The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

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Systematiker
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Systematiker » Sat Apr 01, 2017 12:19 pm

Hey, welcome! I was gone for a bit when you started this, but glad to have you here.

I second Cavesa on the exams, in your context.

And I see you've no fear of dabbling whatsoever! That's probably a good approach for you. Part of the trick is knowing what can get cut when things get busy.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Apr 01, 2017 1:16 pm

I see your points, Ingraed and Cavesa, and thank you for taking the time to post here.

In the end, I think it comes down to the money. I doubt I'm going to have it this year, so it would be best to wait till next year and who knows, maybe even try for the C1 then as I have plans to spend some time in Germany first.

It is my first year of language learning after all, and perhaps I need another year to be fully sure I can pass such an expensive exam.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Apr 01, 2017 1:21 pm

Systematiker wrote:Hey, welcome! I was gone for a bit when you started this, but glad to have you here.

I second Cavesa on the exams, in your context.

And I see you've no fear of dabbling whatsoever! That's probably a good approach for you. Part of the trick is knowing what can get cut when things get busy.


Thank you :). I'll give the issue further thought as so many things can change between now and December. For dabbling, the chopping block will definitely get pulled out when I get too busy
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Cavesa » Sat Apr 01, 2017 1:25 pm

That looks like a very wise course of action :-)
It will give you time to learn another language on side, if that is what you want.
You have enough time to get to really solid C1 and skip B2 level exam (which saves money). While B2 is already a solid level, the C levels make a bigger impression.
And you can plan the budget accordingly.
Great!
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sun Apr 02, 2017 10:37 am

Les Anciens

Due to the demand for Italian reading fluency at least as a requirement to dabble in Ancient Greek and Latin, I've decided to revive Italian with a Harry Potter bilingual edition. After the first few hours of struggling through, most of the half forgotten stuff came back to me and now I can stand a chance of using the Latin Assimil with an Italian base and the Italian Athenaze without wanting to tear my eyes out in frustration. I'd have used the French base but for some reason the deviation between French and Latin is so jarring that it kills my enjoyment of the book.

I'll read about 50 more pages of Harry Potter before getting into Assimil proper as that will give me more time to read a few more pages of Lingua Latina Per Illustrata. I dislike going into Assimil courses completely cold and clueless, so this is necessary for me.


For Ancient Greek, I found a collection of YouTube videos produced by Leonard Muellner (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) and Belisi Gillespie, who 'present all the content covered in two semesters of an Introduction to Ancient Greek college course.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNAwyi ... t=0.936697

Taking it slowly and just compiling my grammar sheets with notes, which I hope will make it significantly easier for me when I start using Reading Greek and Assimil's Le Grec Ancien. Teach Yourself Ancient Greek also looks beginner friendly.


Verdict : All is well on the dabbling front.



The Moderns
The active wave still goes on for French and German, and I find the self correction to be the most rewarding part of it.
Still reading Das Parfum and still trying to watch more stuff in French. Listening comprehension is improving and I still have about 58 more hours to finish the French film Half SC. Good results are expected.
Slightly reluctant to go home for the Easter holidays as my routine will be interfered with, to say the very least.

Lesson 40 of Assimil Spanish and things are getting interesting. Already seen the subjunctive a few times and the lessons are getting faster. Still, I can't wait to be done with this Assimil experiment so that I can get into native materials.

Had a Skype conversation with a German speaker and absolutely felt somewhat fluent, at least enough to joke and make cultural comparisons and give English grammar lessons. Great feeling. In comparison I stammered my way through a Skype conversation in French. The curse of cognate vocabulary, easy to recognise in context but difficult to recall when needed.


Verdict: Trudging the long road to fluency, one stammer at a time.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:33 pm

I find it deeply ironic that the only language, of which you're absolutely not allowed to have less than perfect pronunciation, is a dead one. Yes, I'm talking about Latin and the war over classical pronunciation.

'Oh, he trills his Rs too much'
'Oh, his Cs aren't hard enough'
'Oh, he's pronouncing it with an Italian accent'
'Oh, what awful pronunciation'
'His vowels aren't long enough'


An Esperanto get together - people genuinely pleased that others share their interest in such a great language, especially since a large percent of the population don't or haven't even heard of Esperanto

A Latin get together - people coming to blows over pronunciation.

No one is good enough to be truly accepted. I'm sure that even if Cicero were resurrected today and he made an incognito video on Youtube, people would still converge in the comments and criticise his pronunciation.

'Look mate, I know you're Cicero and an actual native Roman but your pronunciation is wrong'
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby tarvos » Sun Apr 02, 2017 6:42 pm

I was at a Latin gathering once and people spoke Latin with a Spanish accent (this was in Valencia, Spain). There are several accepted ways to speak Latin of course, but what I found the most refreshing was the following - we went out for dinner with them that night and they treated Latin as a normal, spoken language - much as they would learn any other language, such as Modern Greek (which I also spoke that night), or Spanish, or what-have-you. That was exactly the mentality they ingrained in their students - people never learn Latin properly because it's treated as a dead language, when you can, in fact, speak it, and this hugely aids the learning process.

