Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi, Latin, Hebrew

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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Gordafarin2 » Tue Jun 30, 2020 10:18 am

Beli Tsar wrote:We’ve had plenty of discussion of Anki’s uses for efficiency lately. I feel that this is almost another use for it - making possible very slow-burn study that simply wouldn’t work without it. Learning through exposure to actual text or conversation needs a certain volume to work. Anki is enabling me to make progress without that.


Beli Tsar, I'm so sorry to hear you've been sick! I hope you continue to recover well.

I agree wholeheartedly on your point about Anki. It helps me a lot in keeping up some consistency even when I don't have the time or energy to devote to full-on studying. When I'm reviewing sentence cards, it's a sort of micro-studying I can do in the lost bits of time waiting in queues, on the bus, or these days when I'm taking a brief stretch break in the home office.

My interest in language learning waxes and wanes with my other hobbies, social life and mental health. At the moment I'm very motivated, but that hasn't always been the case, and in a few months I might lose interest again. But running through some Anki cards is easy enough to do, with no prep work or decisions to make, and even if I'm just reviewing a few dozen cards it's better than doing nothing that day.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Tue Jun 30, 2020 12:49 pm

Gordafarin2 wrote:Beli Tsar, I'm so sorry to hear you've been sick! I hope you continue to recover well.

Thank you! I really appreciate that. And I think I am definitely on the mend now, as long as I don't overdo things.
Gordafarin2 wrote:I agree wholeheartedly on your point about Anki. It helps me a lot in keeping up some consistency even when I don't have the time or energy to devote to full-on studying. When I'm reviewing sentence cards, it's a sort of micro-studying I can do in the lost bits of time waiting in queues, on the bus, or these days when I'm taking a brief stretch break in the home office.day.

Exactly! And sentences really are perfect for this. It's the first time I've used them seriously. I'm discovering the agreeable hybrid between SRS learning and actual input they make is a great help to sustainability.
Gordafarin2 wrote:My interest in language learning waxes and wanes with my other hobbies, social life and mental health. At the moment I'm very motivated, but that hasn't always been the case, and in a few months I might lose interest again. But running through some Anki cards is easy enough to do, with no prep work or decisions to make, and even if I'm just reviewing a few dozen cards it's better than doing nothing that day.

That sounds wise. These tools do make me grateful to be learning languages now and not 15 years ago.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Jan 07, 2021 1:36 pm

Like most people, this new year isn't looking like time for any interesting resolutions. I haven't posted in a while, and that's because language learning has had to take a back seat. I'm still ill with long COVID: I look healthy, but haven't been able to go out of the house, other one trip a week in the car, for a couple of months. Life's not bad - exciting new job, I've just started a very interesting part-time masters degree, and with the lockdown here we're back to home-schooling.

Looking back on the last few months, I can only reiterate what I said above - Anki has been a lifeline in terms of keeping up with Hebrew in particular, where I haven't learned enough to really maintain it properly, but still don't want to lose what I have. I've often fallen behind, but always caught up again in the end. And it's made it possible to make some low-key extra improvements to Greek too, using sentences for rarely-occurring vocab and some revision of fundamentals.

Looking back, too, I can see that the practice of just reading every day in Greek - even if it's often been minimal, and done through deep brain fog, has still continued to help me make real progress. Yes, I should, at some point, rebuild the foundations of my Greek knowledge from scratch; but meanwhile, reading Lysias last night for the first time was just great fun.

Now that I am doing a Masters, it would suddenly be useful, rather than just nice, to learn Latin - even if it's only enough to trace references and so on. While I shouldn't be taking on a new language right now, it really would be useful. So, Hebrew is on the back burner for a bit longer, and I've started Latin.

I laid a bit of a foundation - a quick review and ankification of early parts of wikimedia courses Latin/Teach Yourself Complete Latin/Moreland & Fleischer + most of Duolingo, and am now working through Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLSPI).

It's a very different experience to anything I've done before. Not only is it inductive, which is very different, but there is a clear path followed by many to good reading skills: do LLSPI, then some readers, then Roma Aeterna, then a couple more readers. There's a lot of helpful stuff on forums, reddit, etc. etc - though at times LLSPI does seem to be treated as a religion rather than a language textbook.

