Best way to learn Dead Languages?

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einzelne
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:44 pm

jammon39 wrote:I find it interesting that so many language learners on this forum do so much without language partners or social interaction. I find it encouraging.


With all materials now available on the Internet, with all the tools like pop-up dictionaries, portable media players, you can certainly learn a language passively to an advanced level.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby guyome » Tue Oct 05, 2021 2:04 pm

einzelne wrote:I mean, can anyone of those 'purists' write a book on Aristotle in Latin how, for instance, Bergson did and who, by the way, wasn't even a Classicist by training
Don't quote me on that but I read once that a lot of these late 19th/early20th c. thesis were not written in Latin by their author but only translated by Classics students who made a few bucks on the side this way :D But yeah, your point still stands, active mastery has plummeted. How many Classics students could write such a thesis today?
einzelne wrote:If we happened to have such a powerful toolkit, any interested autodidact could master Latin or Greek to read them somewhat comfortably: if you have a firm grammar and vocabulary core and all low frequency words are glossed on the margins (translations, not Latin definitions, again, not need for guess games!) of your book, then you can invest all your time to the task of reading and nothing but reading in your target language.
I'm not a big fan of bilingual editions, as I've always found the process of using them tedious (especially for Latin, where the original and the translation can differ quite a lot in syntax). I very much prefer reading easier stuff, working my way upward, rather than reading more complex stuff alongside with translations. But glosses for rarer words is something I found more interesting and easier to work with.

The picture you posted reminded of a widespread collection of Latin/Greek editions published in France during the late 19th/early 20th c., the "juxtalinéaires". Maybe this is something you'll find interesting/useful? I've never used them extensively but I find the bit-by-bit literal translation on the right easy to use for a quick vocab check.
Each volume (dozens of them all in all, there's even a few for modern languages) has the same layout: left page is the Latin/Greek together with a polished translation; right page has the original, with Frenchified word worder, alongside a literal, bit-by-bit translation. There are also some notes (a couple for each page) tucked at the end of each volume.

Image
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:03 pm

  • How would methods differ? While there are some immersion-style or interactive resources for dead languages, there generally aren't enough to train all four skills (reading, writing, listening, and reading) comprehensively, and most of the best resources for dead languages are grammars. I have personally found that the most important way to think directly in a language rather than translating is to do interactive speaking drills, whether it be programmatic like Pimsleur or Audio-Lingual like FSI. Unfortunately, there aren't a great amount of speaking drills available for dead languages, although there are some. As a general result, I have found that I am much slower to be able to think in a dead language. But as a tradeoff, some of my most comprehensive grammar knowledge is of dead languages (Biblical Hebrew and Homeric Greek) even though I have spent much less time studying these languages than living languages.
  • Would the reading/listening approach work well for this task? Or should listening be a lower priority? I can't say. I am not a fan of Listening-Reading and I think basic coursework gives you everything you need to be able to understand the spoken language without subtitles, unless of course you are Deaf or hard of hearing. In the case of dead languages, I am very anal about pronunciation and I can't stand most attempts at reconstructed pronunciation (there are always obnoxious mistakes); I generally prefer to figure out the pronunciation on my own based on research and my general knowledge of phonology as a serial dabbler. It's not that I won't make mistakes, but if I don't notice them they can't annoy me. :lol:
  • How would you replace the time you would normally spend in conversation or with a language partner? As introvert, I think I would have an easy time replacing my weekly allotment of 0 minutes with a conversation partner. In all seriousness, though, I will generally use my daily commuting Pimsleur time slot for a different language, often a related one (Modern Greek while I was studying Homeric Greek, and Arabic while I was studying Biblical Hebrew).
  • Would you expect learning to be faster and easier or slower and harder? I would expect learning to be slower and harder, with the exception that as I mentioned above, my grammar knowledge will be much quicker and more comprehensive than with a living language due to the preponderance of high-quality grammar-heavy teaching materials.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby tractor » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:11 pm

Iversen wrote:@tractor: Thanks to Tractor for the link. Maybe some of the books on it still can be found in first or second hand bookstores in Norway, but I'm sceptical about finding any of them here in Denmark. Which is one excellent reason for visiting Norway again soon, now that the borders have reopened.

