Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
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

Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Yunus39 » Sun Oct 03, 2021 9:38 am

I ran a search and did not find a specific thread on this topic (though if I missed one, please link).

Learning a dead language in pursuit of reading fluency seems like a significantly different task than learning a spoken language.

How would methods differ?
Would the reading/listening approach work well for this task? Or should listening be a lower priority?
How would you replace the time you would normally spend in conversation or with a language partner?
Would you expect learning to be faster and easier or slower and harder?
1 x
Bangla Pages: 8382
Ancient Greek Pages: 2194
Scots Pages: 449

guyome
Blue Belt
Posts: 601
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2020 1:41 pm
Languages: French (N)
x 2424

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby guyome » Sun Oct 03, 2021 10:18 am

In my experience, learning dead languages differed from learning a living one on three accounts:
1) lack of audio material (really affects ability to develop automatisms and remember vocab)
2) textbooks having unrealistic goals ("Read Cicero after 20 lessons!")
3) cultural distance.

My solution to 1) and 2) was to find and read a loooot of easy texts. Not "easy" as in "Cesar is easy" but "easy" as in made-up Latin texts, 19/20th c. Latin readers for young students, starting with very basic stuff to create automatisms. Medieval Latin also has plenty to offer before tackling more complex, Classical Latin texts.

Point 3) also applies to some living languages of course but I feel that in this case you can mitigate it by focusing first on material where the cultural distance will be limited (international news, translated books,...). This kind of material may not exist for a dead language, or at least not in large numbers. In the end, it means reading a lot on the side (history, religion, customs,...).
6 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 » Sun Oct 03, 2021 11:17 am

I have learnt to read the older versions of several modern living languages, like Ancient French, Ancient Occitan and Old Norse, but the only only only one which I also have learnt to somehow speak (be it at a low and fluctuating level) is Latin. One element in all this is that I had to develop a voice in my head which I could use while reading. The man who did the Ancient French course had actually taught himself to speak the language, but I have never tried to do that - although a few times i have concocted messages here in Old French. However I still have his pronunciations of Old French and Old Occitan ringing in my head. In Old English I once recorded a Youtube video with a reading of the Brunanburh battle in reconstructed Old English, and I suppose that this video has formed the basis of how I hear Old English - but the rest has been concocted by myself with the help of written descriptions of the sounds. :oops:

Which leads to the question: does the quality of the voice in your head actually matter? You do need to develop some kind of idiolect, but as long as you haven't got any chance of speaking to another person in a certain language it doesn't matter whether it matches any of the original variants. Or does it? We do in fact know something about the pronunciation of some of the old languages, including Latin. And here you have the choice of emulating the reconstructed Roman pronunciation or a reconstructed Medieval Latin, but the language is still used in the Roman-Catholic church which has its own traditions. Among linguists and serious learners the 'politically correct' choice would be to adopt reconstructed - and that's what most of them would counsel you to do. But I'm not serious at all so I stubbornly retain certain sounds from the Medieval pronunciation. For instance I ought to pronounce "vetus" (old) as /ouuuuuuuuuuuuuweeeeeeetus/, but I actually hear /vetus/ in my head (with a /v/-sound and short vowels). And do I care? No - I have had short conversations and even done a five-minute lecture in Latin where I used my mixed pronunciation, and my impression is that people understood what I said. And I doubt that that either Cicero or Tertullian would come to whack my bottom. A modern parallel would be a language like Portuguese, where my basis is a mangled version of the European pronunciation, but I like the Brazilian long vowels too much to give them up.

As for grammar and vocabulary I followed courses in Old French, Old Occitan and Latin (not in Old Norse, but there I had an suitable alternative in Modern Icelandic, in which I actually did follow a course), and it was very useful - but mostly because I did get the relevant informations presented in a sober and concise way. The main difference between my studies of Old French, Occitan and Norse is that I still lack good dictionaries from something (like Modern French) into the old language forms, and that's the only reason I haven't not really tried to make them active - in contrast to Latin, where I actually have the requisite tools. But I do have good dictionaries the other way so I can still read all the aforementioned language for pleasure.

How about old languages which I haven't studied, at least not systematically, but still try to read? OK, I can easily read old Italian and old versions of the Ibero-Romance languages because they are closer to their moderns forms than Ancient French is to Modern French, and I can with some difficulty also spell my way through Old Saxon and Old Anglosaxon - but in both cases I did read through some morphological tables and a few things about the syntax, and I do sincerely believe that it is not only necessary, but also feasible to read up on the rockbottom bare grammatical necessities in a fairly short time without being totally absorbed by the material. If you really want to become a fluent reader of Old Something then I can't see any way around a combination of intensive grammar + vocabulary studies (Anki or wordlists, depending on your preferences) plus trying out your newly acquired knowledge on genuine sources, preferably bilingual ones - and with your dictionary within reach.

