Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17565

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Oct 04, 2021 2:47 pm

Over the years, I gave it some thought and even considered (re)learning Latin and finally getting it to a solid level. I'd say Latin is a wasted opportunity in my case. I got through a few years of normal high school Latin classes, very grammatically oriented. I actually liked that and I think it would have worked just fine, had it been followed by lots of reading. And then there was medical Latin, which was a bit different beast (but contrary to some countries, we actually did learn the basics of Latin grammar in those classes too, not just vocab). I sometimes regret having forgotten it, and I think that a more widely spread knowledge of Latin (and of course some other languages) could be very beneficial to our society and the overall education level of the population.

I dare to add my 2 cents, even though I am definitely not as experienced as some of the other commenters here.
jammon39 wrote:Learning a dead language in pursuit of reading fluency seems like a significantly different task than learning a spoken language.

Not necessarily. Don't forget that many people learn living languages primarily for reading as well, or it is at least their favourite activity in those languages. But in case of a dead language, there is much less pressure on speaking, and you don't get judged as a bad learner, just because of your priorities.

There was a wonderful thread on Latin (and other languages), that started with a video guide on learning Latin through tons of reading. At first a rather modern coursebook (Lingua Latina per se illustrata), then lots of intensive and extensive reading, if I remember correctly. With nice ideas on how to construct a not too steep learning curve. I'm a bit lazy to search now, but it was a very good video.

How would methods differ?

That would depend a lot on the Dead Language. In case of Latin (and probably Ancient Greek, at least some historical variants of it, and two or three others), you could learn it like a living language too. There are coursebooks like Assimil, there are grammar workbooks, there are very living-like coursebooks for schools (I was very impressed, when a friend of mine showed me her Latin coursebook used in a German school. That was many years ago).

You could definitely go the traditional way, focusing a lot on grammar and analyses. And I think you'd have a solid chance to succeed, if you really followed those textbooks with lots and lots of reading. Whether or not the language is dead, I think the old learning method is too demonized and blamed for something it wasn't guilty of.

But in case of many other languages, you'd have no choice than to learn more like a sort of cryptography, or a rather theoretical thing, given the scarcity of available resources or incomplete knowledge of the language.

Would the reading/listening approach work well for this task? Or should listening be a lower priority?

Yes, I think it could work well, but it would depend only on the quality and amount of the available resources. In some cases, it would be rather impossible, you'd be inventing a lot of stuff (and probably wrongly. What a luck the natives cannot defend their language :-) ). In others, it wouldn't be so hard.

In case of Latin, you'd struggle not only with the two official variants of the pronunciation (church vs. classical), but also all the variants or "accents" of the "normal" pronuncation. It doesn't get discussed much, but the way a French, a German, a Czech, an English, and an Italian natives will pronounce Latin "right" will sound very different. And all of them will probably swear they are using the official reconstructed classical Latin pronunciation. You can even get mocked for the "mistakes" you were officially taught. So, it's not that simple.

I'd say the main value of listening, no matter how artificial the recording may seem, and speaking, no matter how useless it is in the real life, is mainly a memory aid. You get to save information to your cortex with more tools. That's what I find very valuable. And something I honestly believe I should have been doing a decade ago.

How would you replace the time you would normally spend in conversation or with a language partner?

I don't usually do that much, so there is nothing to replace :-D But more seriously: I'd say more reading is always a good idea.
But now that I think of it, I am luckier than most, when it comes to using a dead language in the normal professional life :-D

Would you expect learning to be faster and easier or slower and harder?

Neither. It would depend on your goals, and also what do you compare the Dead language to. In my case, I'd expect Latin to be much easier than learning to read Japanese. But probably harder than Italian. And a different Dead language would be much harder. No clue whether I'd expect contemporary Mandarin to be harder than Classical Chinese.

I don't think it makes any sense to generalize in this case, as another variable will be the literature available to you.

Btw I love Einzelne's idea about the graded readers.
5 x

User avatar
einzelne
Blue Belt
Posts: 804
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:33 pm
Languages: Russan (N), English (Working knowledge), French (Reading), German (Reading), Italian (Reading on Kindle)
x 2882

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Mon Oct 04, 2021 4:40 pm

Cavesa wrote:There was a wonderful thread on Latin (and other languages), that started with a video guide on learning Latin through tons of reading. At first a rather modern coursebook (Lingua Latina per se illustrata), then lots of intensive and extensive reading, if I remember correctly. With nice ideas on how to construct a not too steep learning curve. I'm a bit lazy to search now, but it was a very good video.


