I’ve been working fairly hard on Latin, for seven years. Not less that one hour, seven days a week, with rare intermissions. And usually two or three hours. Although I understand easy authors like Cornelius Nepos pretty well, Horace is fiendishly difficult, as anybody can see from my queries. Sometimes I get discouraged.
Part of this is due to self-teaching. I know from sitting in modern foreign-language classes that the pupil who pays attention learns not only from his own errors, corrected by the teacher, but also from the corrected errors of the other pupils. She learns from teacher questions areas in which she is weak, that she was not aware of. Self-tuition doesn’t do this.
Because I’m 77, I worry that I might have suffered cognitive decline, that I just don’t learn this kind of material as readily as I once did. Could be, but part of my motive for studying Latin, and reading other difficult texts, is to stay alive mentally.
I compare the experience of Latin study with my experience of learning literary French about 20 years ago. I could already read simple French nonfiction prose and easy literature, but I wanted to read more demanding literature with pleasure. So, I started on Proust’s masterpiece, and worked through it. The first time took two years, working every day. After that, I read through it twice more. Now I can read whatever I want in modern French literature, and with some pleasure.
So, those who have been answering my queries, especially mwh and Hylander, I hope you won’t grow impatient with me. If it seems that I am a slow student, please believe that I am grateful for your help. Even if I never reach a mastery of literary Latin, well the journey toward it has its own rewards.
Don’t feel bad at all. It’s not senility: I just turned 31 and have been making only slow (occasionally-frustratingly so) progress. I’m also amazed at how rapidly kids move in college, and I figure that classroom study (as well as being in an intellectually-rich environment often with little outside responsibility) is a big factor in that. With self-teaching you pretty much have to be perfect, and my (and I imagine your) work is far from that.
Don’t despair. You’re miles ahead of where I am and I’ve always been impressed by your ability to read raw (i.e. without commentary) Horace.
I wouldn’t be discouraged. As I wrote previously, I found Horace’s Satires especially difficult, even for Horace, when I read them a couple of years ago. The Odes are difficult because of the compression and allusiveness. For me, Vergil and Ovid are easier, at least on the surface.
I think modern languages, at least European ones, are easier for all of us. The concepts, the vocabulary, the turns of thought, and even the syntax, are more familiar. The vocabulary, in particular, “maps” more closely onto English. I had picked up Thucydides again, but then decided I needed to refresh my Russian, so I launched into Doestoevsky’s Idiot a week or so ago, and even though I haven’t read much of anything in Russian for a while, I was surprised at how much easier it is compared to Thucydides.
You’re ahead of me on Proust: I’ve only read it twice. But you have a few years on me–not many, but a few–and maybe I’ll read it through once again.
I’m sure everyone who’s responded to your queries is happy to be of help, and I for one have great admiration for what you are doing, and believe it’s an excellent way to stave off mental decline. (That’s partly why I participate in Textkit myself, to keep me alert.) No-one learns as quickly in their seventies (or even in their thirties, witness swtwentyman) as in their childhood and teen years, and I think you have no reason to be discouraged. Your questions are always sharp and to the point, and show how well you are coping with Latin that no-one finds at all easy. So far as I can judge, you’re making great progress. So keep it up, and remember we’re all with you, even though it can’t compare with a classroom environment!
Thanks to swtwentyman, mwh, and Hylander for the helpful words. The moment of that post was at night, when I encountered a Horace quotation on the title page of a book, and it was so hard that I despaired.
I must remember Scarlett O’Hara’s self-help motto: “I won’t think about that now. I’ll think about that tomorrow; tomorrow is another day.”
It’s morning now, and it is another day. Time to get going on Horace, Satires, II, 2.
I don’t have much Latin, but I’m sure that like the Greek that I’m studying it is harder for us than modern European languages, for reasons given by Hylander.
But I’d like to add that while learning, especially language acquisition, does get harder with age, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with cognitive decline. When we learn, certain neural connections are reinforced and others – the ones we don’t need (or the ones we thought we don’t need) – are weakened or discarded. While children are quick to learn, they are also quick to forget. A little child can forget their native language in a year or two, but I’m sure this ability to forget things quickly is intimately connected with the ability to learn fast. In one experiment, infants were able to distinguish all the different sounds that occur in different languages, but by the age of two (if I remember correctly) they could distinguish only the ones that occur in the languages spoken around them. “Pruning” unused neural connections is just as much a prerequisite of learning as consolidating the ones that are used. The fact that learning new things gets harder with ageing is the downside of having acquired skills and knowledge hardwired to our brains; that’s what allows us humans to accumulate decades of experience. Twenty years later you still know your French – that shows that once the work is done, it’s done, and there’s no way of taking that French out from there.