I have been very impolite, posting irregularly (and reading daily) for months without making an introduction post. I’m sorry!
I dabbled in Latin as a teenager almost twenty years ago, plowing through Wheelock’s with my mind intent on memorising paradigms. In my naive conception, that was what learning a language amounted to, and I hardly reflected on any practical use for knowing Latin or any other language. I aimed for “knowing” it in a vacuum and was not particularly interested in the actual texts.
Things luckily changed. I started re-learning Latin a few years ago, this time in combination with an interest in the classical texts and the classical world. I found Lingua Latina per se illustrata and worked my way through both books and some of the supplements. My current reading is De bello Gallico in a student’s edition I found in a used books shop, and I can almost read it fluently. The biggest stumbling block tends to be not the Latin, but the fact that most of it is very boring and repetitive. The OCT of Pliny the Younger’s letters is waiting for me on the bookshelf and I hope it won’t take too long before I’m ready…
Since a year and a half, I’m also learning Greek. I couldn’t keep myself from it. I’m at Athenaze chapter 21. I started out using Zuntz’s Griechischer Lehrgang on the side, but gave up when it started to turn into puzzle solving more than anything else. I changed to JACT Reading Greek, where I’ve finished section 9. I find that using two books helps reinforcing the difficult bits, since they don’t introduce everything in the same order.
I may start posting more regularly as my Greek advances. I will most definitely continue reading. Thank you everyone for being here!
[quote =consistebat ]My current reading is De bello Gallico in a student’s edition I found in a used books shop, and I can almost read it fluently. The biggest stumbling block tends to be not the Latin, but the fact that most of it is very boring and repetitive. [/quote]
Welcome to textkit.
Of course we all have different interests and no doubt it’s best to read texts which excite you. But perhaps if you read more about the politics and rhetoric of the late republic your experience of Caesar would be changed. Things are never quite what they seem with Caesar. He was also read in antiquity because of his style. That we may find this “boring” tells us much about the difference between our cultural values and his. I find it an astonishing work of propaganda. Not every page is riveting, what work can claim that?
I am using Reading Greek with students and find that they are very enthusiastic about it. They particularly like that from the very beginning they can engage, albeit in a very simplified way, with real Greek authors.
Thanks for your post to my North and Hillard thread.
You are right, of course. “Boring” was an unnuanced judgement, but then my Latin at this point also lacks nuance. I can’t yet read much deeper than the surface, and the seemingly endless series of setting up camps in various places, legatos mittit etc is not very exciting. It’s difficult to keep track of all the tribes and names, even when I double-check with a translation. But my knowledge of the bigger picture is limited indeed, and going back to this text in five or ten years I’m sure I’ll get much more out of it.