This one? He also has a similar video on Greek.
1 x

tractor
Green Belt
Posts: 378
Joined: Sat Oct 29, 2016 10:58 am
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Italian, Latin
x 772

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby tractor » Mon Oct 04, 2021 5:39 pm

Iversen wrote:And as I already have mentioned: if I had been able to find dictionaries from for instance Modern French into Old French and Old Occitan (and from ANYTHING into New Norwegian!) I would also have written more often in them.

There are some for Nynorsk, but most of them are out of print:
https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/DKNVS ... /1314/1219
1 x

User avatar
einzelne
Blue Belt
Posts: 804
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:33 pm
Languages: Russan (N), English (Working knowledge), French (Reading), German (Reading), Italian (Reading on Kindle)
x 2882

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Mon Oct 04, 2021 5:57 pm

Iversen wrote:I disagree on the value of trying to to make dead languages living.


I don't write off the idea of having rudimentary active skills. In fact, I myself generate simple sentences to develop automatism in grammar. (Like Hic est puella. Puellam video. Capillus puellae pulchrum est. Puellae cibum dat. Cum puelā it etc.) And I shadow the recordings or retell textbook texts, if I happen to have a free minute. But I doubt that, once all the basics are covered, it significantly helps you to improve your reading skills.

You yourself run the statistical analysis of your posts here and was surprised to discover how limited your vocabulary was. It's normal: our passive vocabulary is an order of magnitude greater than our active one. Besides in everyday speech we don't use complex clauses as in the written form. So, you can continue to practice conversational Latin for the rest of your life, but it won't bring you closer to Lucretius, Ovid, or Livius (just like excellent speaking skills in English won't bring you closer to Shakespeare, Proust, or even Darwin without relevant vocabulary and exposure to their syntactical peculiarities). But you need to master thousands of words which you don't use in everyday speech and get accustomed to the twisted syntax which, again, is absent in informal conversations. Ergo from a certain point active skills won't help you in developing advanced reading skills. Actually they will start to work against you by robing your precious time (active vocabulary to discuss your everyday experience doesn't overlap with the vocabulary you need to know to read Classical, Medieval, or New Latin texts).

PS. Again, I'm not against the living Latin movement per se. If somebody really enjoys speaking Latin, who am I to stop them? I approach it pragmatically: living Latin produce might produce good beginner and early intermediate materials, but this movement is of limited usefulness for the development of advanced reading skills. I would prefer people to concentrate on developing effective tools and materials for higher intermediate and advanced reading stages.
3 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 04, 2021 8:54 pm

@einzelne: I did once make a statistical analysis based on everything I had written in English in my log in HTLAL over a long time, but it didn't tell me the size of my active vocabulary - just the number of headwords I actually had used there. My active vocabulary in English must be larger, though still smaller than my passive vocabulary. That being said, Shakespeare may have used more different words in his works than me in his works, and he may have used them better. I would be happy just to express myself as well as the average native contributor to a popular science magazine, which happens to be my reference frame ... And I have that aspiration in all my languages (including the few dead ones), but my chances of reaching the goal are better in some languages than in others.

My general philosophy about activating languages is that this doesn't subtract from the time I have to reach a certain passive level - on the contrary: the things I do to activate a certain language (like writing stuff in my personal log thread here) will also add to my passive skills, but not every passive activity will bring me closer to activating it. Indulging in smalltalk may not contribute much to my reading abilities, but I don't do much of it so it can't eat up much of my total learning time.

@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. 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.

I may also have to revisit Estonia at some point in the future because I still lack a two-way Estonian dictionary - and maybe Wales to by one for Welsh, since they apparently continue to speak it over there. As for Irish, it may become extinct in the wild before I succeed in learning it...
2 x

User avatar
einzelne
Blue Belt
Posts: 804
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:33 pm
Languages: Russan (N), English (Working knowledge), French (Reading), German (Reading), Italian (Reading on Kindle)
x 2882

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Mon Oct 04, 2021 10:04 pm

Iversen wrote:My general philosophy about activating languages is that this doesn't subtract from the time I have to reach a certain passive level - on the contrary: everything I do in a certain language wil add to my passive skills, but not every passive activity will brings me closer to activating it.