You could also try https://www.antikvariat.net/. Not as fun as travelling though.

Iversen wrote:Else I'll have to aim lower and try to learn Bokmål, and that would be frustrating to say the least since I find Nynorsk so more quintessential Norwegian.

Aim high!
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:13 pm

guyome wrote:The picture you posted reminded of a widespread collection of Latin/Greek editions published in France during the late 19th/early 20th c., the "juxtalinéaires".


Wow! C'est magnifique! And, finally, somebody adapted Lucretius in such a manner! It's a real treasure trove.

I also usually work with easy materials and slowly build my stamina, but in case of Latin, it's harder to do (for instance, if you cannot read original philosophical works in your target language, you can still read companions and secondary literature, which tend to me significantly easier). And, besides, even when I work on living languages I like to read small chucks of texts which are still beyond my capacities — to boost my motivation (bland adapted texts, though easy, can only work to a certain degree). So I combine my materials, depending on how I feel.

I just want to specify the effective way to approach such adaptations (at least the way I see it). For me, they work as an organic continuation of a basic Assimil-like course. I need a literal translation next to the original, as well, as a vocabulary list, so, for instance, if I happen to have 30 minutes a day, I can spend them reading and listening the same chunk a dozen of times (instead of painfully looking up words in the dictionary and parsing convoluted sentences by yourself) and then listening it again in my 'dead' time. Then shadowing and retelling. Well, you know, how it works: repetitio est mater studiorum — so, instead of parsing and translating, I would rather repeat, repeat, repeat and then... I would repeat more! Such editions are indispensable! And again, they are even more useful, since they provide you with small meaningful chunks on the left side, not separate works. If I happen to work with flashcards, this is how I add words - short phrases, enough to get the context (I find full sentences too cumbersome for reviewing).

PS. Off-topic: here's another website which has these texts reformatted (with macrons btw), also have a neat PDF of Alexandre Grothendieck's La Clef des songes! I cannot thank you enough for this and interlinears!
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby guyome » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:51 pm

You're welcome, einzelne! I'm glad you enjoy them (and glad also to see that someone is breathing new life into these old publications by reformatting them).

I agree with what you say about having some regular, even if short, contact with the "real stuff". I seem to go about it in a slightly different way (no using translations, just reading and accepting I'll miss a lot) but like you I find this important to keep motivation at a high level. As you said, readers and the like can be really bland at times.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:00 pm

einzelne wrote:
Cavesa wrote:I'd say it was the equivalent of A2 or low B1.


Yes, I think that B1 active skills is a point of diminishing returns for reading unadapted classical texts.

There are lots of impediments for those who wish to switch from textbook Latin and Greek to original works. Cultural distance has been already mentioned.


I don't think the cultural distance is the main problem. A huge challenge at the B1ish level is reinforcing the knowledge of everything learnt up to that point. Even in the living languages, people get stuck, because they have gaps, they learnt something too superficially, and so on.

That's the main issue with this level imho, a huge obstacle to progress, and what the intermediate "living like" material could really help with.

But, when it comes to dead languages, we have a very powerful tool we don't generally don't have for living ones (apart from some exceptions) — concordances and frequency lists. They give you lots of insights. I had had certain suspicions regarding the use extensive reading alone to increase your vocabulary when I started to use Kindle app and they were confirmed when I checked out a couple of concordances from the library.


I agree, this helps with reading a lot. Readlang, or anki lists on literature vocab, that's a huge resource.

However, a huge and scary obstacle at the intermediate level is still the grammar, which is still not that solid for many learners. It's not just about vocabulary, not at all.

It's a well known fact that textbooks (even for living languages) don't teach you enough vocabulary to deal with unadapted texts. Even if you finish LLPSI which gives you 1800 words, it's still not enough for reading unadapted Latin literature. What makes matters even worse is the uneven distribution of these words.
...
1300 is a huge number. The situation with Classical Latin is even more dramatic. The vocabulary size is substantially bigger, while the tail of low frequency words becomes significantly longer. Again, I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think De Rerum Natura has 5500 unique words, of which only 2000 occur more than 5 times. That means that you have 3500 to master by either repetition via flashcards or constant rereading.

