After studying 13 different languages (the number represents on a scale of 1-10 how satisfied I am with my progress in that language), (German 9, Turkish 0, French 9, Italian 8, Persian 0, Chinese 0, Arabic 7, Spanish 6, Latin 7, Ancient Greek 2, Sanskrit 1, Ancient Egyptian 4, Old English 6) on more than 20 separate occasions, I still feel like I’m doing something wrong. So once again, I feel the need to try something new. I realize a lot of people say don’t do this, but I’m literally going to walk around with a list of greek words and their English translations and while I’m multitasking throughout the day I’m going to be trying to construct greek sentences. I’m going to try to spend about 3 to 4 hours per day speaking Greek and about 1 hour listening to Greek (there isn’t all that much spoken Ancient Greek available). When I’m not multitasking I’m mostly going to use the same methods I’ve always used. I’m also very good at computer programming. I’ve downloaded the parsed edition of wiktionary and I’ve already done a rather in dept look at the Diorisis corpus. There are about 9K lemmas in the Diorisis corpus which are not proper names and of those 9K, I’m guessing 3K of them are compounds formed from existing simple roots, so that’s 6K lemmas, of those 6K lemmas probably 1K have been borrowed into English, so that’s 5K and of those 5K probably 2K of them represent archaic or obscure words that you don’t need. The point is I think I can memorize 3K lemmas and their morphologies by just speaking them and forming sentences with them. Then when I actually read the texts I’ll figure out more accurate ways to use those 3K lemmas.
The reason why I’m doing this is because I’ve learned the hard way that passive consumption of the language only works with roughly 25% efficiency as active production of the language. When you’re forced to do something or reproduce something it sticks in your memory longer. I didn’t do enough of that with Latin. I only spent about 5% of my study time on Latin on active production which is why even today I really can’t read a classical text, though I can understand what modern Latin speakers are saying. With the living languages I was forced to produce the language in order to survive because I lived in those countries but with Turkish, Chinese and Persian I did not succeed because I did not live in those countries and hence was not forced to produce the language and so did not learn them.
For this reason, I’m going to pretend that I live in Ancient Greece and so throughout the day any time I say something in English I am later going to try to say it in Greek.
Perfectionism is another thing that seriously harmed my Latin studies. I would spend 3 hours trying to write 100 Latin words because I obsessively tried to look up as much stuff up as possible and so I wouldn’t write anything because I was always worried that it was wrong. I’m not going to do that this time. This time around I’m just going to say something tolerable and later on I’ll figure out how to make it better.
Thanks, well, ‘much’ is relative. 10 is few in comparison to the numbers of the stars, but much in comparison to the number of Capitals in a nation. So I guess I meant ‘in comparison to Latin audio’.
and understand about 80% of what they’re saying. Admittedly, the conversation was about as simple as could possibly be while still being spontaneous, still it’s a very exciting achievement. For those wanting to measure their progress against mine I was able to reach this milestone after 158 hours of study. Other milestones on my bucket list, where the numbers between () indicate how many hours I think it will take to get there:
Be able to speak fluently about uncomplicated topics (400).
Be able to understand more difficult spontaneous conversations and also lectures (600).
Be able to read easy Ancient authors such as Isocrates or parts of the NT (700).
I’m a writer so I’d like to write my autobiography in AG (700).
Be able to speak about difficult topics such as philosophy, politics and religion (1000).
Understand more difficult authors such as Aristotle or Plutarch. (1200)
I don’t think I’ll be able to reach level 6:
7. Understand difficult poetry in AG (3000)
I don’t think I’ll reach level 6 because AG is just something I do on the side. I’m not trying to make a career out of it.
I should also point out, that for now I only read AG if there is an audio to go along with it. I’ve learned my lesson about reading AG silently, hint: it doesn’t work. Just like when you read English you only retain about 2% of the info, in AG it’s even less.