It's really about your end goals. If you want o converse with natives, then by all means practice it as much as possible. But usually people learn dead languages to read canonical works in the original. And if you, for instance, want to read Pushkin, Tolstoi, Bunin or Platonov in the original, you can talk to Russian native speakers (even the most educated ones) all day long for the rest of your life, it still won't get you closer to reading them (simply because we there's a vast vocabulary and weird twisted syntax you won't find in everyday speech or even printed media).
1 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 04, 2021 10:47 pm

I removed the word "everything" because it was misleading - it might suggest that I did train conversation with smalltalk as my primary goal, but of course it isn't. The things I do to activate my languages - living as well as dead ones- are for instance to acquire a large vocabulary through wordlists, to learn their grammar, to write about sundry themes chosen by myself here (or for my bin), to try to formulate sentences in them in my head and .. well actually also to read stuff and sometimes even to listen to the languages, preferably as spoken by native speakers. And then to use that knowledge to write things myself. In actual fact speaking to native speakers comes so late in my learning process that for most of the time I don't even think about it.

Similarly I do not directly train my reading skills, but for the opposite reason: it's something that comes almost by itself when I do the things I mentioned above. I can read with minimal use of dictionaries in at least a dozen languages and with a few more lookups in maybe a dozen more, but I got there by studying short passages intensively and then relaxing with longer texts about interesting subjects. And of course I'm aware that some fictional authors are more demanding than the average newspaper article, but Wikipedia articles and articles in science mags don't lag not far behind. The main difference would be that there are fewer smalltalk expressions in an article about nuclear physics or the biographies of French composers named Philidor (and fewer imperatives and fewer first and second person verbs), but there is probably as much technical vocabulary in the non-fictional stuff I prefer. And I try to treat Latin as any living language in this respect - which to some extent is possible thanks to the ardent neoLatinists.

There is a host of dead languages which I for different reasons don't try to activate, like Old French, Occitan, Norse, Saxon and Anglosaxon, but still want to acquire passive skills in - but the situation with them is not really different from trying to reach the same passive level in living languages for instance Albanian or Irish, where I don't have access to living speakers (at least not at home).
2 x

User avatar
Yunus39
Orange Belt
Posts: 185
Joined: Thu Sep 09, 2021 8:44 am
Languages: English (N)
Bangla (Advanced Low ACTFL 060723)
Spanish (dormant)
Ancient Greek

Wishlist:
Scots
Ancient Hebrew
Aramaic
German
Latin
Hindi
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 20#p217017
x 464

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Yunus39 » Tue Oct 05, 2021 6:01 am

Thanks for all the fascinating answers! I am grateful for the insight.

One surprise is how virtually all the answers minimize the difference between learning living and dead languages.
If I can push back a little bit . . .

I learned Bangla through the Growing Participator Approach (GPA), and really believe in the broad philosophy behind the approach. However, it is impossible to learn dead languages through GPA as this method requires a native speaker and cultural insider as a "nurturer" from the very beginning. GPA while not impossible to do outside of the target language's culture, would be very difficult to do outside the target language culture, because it is such a social method of language learning. GPA delays reading until the very end of your learning as well.

So for those who use more social methods and philosophies for language learning, will have to relearn a more literacy-focused approach. The same with those who love TV and media as their main resource.

You guys have touched on this, but most of the people I know IRL who are advanced speakers in a language became that way in part through many hours of social interaction in the language. Perhaps my experience does not reflect the majority, but 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.
1 x
Bangla Pages: 8382
Ancient Greek Pages: 2194
Scots Pages: 449

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17565

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:17 am

einzelne wrote:Ergo from a certain point active skills won't help you in developing advanced reading skills. Actually they will start to work against you by robing your precious time (active vocabulary to discuss your everyday experience doesn't overlap with the vocabulary you need to know to read Classical, Medieval, or New Latin texts).

PS. Again, I'm not against the living Latin movement per se. If somebody really enjoys speaking Latin, who am I to stop them? I approach it pragmatically: living Latin produce might produce good beginner and early intermediate materials, but this movement is of limited usefulness for the development of advanced reading skills. I would prefer people to concentrate on developing effective tools and materials for higher intermediate and advanced reading stages.


I love the idea of speaking practice actually robbing people of the precious reading time :-D I find it refreshing. As a classical grumpy cat, with the approach "most books are more interesting than most people anyways", I sympathise.

However, I think the intermediate stage is the main problem, therefore developing the intermediate skills and knowledge is crucial. On the sample of the Latin learners I've seen (high schoolers, many of which had plans for studies including Latin, all intelligent, all voluntarily choosing Latin), I saw clearly the breaking point at which we mostly failed. It was not the advanced reading. It was the point at the "early intermediate" level, where we suddenly had nothing that structured or interesting to look forward to, and all the acquired grammar and vocab knowledge started a falling apart as we didn't have sufficient means or ideas to practice. I'd say it was the equivalent of A2 or low B1.