Sure, in some authors the vocabulary will be overlapping (although my experience with living languages tells me that you can really start ripping the benefits of such overlapping only once you get to the level of reading one average book per week - 200-300 pages. It's hardly doable with Classical Latin or Greek).


These are very good situation descriptions, but at least learning lists based on overlapping authors could really help, and you wouldn't have to worry about a lot of vocab common in the living languages. It would also be much easier to just "predict" what vocabulary you need to learn, based on what do you want to read. That's a luxury we don't have in the living languages.

Any Latin enthusiast, or a serious living language learner as well, knows they won't do well with as few as 1800 words. So, I don't think 5500 are that scary, that's a normal amount of words.

But it would be nice if even the people at 1800-3000 had some graded or "living like" stuff, to practice their grammar and the limited vocabulary on. As a step towards the real stuff, not as an alternative goal (at least for most people).


That's why I think it would be wise to gloss all the words which doesn't belong to the top 2k and which occur less than 5-6 times in the text on the margin. And people knew it already in the times of John Lock who promoted interlinears but for some reason now it's not considered to be 'fair game'. And I suspect why Classicists are so about 'fair game'. Because once we have such 'cheating' editions, they would render all Latin classes useless. The only thing required (after you went through some basic course like LLPSI) would be just reading and rereading, listening and relistening of such books in order to deeply ingrain their content and grammar forms into your brain.


Oh, I suspect that even the living language teachers consider anything independent from them to be "not fair game". :-D The "cheating editions" would be awesome, if they were more widely spread. And contrary to the living languages, tons of good works for those are public domain, so a serious Latin enthusiast could make them for others too. I still think they may be too hard for the intermediate freshly out of textbook in some ways, but they would definitely help.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:13 pm

einzelne wrote:PS. Off-topic: here's another website which has these texts reformatted (with macrons btw), also have a neat PDF of Alexandre Grothendieck's La Clef des songes! I cannot thank you enough for this and interlinears!

The site you cite ;) here has better copies than what you can download from archive.org and other places, whose copies are sometimes too faded for comfortable reading. Hard (impossible, for me at least) to improve the clarity or faintness of the type of those downloads.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:46 pm

Cavesa wrote:However, a huge and scary obstacle at the intermediate level is still the grammar, which is still not that solid for many learners. It's not just about vocabulary, not at all.


Is it really? I can only speak for myself but, while moving from textbook materials to unadapted texts, grammar has never been an issue for me (my experience is limited though — I can speak only for French, German, and Italian). For instance, I 'discovered' and started to pay attention to subjoncif in French only after a year of reading. Usually, context helps: Ich bin in der Stadt vs Ich gehe in die Stadt — so long you the only thing you care is reading, understanding such sentences is not a problem, provided you know the meaning of the words 'Ich' 'gehen' and 'Stadt'. On the contrary, you can know that the subject is the plural, the verb is past perfect and the object is in Akkusativ but if you don't know the meaning of the subject, the verb, the object, this grammar knowledge is basically useless.

Usually, I start to pay attention to grammar once I barely have any new words on the page. It's because, when words recognition becomes automatic, you finally have available cognitive sources for polishing your grammar.
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Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby RyanSmallwood » Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:52 pm

I’ve only dabbled in historical languages so far and a lot of replies already mention a lot of good advice. Not sure if I missed someone saying it already, but if there’s a living relative that shares enough vocabulary that may be worth learning as well, at least as a supplement when you have difficulty finding materials in certain formats for certain levels.

One thing I may try when I’m more focused on historical languages is Reading-Listening or reading a TL text while listening to the audio in translation to try and quickly move through a text and notice the frequent vocab, while also improving your knowledge of the content. Obviously I’d prefer to have hundreds of hours of TL audio and translated text to internalize the sounds, but giving the lack of reconstructed audio materials, it may still be a way to recognize vocab while building familiarity with more original texts.
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