And that leads us to the sources. Basically the translations I have seen were too pretty and slick to be really good - in many cases they amounted to pure free-wheeling junk as if the only goal had been to entertain people who couldn't be bothered to study the original languages. Anglosaxon Beowulf is a particularly abhorrent case because it's poetry, which tempts pseudotranslators to revive their own broken artistic dreams. Some 'translators' have even demonstrated so deficient morals that they based their versions on existing translations into other languages - which should be forbidden by law! :twisted: But if that's all you have got then use those translations with extreme caution as a helping hand when you really can't understand a passage in an original source - and try to get the meaning before you involve such translations (and yes, that's not LR). And beware: the sources you normally can buy have mostly already been heavily edited to help you - like for instance by spelling out abbbreviations in full or regularizing the spelling. And that's fine. But for us learners it would be nice to have more literal translations (still with the helpful editing)- and translations of many different kinds of texts to whet our teeths on.

By the way, Guyome mentions 'cultural distance'. Oh yes, that can be a factor even at the lexical level. My biggest problem with Latin as always been that the old folks didn't think in the same categories as I do.
7 x

User avatar
Steve
Orange Belt
Posts: 169
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2016 7:53 am
Location: US (Wisconsin)
Languages: English(N), Spanish (Intermediate), Ancient Greek (Intermediate), Hebrew (Beginner), ASL (Beginner), German (Beginner)
x 801
Contact:

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Steve » Sun Oct 03, 2021 3:47 pm

Here's a link to thread on the old HTLAL forum http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7524&PN=5 that hits this topic to some degree. On a personal note, I ran across that thread a long time ago at a point where I'd been ready to give up on language learning entirely. Alexander Arguelles' comments about a language needing a voice in your head to come alive lead me to finding ancient Greek audio (modern pronunciation) and start listening while following along with an interlinear. Literally, within a few weeks, I'd made more progress in acquiring reading skills than I had via countless hours of on and off efforts over close to 30 years using the traditional approach. It was like an entirely new world opened up to me. For the first time in my life, I actually started to feel what it was like to be able to use a new language. I went from being at the point of permanently giving up on language learning to having made it a serious hobby. Studying polyglots and non-traditional language learning lead to doing research on learning in general which I'm now trying to turn into a second career.

Over the past number of years, I've had a slowly emerging understanding of why I need to choose certain methods. The oversimplified version is that learning consists of making actual physical changes in our brain. Different methods make different changes in our brain. The changes I want to make are those which will cause my brain to properly react to a new language so I can use it. For decades, the brain changes I was making were based around being able to analyze a new language while thinking about it in English. I got pretty good at being able to give a grammatical description in English of what I was seeing in a text, but I had no reading skills to speak of. The methods I was using were not producing any structures in my brain that were directly reacting to the new language. Once I started practicing actual skills, I found that my brain started reacting directly to written (or spoken) words. A full description of this would get into more details in terms of declarative (fact-based explicit) memory and operative (skill-based implicit) memory. It's also important to note that individuals have different aptitudes for using declarative and operative memory which affects how effective different methods might be for them.

This is why for dead or ancient languages (or any language for that matter) I try to spend much of my initial time using audio along with interlinears (if possible) or parallel texts. At first, I try to get my brain to treat the new language like listening to a song on the radio. It gradually becomes more and more familiar and I can sing along (or even sort of sing it or hum it without the audio) even if I cannot understand half the lyrics (or have a few wrong) at first. I can then use references or English text to polish and correct places that need it. Once my brain has become somewhat accustomed to the language, it more naturally associates the spoken and written forms, and many of the most common grammatical patterns are starting to feel familiar. For me, I have to be very careful about when I start to introduce heavy amounts of grammar study in English so that the grammar study becomes helpful training wheels that can be discarded versus becoming a permanent crutch I must lean on. As a rough rule of thumb, when I catch myself starting to use English a lot in my head, I try to spend more time listening to try to strengthen the "song" of the language in my head so I don't have English intruding as much. There's obviously a lot more to this, but I am trying to get the general idea across.
6 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 » Sun Oct 03, 2021 5:38 pm

Steve wrote:Studying polyglots and non-traditional language learning.