Back then, we had acquired quite good grammar knowledge, we had had a sufficiently good beginner coursebook. We were even finding it weirdly enjoyable, with all the example sentences on wolves in the forests and so on. Had we continued with graded readers, with some listening, with some conversations to practice the learnt material on, I think we would have had much better chances of continuing. But no, the idea "oh, now just try a normal classical book and dissect each sentence" was not appetizing, it was scary and boring.

But 10-12 years ago, it simply looked as if that was the end point. The end of the coursebook, and then mostly just medschool or lawschool Latin, or perhaps deeper courses for the exceptions going for linguistics or history degrees. Just a normal "advanced" reading book was simply way out of reach and there was no bridge to help us get over that gap.

The only bright exception from our Latin class was a friend of mine, who actually treated Latin like a living language. An amazing young woman, one of the brightest and most studious people I've ever met. She even opted for Latin as a supplementary Maturita subject, and amazed everyone with her speaking skills,and of course the rest of the exam (including history etc). She then chose to study something totally different at university, so I guess her Latin is now as forgotten as mine. But she was the only one, who got through the "early intermediate" problem and had a solid shot at just continuing with "advanced reading", had she chosen to do so.

jammon39 wrote:So for those who use more social methods and philosophies for language learning, will have to relearn a more literacy-focused approach. The same with those who love TV and media as their main resource.

You guys have touched on this, but most of the people I know IRL who are advanced speakers in a language became that way in part through many hours of social interaction in the language. Perhaps my experience does not reflect the majority, but 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.


I agree we need more reading in the living language learning and teaching these days, and surely in the dead languages learning and teaching (even though it was always present there, as many of the "modern" replacements are simply not available in those languages. However, the situation is a bit better than it was 10-15 years ago, thanks to the internet. These days, at least a part of the LL public has really changed from the textbook only approach, even too much. I don't think just reading without a solid grammar and vocab base is such a good idea, for various reasons (discussed many times elsewhere). We are now torn between two extremes.

On one side, there is still the patronizing approach, heavily supported by most teachers I've ever met, which would "protect" the learner from normal authentic books for as long as possible. In the LL teaching, it shows in the textbooks, many of which are mostly collections of cheesy photos, and the teachers who expect the student to be totally dependent on them (I've even seen such extremes, as a moron claiming there was a shortage of appropriate C1 and C2 reading and listening material in English). In the DL teaching, it's the focus on only intensive reading of adapted textbook material, and the lack of advice, or even active discouragement from the existing intermediate tools (such as a Latin HP translation). Both these groups basically expect the student to fail and burn out, if they try a real book.

On the other side, we have the hype created by youtube polyglots and similar people, who would demonize textbooks and grammar, and just dive into normal authentic material right away. The bad part are all the disappointed learners, who expect native like comprehension after a few weeks of learning, and suspect themselves of dementia upon failure. These people are going to the other extreme, refusing a reasonable learning curve.

We need a path in between. Most people, who are good at a language (living or dead, foreign or native) are also avid readers. But we also need to profit from other tools at our disposal. Be it a grammar book, an audiorecording, or a conversation.

But to your last point: Just like many people around here, I succeed at my languages with little interaction. I think the hype "speak from day 1", or "you learn to speak only by speaking" is extremely harmful. I've gotten tons of interaction in French, but only after reaching C2. And my other languages are doing quite fine with very little interaction too. I'd like to return to the beginning of the comment: seeing interactions as the thing keeping you away from the more valuable learning activity, which is reading, is an interesting and refreshing perspective. I think we should all at least consider it from time to time. :-)
3 x

User avatar
einzelne
Blue Belt
Posts: 804
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:33 pm
Languages: Russan (N), English (Working knowledge), French (Reading), German (Reading), Italian (Reading on Kindle)
x 2882

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby einzelne » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:29 pm

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.

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.

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.

Take Spinoza's Ethics, for instance. The difficulty of his philosophy and 'geometric' method notwithstanding, in terms of vocabulary it's a super easy text. Around 2200 unique words, 60 of them are proper names. Yet of all 2200 words only about 800 appears more that 8 times (it's a common claim that you need to meet a word around 7-8 times in the context before it will stick in your memory). That means that you still have another 1300 — they will be less frequent but no less important, since it is quite often the low frequency words that bear the weight of the sentence, its meaning. And you won't be able to master by extensive reading of the book (if I remember correctly out of 1300 words around 800 occur only once!)

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). And sometimes a hapax legomenon don't necessarily mean that the word itself is a low frequency one (among Ethics' hapaxes are, for instant, puella which anybody who dabbled with Latin just a little would probably know, or easy recognizable cognates like solitudo). Still, it's a lot of work.

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.
Last edited by einzelne on Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
3 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests