Sahmilat's Languages Log
Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2018 5:19 pm
Original Post, August 2018
I'm an American undergraduate taking a semester off from college for health reasons and I figure that to keep myself from going crazy from boredom, I'll spend some time writing down my progress in the langauges I'm studying.
I did four years of Latin in high school and got pretty good at reading it, but I haven't done much in a while and I want to do some extensive reading to get back into the swing of things. I've been pretty successful reading Caesar, Ovid, Virgil, Catullus, but I want to try to improve my reading fluency so that it goes more smoothly and is overall more enjoyable. For that reason, I'm starting with H. C. Nutting's Ad Alpes, and I think afterwards I might read one or two of the novels translated into Latin by Arcadius Avellanus before going to just reading classical authors. This website has a big catalog of Latin resources, including readers.
I took two semesters of introductory Attic Greek, using the Athenaze textbook. I like the large amount of reading practice it has. I'm trying to finish up the second book pretty soon so that I can move on to Attica, a textbook designed to help move from beginning Greek textbooks to reading selections of authentic classical Greek. I also found a book called Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Griechisch by Meyer and Steinthal. It's divided into two main sections: one of basic vocabulary (Grundwortschatz) and one for vocabulary particular to various authors and genres (e.g. philosophy, history, tragedy). Once I finish Attica I think I'll figure out what author I want to start with and study their core vocabulary from that book. I'm leaning towards Plato or maybe Xenophon. Before I do all that though I have to finish the last ~5 chapters I have of Athenaze.
Against my better judgement, I wanted to also splash around a little bit in Sanskrit mainly out of linguistic, rather than literary, interest. I picked up Thomas Egenes's Introduction to Sanskrit. It's not a particularly in-depth textbook, and I'm still at this point working on learning the alphabet (much harder than the Greek alphabet!). I'm still not sure what I would like to do after this, but I'll probably find a more comprehensive grammar to read through and search for some beginner/intermediate readers, though I'm not sure they're quite as easy to find as Latin and Greek ones are.
I'm an American undergraduate taking a semester off from college for health reasons and I figure that to keep myself from going crazy from boredom, I'll spend some time writing down my progress in the langauges I'm studying.
I did four years of Latin in high school and got pretty good at reading it, but I haven't done much in a while and I want to do some extensive reading to get back into the swing of things. I've been pretty successful reading Caesar, Ovid, Virgil, Catullus, but I want to try to improve my reading fluency so that it goes more smoothly and is overall more enjoyable. For that reason, I'm starting with H. C. Nutting's Ad Alpes, and I think afterwards I might read one or two of the novels translated into Latin by Arcadius Avellanus before going to just reading classical authors. This website has a big catalog of Latin resources, including readers.
I took two semesters of introductory Attic Greek, using the Athenaze textbook. I like the large amount of reading practice it has. I'm trying to finish up the second book pretty soon so that I can move on to Attica, a textbook designed to help move from beginning Greek textbooks to reading selections of authentic classical Greek. I also found a book called Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Griechisch by Meyer and Steinthal. It's divided into two main sections: one of basic vocabulary (Grundwortschatz) and one for vocabulary particular to various authors and genres (e.g. philosophy, history, tragedy). Once I finish Attica I think I'll figure out what author I want to start with and study their core vocabulary from that book. I'm leaning towards Plato or maybe Xenophon. Before I do all that though I have to finish the last ~5 chapters I have of Athenaze.
Against my better judgement, I wanted to also splash around a little bit in Sanskrit mainly out of linguistic, rather than literary, interest. I picked up Thomas Egenes's Introduction to Sanskrit. It's not a particularly in-depth textbook, and I'm still at this point working on learning the alphabet (much harder than the Greek alphabet!). I'm still not sure what I would like to do after this, but I'll probably find a more comprehensive grammar to read through and search for some beginner/intermediate readers, though I'm not sure they're quite as easy to find as Latin and Greek ones are.