Re: Sahmilat's Languages Log [DEU, LAT, GRK]
Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2019 10:26 pm
I'm pretty burnt out on Latin and German after doing very little else for 6-8 years now and I think I might put them on hold for a bit. I am just too tired to read literature and I've passed the wonder of learning new grammar and vocabulary and it's been a bit of a drag lately to just work on my own. When I return to school I'll be able to put them more in use and it might be more fun again.
So that leaves me with French and Attic Greek.
For French right now I'm doing a lesson of Assimil every day and reading Methode Nature one day and doing the exercises the next day. This way I'm not rushing myself too much. Methode Nature has been ramping up very fast, and I noticed that there isn't any real explanation of the new grammar introduced in each chapter like there is in LLPSI. As a result, I'm left kind of guessing. I think the last chapter I read (18) introduced the subjunctive, but because it is never made explicit I'm not entirely sure. This natural method is pretty new to me (I didn't originally learn Latin with LLPSI, I just used it recently to review and consolidate my reading skills) and I'm having trouble understanding verb tenses right now, but I think as I read more it'll get better. After I finish the book I'm going to get one of those CLE Progressive grammaire books probably for intermediate level so that I can have a more systematic understanding. I'm trying something new here cause I learned both Latin and Ancient Greek with an explicit grammatical system, but I think putting off grammar and learning it later in the TL may pay off in the end.
In a related vein, I'm trying to improve my reading fluency in Attic Greek. I feel like I've pretty much mastered the syntax with a few exceptions, and my understanding of verb morphology is pretty solid (although this is probably the hardest part of learning Greek). I just need to work on my vocabulary and try to read. I've kind of hit a motivation wall for JACT, but I think I should be able to just sit down and read the next few chapters across the coming week. I found a book of medieval Greek hoping that it would be easy like most medieval Latin is, but I did not find that to be the case. I'll keep looking for easier Greek stuff, because I don't think I'll be ready for, for example, Attic tragedy as soon as I finish JACT. Once I finish the book, which will hopefully be by like mid July (?) I will try to read one of the supposedly relatively easy authors like Lysias or Lucian. In the fall I'm going to be the only advanced Greek student at my uni so I get to pick what my professor and I read. I think by that point I might be ready to read some Plato, so I'm thinking of picking the Phaedrus because rhetorical theory interests me and my professor wrote the Cambridge green/yellow commentary on that dialogue, so I'm sure he has a lot to say about it (if he's not already tired of that particular work).
Somewhat reluctantly and perhaps ill-advisedly I have returned to reading some Sanskrit textbooks. I cannot resist the siren song of this language with its grammar that seems in some ways even more complex than Ancient Greek's. I'm still working on reading/writing Devanagari quickly and I'm learning some Sandhi rules with Goldman's Devavanipravesika. I think I'll stick with this textbook til the end and then, if my French is by that point up to the task, use Assimil. I may work through another textbook too, like Maurer or Coulson, because it'll give me more vocabulary and I can't imagine reviewing the harder parts of grammar will be a waste of time. I have a copy of Macdonnell's student grammar on the way for reference.
Regarding sandhi:
Goldman kind of throws all external and internal sandhi rules at you all together near the beginning of the textbook (in chapter 3 after pronunciation + devanagari chapters) with a ton of exceptions that I don't imagine come up all that often. Trying to understand this all at once is probably a mistake and it's the hardest thing I've done in language learning so far. Here's an example of something I'm struggling with:
the letter ए (e) when followed by another vowel is broken down into its component parts, as it is a संपुक्त (complex) vowel. It is made up of अ (a) and इ (i). Because it is followed by a vowel and vowel hiatus is to be avoided, the vowel इ is replaced by the semivowel य् (y), which should yield अय् before the first vowel of the next word/morpheme. So far this is the same way the other three संपुक्त vowels act in sandhi. However, the vowel ए is an exception among these. In external sandhi, this result of अय् never actually occurs. If the second vowel is अ, then the अ is elided and the original ए remains, meaning the first word ends in ए and the second word starts with ऽ (transliterated as '). If the second vowel isn't अ, then the य् is lost, leaving the first word ending in अ and the second word starting with its original vowel. In internal sandhi, if the second vowel isn't अ then the य् is lost, and only if the second vowel in internal sandhi is अ do we get the full अय as the result.
I don't expect that to be decipherable to anyone here, even people who know Sanskrit, but I just wanted to type it out to show how much trouble this book is giving me even from the beginning and to make sure I understand all the different cases myself.
