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
: (Anki & understood) +5
LLSPI
: (excercita) +4
Duolingo
2 : (Gold levels)
TY Latin
: +1
Moreland & Fleischer
: +1
Anki Words
: (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.