A language learners’ forum

I just made and shared an Anki deck of 149 Chaucer words, focusing on false friends and antiquated vocabulary:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1017567874

Online interlinear text/translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight":
http://www.maldura.unipd.it/dllags/brunetti/ME/index_gaw.php?poe=gaw

Online interlinear text/translation of various Chaucer:
http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/tr-index.htm

"Chaucer's Canterbury Tales" by Vincent Hopper--a paper book with interlinear translation. Uses modern orthography.

Looks good!

Got anything with audio or imitated pronunciation?

Oxford Uni's continuing adult education dept offer a short online course, "Middle English Literature"

Recommended reading:

Turville-Petre, Reading Middle English Literature: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell (2006)
Larry Scanlon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2009)

Internet archive have copies of Henry Sweet's first and second middle english primers.

My favorite is still Burrow's A Book of Middle English.

When I studied Middle English literature at school and university in the early 1990s we used Stratmann's Middle English Dictionary:

https://archive.org/details/amiddleengl ... og/page/n9

But we mainly just read the main works using critical and annotated editions (but not translations) such as The Riverside Chaucer, The Oxford edition of Sir Thomas Malory's works, the Manchester University Press edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies volumes for things like the Pearl Poet and the Verse Romances. That and listening to the old LPs of middle English works (mainly Chaucer) published by Argo. After a while one just picks up Middle English - its not that different to modern English.

Elexi wrote:After a while one just picks up Middle English - its not that different to modern English.

Old English didn't just turn into Middle English overnight. If you read any Middle English lit from the early times, 900s or so, then you've got lots of OE to deal with. ME of Chaucer's time and later, sure, very close to MdE. This is why most of the time it is recommended that you learn OE before ME.

IronMike wrote:

Elexi wrote:After a while one just picks up Middle English - its not that different to modern English.

Old English didn't just turn into Middle English overnight. If you read any Middle English lit from the early times, 900s or so, then you've got lots of OE to deal with. ME of Chaucer's time and later, sure, very close to MdE. This is why most of the time it is recommended that you learn OE before ME.

It also depends heavily on dialect. Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain were written at around the same time, but Canterbury looks like Modern English spelled funny, while Gawain Is basically gibberish.

If I'm not mistaken that's because Chaucer heavily influenced which dialectal forms would eventually go into standard Modern English.

Edit: Gibberish was the wrong word, you can definitely make out a few words in most sentences, but it's still harder than Chaucer.