Pariyatti Learning Center.

...I must admit I know nothing about Pali, so I don't know what kinds of resources are available. Finding this online course for Sanskrit was pure coincidence though. To be honest, I don't even know why the author of the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit offers it, but it's a good way to organize the study of the book.
I doubt there were similar resources for Sanskrit available before she wrote the CIS. All the other textbooks are pretty old-school if not 19th-century-like primers. So, I guess I was just lucky finding the book and the accompanying online course. I don't even know if something like this exists for Latin or Ancient Greek, let alone Pali.

Hello, Josquin, you seem to be doing very well in your languages. I wish I had your talent and consistency. I think you're quite right in saying that there hadn't been any similar resources for Sanskrit before the CIS. By the way, I mentioned about the CIS Facebook Group/ Course when I announced the book in a previous post - you seemed to have missed that part.
For Latin, the Sermó Latínus courses based on Desessard's Assimil Le latin sans peine and conducted by the Schola Latína Európæa & Úniversálisare are the closest in quality.

[Josquin]

Hello, Josquin, you seem to be doing very well in your languages. I wish I had your talent and consistency. I think you're quite right in saying that there hadn't been any similar resources for Sanskrit before the CIS. By the way, I mentioned about the CIS Facebook Group/ Course when I announced the book in a previous post - you seemed to have missed that part.

Hi aravinda, yes, at the moment things are going pretty well -- thankfully! Given that most of last year was taken up by health problems, this certainly is a positive development. Well, I don't know if I have a special talent -- I certainly am a fast learner and I've always been intellectually curious --, but yeah consistency is the crucial point. Unfortunately, I don't manage studying all my languages to the same extent every day, but I try to do at least a little bit. And if it's only reading for five minutes.

Your mentioning the CIS online course didn't escape my notice, but I didn't really consider joining it as I enjoy being independent in my studies. Also, it started a little bit before I took up Sanskrit, so I didn't really think I could still join. When Antonia Ruppel invited me to the course, I of course said yes, especially because she made it clear that I could still join, so yeah here I am. I don't really know what the benefits of the course are, but it's a nice way to structure the way through the book and it's good to have someone to ask questions to.

Are you taking the course as well? Maybe, we should finally start the LLorg Sanskrit Study Group?

नमस्ते ।

[Josquin]

SEGUNDA-FEIRA, 15 JANEIRO 2018

Olá, meus amigos e amigas!

Hoje vou escrever um pouco em português. Ainda não falo muito português, mas estou a aprendê-lo. Em Julho vou ir a Portugal para o casamento de um bom amigo. Ainda não fui em Portugal, pois estou feliz por ir lá. Não posso dizer muito mais, talvez algo sobre mim: O meu nome é Christian, tenho 33 anos e moro na Alemanha. Sou estudante pós-graduado e gosto das línguas, dos livros, da musica e da comida. Queria poder falar o português quando vou a Portugal em Julho, pois devo aprender mais.

Até breve!