I can definitely feel you, although I would specify that audio is a very traditional technique, it's just classic departments today don't have the slightest clue how to teach Latin and Greek effectively (I happed to come across a PhD candidate recently and he never heard of Ioannis Stratakis, he couldn't even recommend any audio recordings).

Of course, being a successful professor in Classics requires lots of other skills apart from sight reading. Still, I find it appalling when an established professor confesses that she struggles with original Greek texts. Can you imagine a tenure professor in the German department who doesn't read German??? (apart from the fictional one in DeLillo's White Noise, of course).

It's a really sad state of affairs because that means that we won't see effective learning materials for language enthusiasts in the foreseeable future. Geoffrey Steadman's materials is just a drop in the ocean. (And personally, I believe, methodologically it is still approaches language learning as an exercise in deciphering which is not the best way to approach language learning)
5 x

User avatar
Steve
Orange Belt
Posts: 169
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2016 7:53 am
Location: US (Wisconsin)
Languages: English(N), Spanish (Intermediate), Ancient Greek (Intermediate), Hebrew (Beginner), ASL (Beginner), German (Beginner)
x 801
Contact:

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Steve » Sun Oct 03, 2021 7:04 pm

einzelne wrote:It's a really sad state of affairs because that means that we won't see effective learning materials for language enthusiasts in the foreseeable future. Geoffrey Steadman's materials is just a drop in the ocean. (And personally, I believe, methodologically it is still approaches language learning as an exercise in deciphering which is not the best way to approach language learning)


This is more or less what I've seen in Christian circles with regard to Koine Greek for reading the NT and Church Fathers. It seems that most pedagogy is focused on finding better methods to memorize tables and vocabulary lists to get good grades on tests rather than building actual skills. There is one common set of course materials (which I won't name since I don't want to make it about this author and teacher) which seems to be heavily used and drives the schedule and curriculum in many schools. A cottage industry of free and commercial supporting materials (anki decks, videos, audio, study sheets, etc.) has developed around helping students get better grades in classes that use that course.

One of the biggest problems I see is a culture surrounding Koine that treats good reading skills as an epic ability reserved for those who dedicate hours per day for several years which is built upon a base of having mastered the English descriptions of all aspects of Greek grammar. Seriously, there are graduates who can get As in Koine analysis classes where they learned how to do things like determine which of the dozens of named grammatical functions of the genitive or dative or articles apply to a particular word in a particular passage who have no appreciable reading skills. There is a tacit assumption no one questions that complete mastery of English descriptions of Greek grammar is THE prerequisite for doing anything in Koine.

I must confess to a large degree of frustration on this matter. I've run across a few dozen people in person (and many online) who think it's normal to have no reading skills in Koine after a few years of (or even a minor or major in) Koine. I've yet to run across someone in person who gets excited when I talk about how different methods could yield actual reading skills for them. It's like most people with formal Koine exposure cannot comprehend that anything other than tedious labor at grammar mastery is involved.
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 » Sun Oct 03, 2021 10:06 pm

Well, how do you learn to recognize the different forms of a morphology-rich language in a text? For me it is the wrong way to see things - not least because some forms occur several places in the tables. The structure of each sentence should limit the choices to a few possible ones - or just one - and then you just have to recognize those forms to confirm your structural guesswork.

So first you have to do a simple syntactical analysis which ultimately is based on knowing the meaning of the central words and a few things about wordorder, and with a bit lof luck the elements can only fit together in a limited number of ways. You can exclude most possibilities based on the word order and/or because the morphology doesn't permit them. If the author isn't too devious you'll end up with one possible interpretation of the structure. Of course this is harder in languages with a free word order like Latin, and interminably long sentences are also a nuisance that shouldn't be allowed in materials for beginners. So if you are a homelearner and see a long sentence, then skip it - you are there to learn grammar, not what happened to some amorous couple or how to catch lice. Focus on short and simple sentences in the beginning, then return to the problematic ones later when you know how to handle them.

To do the analysis find the verbs and for each one try to identify its subjects, objects, predicatives or whatever else that typically would accompagny that verb - a good dictionary with examples is really helpful here (and of course the semantics are the ultimate key to do this analysis). OK then find out which nouns could be in the nominative - do they fit in number with the verb, and are there other noun clauses that might take the roles of object or whatever else that verb in question typically would be combined with? If there isn't a suitable nominal clause then look for a pronominal subject. If there isn't a suitable candidate then you probably don't need one in that language since the verb ending contains the information. This is the kind of analysis you have to do whenever you read (and with time learn you learn to do it in your subconscious mind). You don't don't need to know the finer details of the grammatical nomenclature at this point - it's much easier to learn that later on when you already can grasp the structures of the sentences you are comfronted with based on their meaning.