Obviously, with what I've said above, I'm not leaving Anki behind. So every sentence of LLSPI is going into Anki; if I didn't do this I'd have to read each chapter at least five times anyway. The vocab is going in too, a few days after I've seen the relevant sentence for the first time. And when I do the excercises (Pensa & Excercita) any I have trouble with go in too. Lots of listening to the excellent recordings of LLSPI by Scorpio Martianus, and reading in the various companion books.

It seems to be working so far. When I get stuck, I'll do a few more lessons of Teach Yourself and Anki them. And I'm reading Carolus & Maria, another reading-method book that makes some easy light relief if I have extra time.

Interestingly, the main feeling so far is just how easy this all is. Obviously, it's early days, and I haven't met Latin syntax yet, and it will get hard. But compared to starting a new language with a foreign script it's a breeze. My Latin sentence flashcards are more than twice as fast as my Hebrew ones, though I've been doing those for more than a year. The cognitive load a new script gives is just so, so high for so long. It's already easier to skim parallel Latin-Greek texts in Latin than Greek, though if I want to understand properly I'm better with the Greek...

I'm not making any resolutions: next week might mean being back in bed all day. But I am having fun.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Feb 05, 2021 7:39 pm

One month since my last update. Taking it fairly easy study-wise, and I’ve slowed down even more this week, but still a satisfying month. And semi-healthy too, as long as I don't go out in the rain...

Latin:
LLSPI : 12 / 33 (Anki & understood)
LLSPI : 7 / 33 (excercita)
TY Latin : 4 / 33
Moreland & Fleischer : 1 / 18
Anki Words : 625 / 2000 (to 2000)

I’m enjoying LLSPI a lot, mostly via Scorpio Martianus’s excellent readings rather than the book. The excercita, though, do trip me up - 90% are so easy they seem like a joke, and the remaining 10% are completely impossible. Keeping track of all the pronouns has been especially hard. I just don’t pick up these things by the ‘natural’ CI method - I need them pointed out and drilled. If it wasn’t for the excercita I’d be much further through the book - it wouldn’t be too hard to read on a good few chapters before getting stuck. All the extra readings - Colloquia, Fabulae etc. - are also really helpful. Reading such a volume at pace so early is a real pleasure. Anki means a lot less repetition too, which I’m glad of.

Though I haven’t gone far with TY, what I have done has felt very helpful, since it’s so different from LLSPI - it’s given me access to several other tenses and a bunch of other words, making real material is a lot more accessible. It’s very helpful having proper, clear explanations (though Moreland & Fleischer is even better here, when I dip into it - you need to know a bit about grammar, but it’s very lucid). It’s also refreshing having actually hard sentences, some real live ones by real Romans.

It’s delightful working on a language where I can get easy access to serious volumes of easy input, which is transparent enough to make that useful. I listen to a podcast each evening - I’ve been through the 18 episodes of the very easy and rather amusing podcast Quid est tu? And am now onto the easy history of Latin literature by Satura Lanx.

For the ‘real language’ part of multi-tracking, I’m beginning to sample real Latin too - mostly short texts & recordings from Satura Lanx and Latinitium. It’s a refreshing change from a coursebook, however good - so far I’ve mostly been working on Pliny, with a bit of Catullus and Ausonius thrown in. This is a little bit too much fun, and I need to stop mucking around so much with real Latin on Oplingo and get back to the textbooks.

In the early evening I have some very poor-quality and often interrupted time while the kids get ready for bed. It’s useless for anything serious, but I’ve been using it for Duolingo. I’ve nearly finished the (very short) tree - mostly in time when I can’t do anything ‘proper’. It’s been helpful - drilling things well, mostly. It’s very limited (it’s a Beta tree with only one tense!), but what it teaches it does at least teach thoroughly. It feels better than it used to - better grammar explanations, and overall more varied, drilling things from more angles, less of the same sentence repetitively. In a language it’s hard to speak it feels more useful, and I’m glad to have done it, especially since I haven’t wasted any ‘real’ learning time on it.

Once I’ve actually finished the tree and practiced on it a few days more, I think I’ll move to using this time to drill verbs with the app Vice Verba. It would be helpful if there was something comparable for declining nouns - those always cause me more trouble than verbs anyway.