I find that the real difficulty with Latin, at least for me, does NOT lie in the fact that the grammar is complex or that people are consistently coming to blows over the correct pronunciation of certain words (nor are all Esperanto speakers so forgiving, although when I first arrived at a gathering someone sat me down and worked through the grammar points with me). It's that there are so few people to speak and practice with. I studied Latin for five years in high school and I was always good at the grammatical side of things, but I forgot all my Latin because I never practiced it, unlike French and German, which I got to use later on. I had to revive those from some dusty depths too, but the practice opportunities living abroad has given me implied I got much better much faster.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:01 pm

tarvos wrote:I was at a Latin gathering once and people spoke Latin with a Spanish accent (this was in Valencia, Spain). There are several accepted ways to speak Latin of course, but what I found the most refreshing was the following - we went out for dinner with them that night and they treated Latin as a normal, spoken language - much as they would learn any other language, such as Modern Greek (which I also spoke that night), or Spanish, or what-have-you. That was exactly the mentality they ingrained in their students - people never learn Latin properly because it's treated as a dead language, when you can, in fact, speak it, and this hugely aids the learning process.

I find that the real difficulty with Latin, at least for me, does NOT lie in the fact that the grammar is complex or that people are consistently coming to blows over the correct pronunciation of certain words (nor are all Esperanto speakers so forgiving, although when I first arrived at a gathering someone sat me down and worked through the grammar points with me). It's that there are so few people to speak and practice with. I studied Latin for five years in high school and I was always good at the grammatical side of things, but I forgot all my Latin because I never practiced it, unlike French and German, which I got to use later on. I had to revive those from some dusty depths too, but the practice opportunities living abroad has given me implied I got much better much faster.


I'm certainly glad to see there are people who take a more relaxed approach to pronunciation. And it is rather sad that losing active skills in Latin is almost inevitable due to the lack of people to practice with.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Cavesa » Sun Apr 02, 2017 7:50 pm

You evil people! You are lucky I already call Elenia Mefisto, or you two would get the nickname for making me want to retake Latin :-D

Yes, there are tons of Latin accents, which are actually more like different norms of pronunciation. All those people claim to use the official, one and only reconstructed classical Latin version (usually not the church one), but they always sound heavily influenced by the native language of the speaker. I tried to learn from anglophone sources (ages ago), but it felt like I was learning mistakes (I am not talking about the C vs K thing, but more about the deformed vowels and other stuff). :-D Not easy. I tried French based resources, and it was a bit better, but the problem was still there. And Italian or German Latin sound different too. I am used to the Czech Latin the most, but if I could choose, I would certainly believe the Italian Latin likely to be the least deformed one. Is there any popular accent of the "Correct" reconstructed Latin pronunciation, that I should try, if I ever get back to it? One that would make the fewest people laugh at me.

Latin has the potential to do a lot of stuff Esperantists aspire to do, and they are more successful now. Latin does have many advantages, such as tons of literature, or a great base of universities and high schools teaching it, which Esperanto can't even dream of. Yes, it is harder, but there is a lot of beauty and practical use for the complexity (as someone with some experience with medical terminology in Czech, Latin, English, French, Spanish, and a bit of German, I certainly believe we should have all kept Latin for most uses without changes). But it suffers from a lot of prejudice, bad experience of the students, and overall attitude of our culture, which stopped seeing it as something worthwhile.

I wish I had the time to use the audio course you mentioned on this forum today or yesterday. It looks awesome.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby tarvos » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:19 pm

Yes, there are tons of Latin accents, which are actually more like different norms of pronunciation. All those people claim to use the official, one and only reconstructed classical Latin version (usually not the church one), but they always sound heavily influenced by the native language of the speaker. I tried to learn from anglophone sources (ages ago), but it felt like I was learning mistakes (I am not talking about the C vs K thing, but more about the deformed vowels and other stuff). :-D Not easy. I tried French based resources, and it was a bit better, but the problem was still there. And Italian or German Latin sound different too. I am used to the Czech Latin the most, but if I could choose, I would certainly believe the Italian Latin likely to be the least deformed one. Is there any popular accent of the "Correct" reconstructed Latin pronunciation, that I should try, if I ever get back to it? One that would make the fewest people laugh at me.


No. Even though you would get all the phonemes right, you would never get the prosody right, because we simply do not know with what prosody exactly Latin was spoken during those days. It is only natural that your Latin would sound Czech-tinted the same way mine would sound Dutch or Spanish-tinted. And you shouldn't really worry about that because the pronunciation is going to vary - we simply don't have native speakers that can teach us the correct sentence intonation anymore, and really, even if you get the phonemes right, the prosody is going to give your accent away.
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