:-)

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sfuqua
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Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2014 8:29 pm

:-)

Post by sfuqua »

I'm a 61 year old dabbler at language learning. I'm going to drift off the ancient language topic a tiny bit in this post, just to introduce myself.
I studied Latin in high school, and got to the point where I could barely begin to read Caesar, and I haven't done much with it since. I learned Samoan to a quite good level (for a foreigner) when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa. I learned Tagalog while I worked in a refugee camp in the Philippines.
A few years ago my interest in ancient languages was reawakened when I read (in translation of course) through some of the "Great Books" from Moritmer Adler's list. This really stirred up my interest in ancient Greek, and I bought a copy of Pharr's Homeric Greek, and made it through the first few chapters before I got distracted.
The past three years, I have spent learning Spanish on my own. I've reached a point of diminishing returns, I could be a great tourist and pretty much talk about anything with people (if they don't talk too fast :-), and I can read things at the newspaper/Harry Potter level. Great literature still demands a dictionary.
I did some reading about medieval Spanish, which leads naturally to Latin.
I stumbled across this site, and learning an ancient language looks fascinating. I'm surprised that there are even audio resources available now. I learned much of my Spanish from Assimil, including a lot of repeated shadowing, which is the next best thing to a conversation in my opinion. I am not planning to give up my life to study ( I like my life :-), but I'm going to start plugging away at Adler-Milner materials, and maybe a bit of Ollendorff Greek. I have a language habit or doing an hour of Spanish after dinner; I'm going to add Latin, and maybe acient Greek, into the mix. I really don't know what I'm doing with ancient Greek...
Sorry about the long post.

Phil-
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Posts: 85
Joined: Tue May 27, 2014 12:44 am
Location: USA

Re: :-)

Post by Phil- »

Welcome! You've learned an impressive number of languages, and it sounds like you learned most of them in the best way possible--by speaking them. It's a bit harder to do that with Latin and Greek, but it sounds like you know how to find good resources.

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