Overall, fairly satisfied with the last month, though it would be good to move faster with LLSPI. But doing things thoroughly makes more sense for me, I think.

Greek:
Usual NT daily reading
Lysias, ‘Against Eratosthenes’;
Plato, ‘Crito’ (½)
Lots of new sentences into Anki with their vocab

I’ve recently laid my hands on a couple of really excellent and very thorough grammars. For a long while I’ve wanted to re-lay the foundations for my Greek, and to go over Attic grammar properly. So resisting the temptation to go through these and Ankify them is hard.
But Plato is very enjoyable, and I’m planning to go on with some more once I finish Crito. I’m using the excellent little reader’s edition with footnoted vocab by Steadman, and think I need to resolve not to dip into any proper books in Attic until I’ve read ten or so of these little editions. They’re just so helpful in building the foundations. Of course I can still dip into more unusual things in Koine - I’ve been reading some of the Oxyrynchus Papyri, and the sensation of reading the mail of ordinary people who have been dead for 2000 years is remarkable.

Hebrew:
Treading water - keeping up with Anki and adding a little each day.

Nothing to report here. Should add in a little real exposure each day.

Overall - a good month, very satisfied overall.
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Skynet » Thu Feb 18, 2021 8:15 pm

Hi BT,

I remembered that you were one of the few people here studying ancient Greek to read the New Testament. I wanted to ask if the Greek in Assimil's Le Grec Ancien would enable me to read the NT? Here's the link to the https://monachat.assimil.online/extraits/produits/9782700505924_extrait.pdf If so, this would be my 2023 language project.

I lost interest in Farsi and am unlikely to learn Biblical Hebrew either. I've got no idea what sucked my language enthusiasm dry. :lol:
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby kundalini » Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:47 pm

Skynet wrote:Hi BT,

I remembered that you were one of the few people here studying ancient Greek to read the New Testament. I wanted to ask if the Greek in Assimil's Le Grec Ancien would enable me to read the NT? Here's the link to the https://monachat.assimil.online/extraits/produits/9782700505924_extrait.pdf If so, this would be my 2023 language project.

I lost interest in Farsi and am unlikely to learn Biblical Hebrew either. I've got no idea what sucked my language enthusiasm dry. :lol:


After going through the Assimil course, I was able to read the New Testament in the original without too much trouble. That is, much of the vocabulary was unfamiliar, but there weren't many grammatical obstacles. I used Tyndale's interlinear New Testament, which provides the original text and an English translation, as well as a word-for-word translation. I typically concentrated on the original text while consulting the translation as needed for unknown words.

I should add that I took classical Greek rather lackadaisically for a year and a half as an undergrad, which was largely forgotten by the time I began using the Assimil book. But it was Le Grec Ancien that transformed my approach to Greek from solving a textual puzzle (which was how I was taught Latin) to reading it much more intuitively. I actually learned French in order to be able to use the Assimil course, and it was worth the effort. My experience with this course gave me the confidence to approach other languages. I'm very grateful to Jean-Pierre Guglielmi, the author of the book, for his labor of love that surely must have taken years to put together.
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Skynet » Fri Feb 19, 2021 1:50 pm

kundalini wrote:After going through the Assimil course, I was able to read the New Testament in the original without too much trouble. That is, much of the vocabulary was unfamiliar, but there weren't many grammatical obstacles. I used Tyndale's interlinear New Testament, which provides the original text and an English translation, as well as a word-for-word translation. I typically concentrated on the original text while consulting the translation as needed for unknown words.

I should add that I took classical Greek rather lackadaisically for a year and a half as an undergrad, which was largely forgotten by the time I began using the Assimil book. But it was Le Grec Ancien that transformed my approach to Greek from solving a textual puzzle (which was how I was taught Latin) to reading it much more intuitively. I actually learned French in order to be able to use the Assimil course, and it was worth the effort. My experience with this course gave me the confidence to approach other languages. I'm very grateful to Jean-Pierre Guglielmi, the author of the book, for his labor of love that surely must have taken years to put together.