The real reason I'm using Devavanipravesika is because it has grammatical terms in Sanskrit rather than using Latin-derived terms. I think this is a major advantage over other textbooks that were made in the classical philological tradition.
whew. that's enough sanskrit for today
So that leaves me with French and Attic Greek.
For French right now I'm doing a lesson of Assimil every day and reading Methode Nature one day and doing the exercises the next day. This way I'm not rushing myself too much. Methode Nature has been ramping up very fast, and I noticed that there isn't any real explanation of the new grammar introduced in each chapter like there is in LLPSI. As a result, I'm left kind of guessing. I think the last chapter I read (18) introduced the subjunctive, but because it is never made explicit I'm not entirely sure. This natural method is pretty new to me (I didn't originally learn Latin with LLPSI, I just used it recently to review and consolidate my reading skills) and I'm having trouble understanding verb tenses right now, but I think as I read more it'll get better. After I finish the book I'm going to get one of those CLE Progressive grammaire books probably for intermediate level so that I can have a more systematic understanding. I'm trying something new here cause I learned both Latin and Ancient Greek with an explicit grammatical system, but I think putting off grammar and learning it later in the TL may pay off in the end.
In a related vein, I'm trying to improve my reading fluency in Attic Greek. I feel like I've pretty much mastered the syntax with a few exceptions, and my understanding of verb morphology is pretty solid (although this is probably the hardest part of learning Greek). I just need to work on my vocabulary and try to read. I've kind of hit a motivation wall for JACT, but I think I should be able to just sit down and read the next few chapters across the coming week. I found a book of medieval Greek hoping that it would be easy like most medieval Latin is, but I did not find that to be the case. I'll keep looking for easier Greek stuff, because I don't think I'll be ready for, for example, Attic tragedy as soon as I finish JACT. Once I finish the book, which will hopefully be by like mid July (?) I will try to read one of the supposedly relatively easy authors like Lysias or Lucian. In the fall I'm going to be the only advanced Greek student at my uni so I get to pick what my professor and I read. I think by that point I might be ready to read some Plato, so I'm thinking of picking the Phaedrus because rhetorical theory interests me and my professor wrote the Cambridge green/yellow commentary on that dialogue, so I'm sure he has a lot to say about it (if he's not already tired of that particular work).
Somewhat reluctantly and perhaps ill-advisedly I have returned to reading some Sanskrit textbooks. I cannot resist the siren song of this language with its grammar that seems in some ways even more complex than Ancient Greek's. I'm still working on reading/writing Devanagari quickly and I'm learning some Sandhi rules with Goldman's Devavanipravesika. I think I'll stick with this textbook til the end and then, if my French is by that point up to the task, use Assimil. I may work through another textbook too, like Maurer or Coulson, because it'll give me more vocabulary and I can't imagine reviewing the harder parts of grammar will be a waste of time. I have a copy of Macdonnell's student grammar on the way for reference.
Regarding sandhi:
Goldman kind of throws all external and internal sandhi rules at you all together near the beginning of the textbook (in chapter 3 after pronunciation + devanagari chapters) with a ton of exceptions that I don't imagine come up all that often. Trying to understand this all at once is probably a mistake and it's the hardest thing I've done in language learning so far. Here's an example of something I'm struggling with:
the letter ए (e) when followed by another vowel is broken down into its component parts, as it is a संपुक्त (complex) vowel. It is made up of अ (a) and इ (i). Because it is followed by a vowel and vowel hiatus is to be avoided, the vowel इ is replaced by the semivowel य् (y), which should yield अय् before the first vowel of the next word/morpheme. So far this is the same way the other three संपुक्त vowels act in sandhi. However, the vowel ए is an exception among these. In external sandhi, this result of अय् never actually occurs. If the second vowel is अ, then the अ is elided and the original ए remains, meaning the first word ends in ए and the second word starts with ऽ (transliterated as '). If the second vowel isn't अ, then the य् is lost, leaving the first word ending in अ and the second word starting with its original vowel. In internal sandhi, if the second vowel isn't अ then the य् is lost, and only if the second vowel in internal sandhi is अ do we get the full अय as the result.
I don't expect that to be decipherable to anyone here, even people who know Sanskrit, but I just wanted to type it out to show how much trouble this book is giving me even from the beginning and to make sure I understand all the different cases myself.
The real reason I'm using Devavanipravesika is because it has grammatical terms in Sanskrit rather than using Latin-derived terms. I think this is a major advantage over other textbooks that were made in the classical philological tradition.
whew. that's enough sanskrit for today