Also, the 158 hours does not include studying Greek while multitasking. I study a lot of Greek while driving my car or doing mindless tasks at work. My favorite exercise to do while driving is to have one hand on the wheel and another hand with a translation of a text into English of AG and then I try to translate it back into AG. Then when everything is safe I’ll sneak a peak at the AG text to see if I translated it back correctly.
Is it correct that these hour-estimates are cumulative? I.e., “3. To read easy Ancient Authors” woud require 400+600+700 hours? That would be 1700 hours, which is maybe 9 months of full-time study, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If I remember correctly, Erasmus (1466-1536) spent three years studying Greek. (I’ve never found an account of how he studied.)
I agree that harder authors require even further study.
No, the hours aren’t cumulative. I thought about whether or not people would read it that way and thought they would not but I guess I was wrong. So to be able to understand Aristotle (his easier works, the Metaphysics is hard even in translation) I think will take 1200 hours of from the time I started my studies.
I should also make a distinction between direct learning and indirect learning. Direct learning is when you’re actually studying the language, indirect learning is when you’re spending time acquiring resources to study the language (such as going to the library) which in my experience takes up a lot of time. We could also further subdivide the indirect time because a lot of that indirect time is spent writing software to study the language but when you’re writing the software to pick out the patterns of the language, you actually are learning a lot about that language’s patterns. So in my case I have 199 hours of indirect study. Eventually I want to get to the point where only 1 hour is spent on indirect study for every 3 hours of direct study but I have to finish building my Greek lemmatizer first.
But of course they never state what “learn” means. I studied Arabic for about 4000 hours between 2007 and 2009 and although I was able to learn to speak it fluently I was not able to get to the level where I could understand two native speakers talking to each other, myself excluded from the conversation. For some reason, when you become part of conversation everything is much easier. 14 years later I returned to the language and was able to increase my level in a very short two month period. Maybe I can now understand 30% of the sentences which is maybe 75% of the words in conversations of which I’m not a part. And I once counted that I can understand 88% of the words written down in a transcript of an Egyptian film. In my experience Greek is harder than Arabic given their use of declensions and given the fact that there are no native speakers. Still, I’ve studied 13 languages on maybe 22 discrete occasions (early on the majority of those studies were failures) and I really feel that this time is different. Once I get this lemmatizer built I plan to spend 4 times as much time producing original sentences as I do reading someone else’s sentences.
The cumulative understanding seems more realistic to me.
My benchmark experience is gaining enough mastery of written French to read 19th century, and early 20th, authors. Although I could already understand written French on the level of the early parts Roma Aeterna in Latin, it took me two years of 1-3 hours each day. That’s the time I spent working my way through the 3000 pages of Proust’s masterpiece, twice. Besides Proust, I read 40 or 50 of the Simenon Maigret police stories, but over a longer period of time. The Maigret stories were the first unadapted French literary texts that I could sight-read.
Nowadays I can read French literary works with pleasure, and for the most part only need the dictionary for unknown words. However I can tell from the scholarly introductions in the Bibliotheque Pleiaide books that I’m missing much nuance. There is a big difference between reading something with pleasure and commenting on the same work with the subtlety and precision of a literary scholar.
The journeys with Latin and Greek feel subjectively considerably more demanding.
I’m 85, and have been retired for a long while, so I have had time for these avocations. I hope to have enough left for my present pursuits.
Proust is actually my favorite writer of prose, though to be clear I prefer poetry. I mostly read Proust between 96 and 2001 but I reread the first volume last year. I was very curious to see if Proust would hold up now that I know so much more about the world. Besides, when I was young (I was 20 in 1996) I was very easily dazzled by the great authors and perhaps quite a few of the so-called canonized writers managed to hoodwink me with their snake-oil. It is true that on some occasions I was able to understand what magical tricks Proust was using but even though I knew there was a magical spell behind them I still managed to enjoy the reading. My favorite passages are those that attempt to describe the emotions and motivations of the characters. When I get a moment I’ll try to find some examples.