Ezra wrote:A fabulous month. I did not fully achieve my goals, and the end of month was somewhat uninspiring due to some RL stuff, but in the language learning department things were pretty fabulous.
Latin (38 h)
The king of the month was Latin. Having finished firstt volume of Augustine's "Confessions" with the aid of parallel text, I proceeded to the second part of Justus Lipsius' "De constantia" unaided. Unfortunately, it is still far from being easy. To get through a page tooks me about 15 minutes. Still, it allows for more or less rewarding reading as I am interested in Stoic philosophy and Justus Lipsius is one of much less known stoics out there.
Classical Chinese (30 ½ h)
Going through Fuller. CC is a nice change after heavy-inflected Latin. On the other side, characters are the main time sink: I have to check every new character in a dictionary (as Fuller usually only gives a meaning pertaining to the given text passage) and add it to Anki. So I am on 15th lesson now. I actually like Chinese stories provided in this textbook from Zhuang Zi, Garden of Stories, Han Fei Zi, Mencius etc. They might seem trivial at first but underneath there is strong, even brutal pragmatism and a very practical outlook.
Hebrew (20 ½ h)
I've read 30 chapters of Jeremiah. Much more easy to read than Isaiah. Its language less flowery and there are much more prosaic chunks.
German (20 h)
I've finished 23 units (3 of them in this month) of "German for reading". Ideally, I would like to finish it in November, leaving Worman's readers for next month. In general, I like German language. Nice phonetics (unlike French), nice orthography (unlike French), great literature (unlike French; well, it is great enough but not my type of greatness). Somehow, I like German's syntax and the way you can create compound words on the spot.
Italian (3 h)
Not much time was devoted to Italian. I've started to read "Grammatica generale delle due lingue italiana e latina"
Japanese (2 ½ h)
Seems like not much love to Japanese either. I've actually contemplated dropping Japanese altogether but decided against that at the end. It is probably that Classical Chinese has filled my Far East slot almost entirely, so there is not much energy left for another Far East language. Still, I will probably try to finish one ranobe and then we will see.
If you can already ready classic Chinese smoothly, the chance is that you can also partially figure out the meanings of some Japanese text (without knowing their soundings). Japanese share a lot of characters with Chinese.