ἀρχὴ παιδεύσεως ἡ τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐπίσκεψις principium eruditionis vocabulorum consideratio est Epictetus I certainly spent a lot of time on Comenius the preceding decade, extolling his usefulness for Latin and Greek vocabulary acquisition and making YouTube videos to that end. I mean a lot of time — my wife got to calling it Comania! Here …
Continue reading “Comenius – Still Useful (or, Comenius Comania)”
Ten years ago, on the brink of retirement, I began dusting off the Latin and Greek I had learned decades ago in college. In the process, I discovered there were two ways of going about learning ancient languages. For lack of better terms, we can call these the grammar-first approach and the natural-language approach. In …
Welcome to my Languages blog on WordPress. Ten years ago, as I was transitioning to retirement, I began dusting off my Latin and Greek. I had been a Classics major in college, and in fact I have an ABD (All But Dissertation), but I had not read these ancient languages in decades. How did that …
[January 2021. I have made some relatively minor edits to the original text.] The Problem The ideas in this post grew out of reading Livy and Polybius this winter/spring term. Livy is the master of the Latin periodic sentence (a single sentence that packs a large quantity of information into multiple and in Livy’s case …
Hello all. Has it really been a year and a half since I’ve posted anything of substance? Well, the sun has completed a few more revolutions around the earth (if I am to think like an ancient), and in that interval my Latin and Greek have not been idle, so here is my most unTweetish …
[January 2021. Here are a few other important updates: For learning classical Greek, a lot of people are using Donald Mastronarde’s Introduction to Attic Greek, in its second edition (2013) (see here for additional resources). I have not seen it, but I know Mastronarde to be very thorough and meticulous. Mastronarde is the creator of …
Continue reading “Teaching Yourself Latin and Greek, Part II”
In college too many decades ago, I was a classics and ancient history PhD candidate. I did not stay in the field and did not keep up with the languages. But a little more than a year ago, beginning to plan for retirement, I decided to resurrect my Greek and Latin. I have been pretty …
Reflections As The Spirit Moves Me