Hello Bedware, remember me?
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/i-memorized-the-first-100-lines-of-the-iliad-and-i-barely-know-greek/20777/1
I was briefly part of your San Diego Latin circle reading group back in late 2021. I bought a house in Maryland so I had to leave the group but it was sure fun while it lasted. In any case, here’s what eventually happened to my Latin studies:
- I spent too much time putting the cart before the horse, that is to say, I spent too much hung up on the length of vowels when I hadn’t even mastered the basis of Latin yet.
- Computer programming is addictive, so I spent too much time trying to build databasis of Latin words and rules. This was a good idea if one was trying to make a career out of Latin, but not if someone is a mere amateur.
- I spent too much time of recognition versus production. I probably spent 10 minutes trying to read Latin for every 1 minute trying to speak it or reproduce it. The ratio I now use is 4 minutes of production for every 1 minute of recognition.
Anyway, I’m setting aside 50 hours of week studying Greek for the next 20 weeks to learn Greek, not making the same mistakes I made with Latin.
Welcome to Textkit, Caelum!
welcome here!
50 hours per week is a huge commitment!
How’s it going? I am wondering if you are able to keep that pace!
Really? As a computer engineer, I find linguistics to be far more addictive. My mother often criticizes me for that, because I am studying linguistics instead of programming or other parts of computer engineering.
@Karagialis I had a lot of mistakes in my computer code for analyzing AG and I decided to correct them. I was hoping it would take 100 hours. 700 hours later I’m still correcting them. My perfectionism just won’t let me stop and I cannot put the project down. I’ve decided i’m just going to have to try to plan out a list of tasks and try to stick to that list and when the tasks are done I’m going to have to try to stop coding even though I know it will be hard. In any case, to answer your question, when I am simply coding, I can code between 60 hours and 70 hours a week. But remember I have no family, do not go to school and have a job which requires only one hour of work on an 8 hour shift. (I work night shift at a hotel). When I study exclusively the Greek language, it is more difficult to maintain 60+ hours per week because it is more taxing to the mind. Then my productivity rate drops to maybe 50 hours. i have the exact numbers but i haven’t compiled them yet.
@flatassembler maybe it depends on the type of code you’re writing. maybe if it is code that is your own pet project it is more addictive whereas writing code in service of a company is far less addictive. as for linguistics being addictive, yea, you’re talking to a studyaholic so you’re not going to get much push back from me on this issue. i’m addicted to studying in general, but in my experience writing code has been so much more addictive than all my other academic pursuits. foreign language study is, for me at least, also very addictive but I have found that early on in the study it is very addictive but then once you’ve learned the top 1000 words and start trying to learn the words ranked 1000-4000 that is much more difficult and consequently less addictive.