But at least in morphology-rich languages it is hard to do this analysis without some knowledge of the possible forms. So the kind of the analysis I just described is only possible when you already have seen/studied at least the most common morphological forms. This does not mean that you have to learn everything by heart beforehand - find some simple overviews to consult or sketch out your own overviews on paper - and do NOT accept to learn grammar dripwise without an overview over what you should end up with. Textbook systems generally teach you grammar dripwise, and that may be the only way to learn sentence structures for illiterate children, but then you are limited to sentences that use precisely those elements (or in other words: to that textbook system). You need the overviews to deal with genuine texts, even if you still havent' learnt all the forms and rules by heart. And it doesn't need to be like solving rebuses - even in Latin you can to a large extent base your analyses on word order as long as you stick to simple prose, but you need to know your tables or have them within reach to exclude the irrelevant structures - and it's precisely in this situation that you have the motivation to learn the forms involved by heart. And with time you will know so many of them that you can read almost fluently, and then - and not before - it is time to fill out the holes.

So to sum this up: it may be possible to 'get the gist' of a sentence just from combining the meaning of some central words, but to really read you must be able to see structures - and that's why you study grammar, and it is also the reason that learning grammar should be combined with structural text studies.
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 2:47 am

Going back to the original post. Here's my take on it. Please note that I just dabbled with Latin and Greek (although I resumed working with Olberg's LLPSI recently) so can only present an autodidact perspective. And, as an autodidact, I can tell you that the major impediment is the relative lack of effective tools/materials.

How would methods differ?

They don't. It's just there's not that many textbooks and other learning materials (Books like Athenaze and LLPSI and free scanned books from 19th century improved the situation considerably.)

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

All skills reinforce each other. I can't emphasize enough how good audio materials are essential for effective language learning (again, there's not that many materials in comparison to modern languages. Quite often the audio-recordings with so called 'restored' pronunciation are simply too horrible to listen.)

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

It means that you have more time for reading! There's a recent trend in turning latin and Koine into living languages and teach them accordingly. I personally don't understand it, for me it's not the most effective way to approach dead languages. The only advantage of it is that now we have more audio thanks to these enthusiasts.

Shadowing is fine. The retelling technique is also fine (may be). But I read and listen to complex texts in French and German and I know from my personal experience, that active skills are not essential. Better spend your time on reading, mastering vocabulary, since this is will be the major impediment for reading original texts: huge vocabulary and complex syntax which you won't find in the colloquial Latin/Greek anyways (I came across some testimonies from people who participated in Accademia Vivarium and who stated that it didn't help them to improve their reading skills)

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

Generally, it depends on the difficulty of the language itself. In case of dead languages the lack of decent teaching materials is a huge impediment.

In the ideal world, here's what I would love to have:

— A series of graded readers/textbooks like Italian Athenaze and LLPSI + grammar companion (Neumann for LLPSI is actually great) + literal translation of all texts (yes, as a beginner I don't want to play in guessing games, that's why I love Assimil's layout) + decent audio recordings of all texts (I wonder how many hours it would be enough... Ørberg is 5.5 hours and I would rather have 50h of easy Latin texts, if not 100... I mean, have you seen students of English or German going straight to Shakespeare or Goethe right after the basic grammar course?...). The task is to firmly ingrain top 2-3k words which cover 90% of the text (all stats for the extant classical works are readily available).
Also, Classicists should really stop being arrogant snobs (to put it mildly) and start making graded readers not based on the Roman stuff — graded readers on the bases of Neo-Latin texts on science, politics, and philosophy could be perfect — after all, texts by More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes etc are also a part of the history of Latin. And I imagine for a beginner it would be easer to read and engage with them. Their fear 'o! but it's not authentic Latin!' is ludicrous given their level of Latin. 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?
— Decent audio-recordings for all canonical works.
— When it comes to original texts, I would love to see them in 2 forms:
a) for intermediate learners: you write a paragraph in the original, a literal translation, a vocabulary of words which is not covered by the first 90% (which you are supposed to master while working with graded texts), grammar notes on tricky points (see attachment). Just like with adapted materials your task is not to play the guessing game but getting use to a new syntax, vocabulary in context by reading and multiple rereading of texts.
b) for advanced readers: a light version of the version above — you run a statistical analysis, detect all words which appear in the text just 5 times or less and provide the translations on the margin.