Thanks for the detailed response! I must say that I laughed at your username! I'm also happy that I learnt French because it means that no Assimil language is beyond reach. I've even considered learning Alsatian just because Assimil is that good. It looks like le grec ancien will be my 2022 language project. Didn't you find it odd that the course comes with audio? How on earth are we to know how the language sounds when it hasn't been spoken in thousands of years?
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:01 pm

kundalini wrote:
Skynet wrote:Hi BT,
I remembered that you were one of the few people here studying ancient Greek to read the New Testament. I wanted to ask if the Greek in Assimil's Le Grec Ancien would enable me to read the NT?
If so, this would be my 2023 language project.


After going through the Assimil course, I was able to read the New Testament in the original without too much trouble. That is, much of the vocabulary was unfamiliar, but there weren't many grammatical obstacles. I used Tyndale's interlinear New Testament, which provides the original text and an English translation, as well as a word-for-word translation. I typically concentrated on the original text while consulting the translation as needed for unknown words.

I find it pretty hard to judge how far Le Grec Ancien takes you. I've heard reasonably good things. But my expectation would certainly fit with Kundalini's experience: any decent Attic textbook will take you far enough to read the New Testament. It's just not that hard!

And learning Attic first would definitely be my choice if I could do it over again, as it seems to give you a better understanding of and perspective on the language.

So yes, since you've got the French to do it via Assimil, why not? There are other textbooks that would give you more explicit drills and grammar (Decker's Reading Koine Greek would be my first choice for Koine only; Keller & Russell's Learn to Read Greek for Attic), but you can always do that later, or reinforce with one of the out-of-print grammars on Textkit if you need to.

And yes, vocab is the big jump - and here there are great solutions: Memrise and Anki have multiple courses/decks for all the vocab in the NT by frequency, and reading is made much easier with the UBS reader's Greek New Testament, which footnotes all the vocab and parses harder forms. It gives the advantage of the interlinear without the temptation to make it quite so much of a crutch.

Sounds like a great project for 2023! And I'm sure you'll find it far easier than getting all those spoken languages to B2!
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:24 am

A month of remarkably little progress: Anki is now ridiculously easy, because I’ve not been adding enough. Poor health, hard work on my Masters, plus discovering how much fun frustratingly hard work it is to shoot and edit short videos for work. Something always goes wrong...

Latin:
LLSPI : 13 / 33 (Anki & understood) +1
LLSPI : 10 / 33 (excercita) +3
Duolingo 2 : 22 / 22 (Gold levels)
TY Latin : 5 / 33 +1
Moreland & Fleischer : 1 / 18 +0
Anki Words : 728 / 2000 (to 2000) +184 [was 625]

My one achievement this month in Latin has been finishing Duolingo, the whole (short) tree gold. I’m pretty glad I did it: doing a practice session shows the pleasingly varied text I can produce quickly without stress. It’s nothing compared to mastering a proper textbook, but considering I did it in dead time, I’m pleased.

I really struggled to push on with LLSPI, as discovering I could with a bit of help get into real text underlined how boring it is to keep repeating it. It’s just so much more fun to listen or read to Pliny, the Psalms, snatches of Gregorian chant, Catullus, really anything… but even that has tailed off badly after the start of the month.

Similarly, the mismatch between the text in LLSPI (very easy) and the excercita (not) has slowed me down badly. I think I need more of an active/passive wave approach to this. The excercita are really great, they are some of the best and most rigorous grammar drills I’ve done. But that means that they take a lot of energy and slow down the exposure and reading part of the course.

Anki and daily listening - mostly Psalms and Satura Lanx’s history of Latin literature - has kept me going meanwhile.

Greek:
Usual NT daily reading
Plato, ‘Crito’ (second half)

No news here. The Crito is surprisingly good fun, though reading a book about whether you should obey the laws when doing so has bad results for you personally feels a bit too topical in the time of COVID.

Hebrew:
Ditto. Occasional dips into real text reinforce the impression that some parts of this language I now know cold, and other parts I haven’t the foggiest. The longer I go on Ankiing what I know already, the more this happens. Need to push on some time.
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi & Hebrew

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Jun 18, 2021 8:05 pm

Coming out of a long period of feeling very, very sick - thus no updates for a while, and very little textbook-progress. Keeping up with Anki and listening has been good, though. But this is three months progress rather than one, so my bars look more impressive than they should.

