Haven't posted in a few weeks, in part because I'm embarrassed at my failure to limit myself to only studying certain languages. I'm trying to be more positive though, so instead I'll be glad that I have things I'm so passionate about and with which I can spend my time during this quarantine.
German: Haven't been great about German lately. Since I finished
Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan I hopped between a couple of books without finding one that really drew me in. Most recently I've read about 1.5 chapters (sections?) of Kafka's
Der Proceß. I've made attempts at this book before since I bought it about two years ago, but I've never gotten far. Hope to do more this time around. Again, this is an exercise in not judging myself too harshly. I had a goal to finish 5 books by the end of April, but as my German time has been dropping off, that's obviously not going to happen. I read about 1.5, which is still more than I might have if I hadn't set a goal at all. It's all good.
French: At one point I was doing this pretty consistently, but my textbook use has fallen off because I find them both (Assimil and Mauger) pretty boring, and I just haven't felt like doing any listening lately. Maybe in the next few days I'll get back on that. I do like French a lot, it's just always my, like, fifth choice of something to do right now.
Latin: I'm finally about halfway through Beeson, reading some interesting stuff. If anyone is interested in reading my post on the selections of Cassiodorus, it's
here. It's not super interesting but it is in Latin, and I hope it's readable. In more classical news I decided I should finally get around to reading Cicero. I started with
Pro P. Quintio because it's the first oration in the collection I'm using (Bibliotheca Classica Latina). I'm a little over halfway through it and it's surprisingly readable. I was pessimistically expecting Cicero to force me back into my translation habits from high school, but I can read it pretty naturally (especially when I read out loud to prevent my mind from drifting), although I am not 100% clear on the details of the case because I don't know a ton about Roman legal language or how court cases work. I might do some secondary reading on that or just hope to absorb that from reading more Cicero. He's not considered the pinnacle of ancient prose style for nothing.
Greek: I'm up to maybe Lektion 30 in Zuntz. Haven't been working on this as consistently as Latin. This textbook isn't exactly fun, but it is interesting. I'm still learning new things about grammar that I "should" have learned in my intro Greek class. I'm putting the sentences with new words in them in Anki as cloze cards. More on the method below.
Sanskrit: Using Stiehl's
Sanskrit Kompendium is actually making me feel kind of bad about my German. A lot of the sentences are just not the sort of things I'm used to talking/reading about in German so there's a good number of new words that seem to be relatively "basic" vocabulary. What I'm doing is writing down the sentences in my notebook first in Sanskrit (in devanagari) then in English, then making cloze cards out of them in Anki. I also have a set of cards just for testing verb roots.
I like this book because it provides a lot of practice with each grammar point. However, it introduces a lot of vocabulary with, I think, not enough repetition. This might be contrary to the goal of "shelter vocabulary but not grammar" that I have heard from some people. I certainly don't think this is a perfect textbook, but I'm still not confident enough in my French to use Assimil. It might be manageable, but I want to stick with this book as long as I feel like I'm still learning.
guyome wrote:Hello fellow learner of a dead/ancient language! I kind of have the same problem with Latin, being a fairly proficient reader/listener but having my writing and speaking skills lagging very far behind. As far as I have seen, that wouldn't even be a problem for most Latin learners since reading is the most important thing you can do with Latin at the moment. Still, I want to at least write better Latin for two reasons: it means having a better grasp of the language, which can only be beneficial to passive skills, and Latin is just so beautiful a language I want to be able to produce it.
I think our predicament is a common for learners of Ancient Greek or Latin. I have tried various things to activate my passive skills but so far I can't say I've been very successful. With other languages, it wasn't much of a problem since massive exposure to media always seemed to do the trick at some point. I barely spoke English for years because I didn't need to, but the day I had to I found I could express myself pretty well, for instance). Although there is more Latin audio available now than a few years before, I think it is nowhere near enough to immerse yourself into it and come out a fairly competent active user.
I definitely think that it's worthwhile to develop active skills in ancient languages. For one thing it's more fun, and for a second it's a great way to internalize grammar and vocabulary in a way that makes you a better, more natural reader. It's like you don't "really" understand a grammatical structure until you can use it, and then it's very easy to understand when you see it while reading.
As far as ways to activate passive skills, I think you just kind of have to jump into it. Composition textbooks are useful in their own way, but I find them (at least the one's I've tried) very very boring. What worked for me (insofar as I can consider myself a competent Latin user) is just writing about what I'm thinking and talking to people on the discord (discord.gg/latin). Immersion would definitely be useful, and I hope to do some sort of summer program someday, but I'm pretty satisfied with the progress I'm making by just reading and trying to communicate with other people in Latin. I even joined a Greek chat last week or so and was able to communicate at a basic level. It was really hard and I left after like 15 minutes, but I could speak! in ancient Greek! wow!
guyome wrote:Neither am I
Not that I think Zuntz's method is bad in itself but I doubt it is the only one. A method based on authentic sentences like Zuntz's would probably fail to capture my interest, if only for psychological reasons:
- if they are even slightly adapted, then it is no Authentic Greek™ anymore anyway, and I have noticed that I tend to feel cheated when authors of textbooks pretend they give you Authentic Cicero™ when in fact all you have is the skeleton of his sentences. It is just a very unpleasant feeling, while with made-up Latin, things are at least clear
- the other reason (and maybe the most important) is that jumping from one diconnected sentence to the other is not satisfying and actually makes things harder for me. It is like starting from scratch with every sentence because of the lack of context, new thought, etc. I much prefer reading a coherent piece (and I've found that vocab sticks better when there is a story behind it, which is another reason I don't care much for the sentence based method).
I think that to for a self-learner to make it far through Zuntz's book they would have to be very motivated and very patient. It's not exactly the most pleasant experience. I think it would work well with a teacher, but I don't really know anything about that. I also kind of agree about adapted sentences, it seems like cheating in some way.
guyome wrote:That being said, I have no doubt such a method can be very good for others. Reginald Foster teaches Latin like that and, like Zuntz, he is vehemently opposed to made-up Latin. The problem is everyone (be it the LLPSI crowd, the Grammar-Translation croonies, or Reginald Foster himself) seems to think their method is the only one leading to fluency. And that's not even touching the fact that "grammar-translation" is used in such various ways that the word is often meaningless, or that people using LLPSI can use it in very different ways, etc.
In my opinion, the basic thing you need is a decent volume of text in the target language and the will to read it as it is written (without hunting for the verb first, etc), which can be done with LLPSI, with authentic sentences, with traditional textbooks.
I agree that there are probably multiple structures a course can take that can help a learner get started on the path to fluency. I have, however, been convinced by the CI folks on twitter and elsewhere that input is irreplacable. I don't think there's anything "wrong" with grammar and translation, in that I don't think it like breaks your brain and permenantly prevents you from really understanding the language, but to some extent I feel like it's a bit of a waste of time. Every paragraph of English in these textbooks explaining grammatical concepts could be replaces with some amount of level-appropriate Latin (or Greek, or Sanskrit) that demonstrates this grammar. I also personally just find translation into my native language to be a boring and not particularly enlightening exercise. For these reasons I think that "traditional" textbooks for Latin, whether they are GT in the strictest sense or not, simply don't stack up to a book like Familia Romana, which is itself imperfect.
I dream of someday doing enough research into SLA and getting good enough at at least one of my target languages that I can write a Good Textbook or compile an intermediate reader or something. Who can say though.