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. (Btw the German publishing house Reclam attempted to do something in that direction. They have a core Latin dictionary Standardwortschatz Latein for about 2k words and then, if they have an edition of Confessiones they gloss each word which is beyond Standardwortschatz.)
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Last edited by einzelne on Mon Oct 04, 2021 6:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
6 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 6:58 am

einzelne wrote:I can't emphasize enough how good audio materials are essential for effective language learning (again, there's not that many materials in comparison to modern languages. Quite often the audio-recordings with so called 'restored' pronunciation are simply too horrible to listen to)
(..)
There's a recent trend in turning latin and Koine into living languages and teach them accordingly. I personally don't understand it, for me it's not the most effective way to approach dead languages. The only advantage of it is that now we have more audio thanks to these enthusiasts.
(...)
Also, Classicists should really stop being arrogant snobs (to put it mildly) and start making graded readers not based on the Roman stuff — graded readers on the bases of Neo-Latin texts on science, politics, and philosophy could be perfect — after all, texts by More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes etc are also a part of the history of Latin. And I imagine for a beginner it would be easer to read and engage with them. Their fear 'o! but it's not an authentic Latin!' is ludicrous given their level of Latin. 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?


Fine post, einzelne, and kudos to Bergson & co for learning Latin without the internet, but I disagree on the value of trying to to make dead languages living. As you can see from what I wrote above I'm not fanatical about using canonical reconstructed pronunciations, and I would definitely support the plea for more graded readers based on post-Roman stuff, but I know from myself that even striving to make a language active has an effect on its survival chances in case you stop studying it on a daily basis.

I took first the 'small' Latin test and later the 'middle' one almost forty years ago because it was mandatory to have it for students at the Romance Institute at the local university. Both courses were run according to strict grammar-translation principles - i.e. reading, translation back (within a very limited framework) and of course grammar. No recommandations to write free essays and definitely no urge to learn to think or speak in Latin. And the result was that when I stopped studying language my Latin skills vanished almost overnight. My other languages survived slightly longer although they also got rusty with time (depending on how much I neglected them - in the case of Romanian down to point zero). When I then took up Latin again the grammar felt homely and nice and easy to revive, but the thing I made differently this time was that I tried to be just a little bit active (writing, thinking), and I got a totally different attitude to the language this time because I now didn't need to have a book in front of me to keep it alive: I could just start thinking about something. I have NOT become a convert to the natural method, but there is nothing that shows you with amazing clarity what you still need to learn as trying to formulate something yourself.

And another thing: I once bought an English-Latin 'New College' dictionary in Manila, and that's my prime resource when I write something myself or need to find a word or expression for something. And the reason is that it normally gives me an answer, where I also have an old Danish-Latin that rarely do so (and I even threw a more recent Danish-Latin one out because it was even more useless). I have a theory that the last two were made by simply inverting existing Latin-Danish ones, whereas the 'New College' one looks as if they took the English words and expressions any modern dictionary would contain and asked themselves: how would you express this in Latin? I also have a few other sources that try to do the same thing, though limiting themselves to things that weren't invented yet in Antique Rome - but at least one of them (German to NeoLatin, Lampertz) is so terribly afraid of deviating from the attested vocabulary that it covers all holes with complicated circumlocutions - and of course that won't function. The other (Morgan) was culled from the internet, and I had to rearrange the whole thing to make it resemble a normal dictionary - and I only have it on my computer, not on paper, so I use it less often than the 'New College'. Anyway, without such userfriendly dictionaries I wouldn't have attempted to learn to write in NeoLatin, and I might have lost my Latin once again.

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. Now I have to make guesses and check each guess in a dictionary the other way (or by using Google Search) - and if the guesses prove to be wrong then I simply can't express the things I wanted to express. And that is frustating, to say the least ...
6 x

User avatar
Sonjaconjota
Green Belt
Posts: 271
Joined: Tue Apr 13, 2021 8:12 am
Location: Barcelona
Languages: German (N) - English, Spanish, Catalan (advanced) - French, Dutch, Italian (intermediate) - Turkish (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 24#p192024
x 1094

Re: Best way to learn Dead Languages?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Mon Oct 04, 2021 8:16 am

In case it's of interest to anyone: These German publishers have graded readers for Latin.
They are aimed at German schoolchildren, but I think they could be a nice resource for anybody, even for people who don't understand German.
https://www.klett-sprachen.de/lektueren/latein/c-145
If you click on "Im Buch blättern" under the picture, you can have a look inside.
9 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests