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.
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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".
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.