Salvete, All,
Thank you for receiving me at Textkit. I hold an administrative position at UCLA and am working on a doctorate there in the English Department (with a focus on Middle Welsh and Middle English texts), though I’m not currently enrolled. I have small Latin and less Greek, but love studying both and look forward to improving.
Unluckily, no one in my family or schooling stressed the merits of studying Latin or Greek, and I took Spanish courses instead. My first study of Latin came as I made the decision to apply to graduate school in medieval and early modern English. I already knew that a knowledge of Latin would be critical to that pursuit, but I didn’t realize that I would choose that pursuit until shortly before I applied, ha. I don’t regret studying Spanish, but given a time machine I’d replace it with Latin and Greek.
I spent the summer before my first term at graduate school going through Wheelock and made it up to the chapters where extended readings from Caesar begin. I had found learning the forms easy and fun, but Caesar defeated me with syntax. Also my grad classes started, which soon squeezed out much of my time for Latin studies. That was almost 17 years ago. I tried again about three years later with Jones and Sidwell’s Reading Latin, which one of my professors recommended. The first half of the book rooted its reading exercises in Plautus (Aulularia for Section 1, Bacchides Section 2 and Amphitryon Section 3), which I enjoyed. The second half shifted its emphasis to Cicero (In Verrem for Section 4), but I didn’t make it that far before abandoning Latin studies again in favor of whatever grad-school or teaching responsibilities pressed on me at the time. I also participated in a grad-student Latin group around that time, but we only made it through a few chapters of Wheelock before disbanding.
My next Latin foray happened maybe five years later, and that time I used Moreland and Fleischer’s Latin: An Intensive Course. Believe I made it about 2/3 through the book before lapsing again. Around that same time, I made my first effort at Greek, planning to work with a friend (who’d already studied a decent amount of Greek) on going first through Wilding’s Greek for Beginners and then Pharr’s Homeric Greek. In the event, we made it through a few chapters of Wilding, but soon scrapped our plan.
Then about three years ago came yet another Latin attempt. Rather than pick up another beginner’s textbook, I wanted to read an actual Latin text, one of my own choosing, and commit it to memory. After cruising the “Latin Per Diem” YouTube channel, I settled on Virgil’s first Eclogue and ordered the Loeb edition. I found the YouTube channel great for plunging me into the poem quickly – grammar, metrics, context – and then I’d spend time consulting the grammar from my Moreland and Fleischer volume for each word, though as time went on I found myself using Wiktionary instead. I was taking a sick friend’s dog on daily walks during that time, and Wiktionary proved the more practical grammar for those. I’d alternate between reciting and memorizing the lines of the Eclogue and doing the same with paradigms for the various words and etymologies (since I have a strong interest in Indo-European studies, though little experience). I made it a little over halfway committing the eclogue to memory – right up to the second “Fortunate senex” – before once again giving over my studies.
Since that time I finally dropped out of my graduate program – though I still plan to finish one of these decades if I’m so fortunate – and took a full-time administrative position at UCLA in the office where I’d already worked part-time for many years (having exhausted my teaching allotment and sought other income on campus). With my time somewhat my own now outside of work hours, and with my career track no longer aimed at academia, I feel little pressure to rush my dissertation anymore and hope to gain now, at last, the grounding in Latin and Greek that I’ve only grasped at in short bursts the last two decades (almost). Over the last month or two, I picked up the first Eclogue again, this time starting from the end and working my way back, and am finally able to recite the whole piece. This time, I didn’t place as much emphasis on absorbing the grammar, as I feel I finally have enough of that to muddle through and just look up things here and there as needed.
I’m also working to memorize pieces of medieval Christian liturgy, mainly Psalms, since that bears on my dissertation (certainly to a greater degree than Virgil at any rate). I plan to keep working through the Eclogues, though not memorize them all, and on through the Georgics and Aeneid before turning to Ovid and Horace. I’ll also use the Latin Per Diem site to take detours into other Latin (and Greek) writers for fun. I’ve just starting going through some of the Greek videos on Latin Per Diem over the last week, committing the first two lines of the Iliad to memory. I’ve also started on Pharr’s Homeric Greek again, so far just reading through the introductory materials and refreshing myself on pronunciation and metrics. I hope to read through the entire Iliad and Odyssey, then move to Hesiod and Pindar, then on to the Athenian dramatists and Plato. That should keep me occupied for the next ten years or so, ha.
So there we are – almost seventeen years trying to get myself some semblance of a Classical education, yet still a novice. Not the most exciting odyssey, but it’s mine. I hope the next seventeen years of study will prove more consistent. I’m thrilled at the prospect, anyhow, and love engaging with the material.