Latin:
LLSPI : 18 / 33 (Anki & understood) +5
LLSPI : 14 / 33 (excercita) +4
Duolingo 2 : 22 / 22 (Gold levels)
TY Latin : 6 / 33 +1
Moreland & Fleischer : 2 / 18 +1
Anki Words : 1500 / 2000 (to 2000) +772 [was 728]

LLSPI has gone in waves: when I listen plenty to Scorpio Martianus’s excellent recordings I’ve gone a lot faster. Otherwise I get bored just reading it… I need to get a better rhythm of listening going. The excercita continue time-consuming, but are getting easier - partly because of multi-tracking. Over time, there’s more crossover in LLPSI with things I’ve covered (especially verbs) in TY & M&F.. I’m also making more proactive use of declension, verb tables etc., and dropping those into the Anki cards too. I depended too much on absorption by input early on, but some of these details are too small for me to easily absorb them this way.

I’ve got into a daily reading habit with Oplingo lately (thanks, Leosmith!). In the spirit of multi-tracking, I went looking for some real but easy Latin, and settled on The Imitation of Christ, partly because of the excellent translation by Bedwere https://librivox.org/de-imitatione-christi-by-thomas-a-kempis/. It’s slow and I’m reading very intensively - every new word into Anki, and using the audio for Ari’s Chinesepod/Smallwhite style listening practice. I’m enjoying it enormously - simple but very beautiful Latin, and there’s a joy in gaining clear understanding of a text in a language you still don’t really know.

I’ve also hit the point where I can pick up some graded readers, and have started ‘Cloelia’ http://www.latinteachertoolbox.com/cloelia-puella-romana.html. It’s fun, and remarkably easy and interesting for someone who’s barely half-way through a grammar.

Daily Anki has been great, with a good spread of things. Words are still very easy to absorb, especially from LLPSI. Some of the words from the Imitation have been harder - so many awkward little pronouns and conjunctions and so on, which would be spread out in a textbook. Nonetheless there have been days when I’ve learned 100 words without sweat, as easily as I’d have learned 10 in Farsi. Plenty of other days I’ve learned none, though, because of sickness.

Each night, I go to sleep to a varied listening queue of real Latin each night, which is very pleasant.

Overall thoughts: I’m six months in to Latin learning. Had I not been ill, I’d have gone faster. My vocab learning is reasonably pleasing - I’ve got as far as I did in my very intensive three months in Farsi. And I’m having fun reading. I’d hoped to be a lot further overall, nearing the end of LLPSI, by now. But what I have learned feels well-consolidated and like a good base for the future, which my Greek always lacked. And, unlike Greek or Farsi, there is plenty easy beginners reading material which is already within reach, and which should help with consolidation. I’d like to pick up the pace at least enough to finish the textbook this year, though!


Greek:
Usual NT daily reading
Lysias Against Eratosthenes (Intensive)

Instead of going on to more extensive reading as I’d planned, I’m going through Lysias I again, this time sentence + vocabulary mining it so thoroughly that I can read the whole thing fluidly. This is taking a while, as it’s a side project compared to Latin. But it works, so, so well. Perhaps that’s unsurprising. But it’s a joy to pick up something I stumbled through with real difficulty and plenty help not long ago and just read with perfect comprehension, idiom included. It will be interesting to see how much easier this makes my next book.
After watching Mork the Fiddle build on his basic, extensive reading, and then rapidly turn to vocab-study, as well as my own struggles reading fast, I did feel that some much more intensive work might benefit me in the long run. The alternative is trying to vaguely bludgeon my way through more readers and then to discover that I’d forgotten it all. The transition from Koine to Attic is still hard.
Meanwhile, I read JACT’s World of Athens, a book about Athenian culture and history designed to help those studying the language understand these things better in order to help them read. It’s very good indeed, and certainly helpful, though it definitely makes you realise how alien the ancient Greeks were - and sometimes how horrid.

Hebrew:
Nothing to report

Farsi:
I thought we were done here for a while, having left my previous job, with its regular interaction with Iranians. But we’ve had some Iranian friends turn up at my new workplace, and things may change rapidly… And I’ve already forgotten so much. It’s there, under the surface, but I hadn’t got far enough to actually retain any capacity to speak after all this time. Much as I’d like to restart this and get to my original B1ish aim, here’s hoping I don’t have to start work on this again until Latin at least has made some serious progress.
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