Hello! I am a PhD candidate and a medievalist. I have been learning Latin essentially as an autodidact (while also auditing courses at my university) for the past four years. In addition, two years ago I attended the Summer Greek Workshop at UC Berkeley, and then audited a number of classes in Ancient Greek, as well. My current field is Old French, but I am cultivating a broader late antique/medieval perspective in order to understand the overall cultural and historical context of my own subject matter. I am particularly inspired by the fluency and flexibility of scholars like Peter Brown in handling and interpreting a wide array of textual materials from different eras, and, following Brown’s example (e.g. the way he reads Cicero with Augustine in his studies of the latter), consider it important to have a solid understanding of the ancient culture that underpinned that of the Middle Ages, both in the West and in Byzantium.
Of course, my ambitions are still a long way from any sort of fruition. While I am by now a reasonably proficient, if slow, reader of most sorts of Latin (though my lexicon still leaves something to be desired), reading texts in Greek is invariably a long slog involving constant help from a dictionary. I have read John, bits of Plato, 2-4 books from each of the Homeric epics, Euripides’ Helen and some snippets of the impossible Thucydides. The Greek Workshop provided a great grounding in grammar, and so I find vocabulary to be the most difficult aspect of the language by far. I am considering reading some of Euclid’s Elements next in order to immerse myself in abstract vocabulary and abstract reasoning in Greek, though I would also like to read one of Plato’s dialogues from start to finish. I hope that a community such as Textkit, to whose forums I have sometimes referred over the years, might help structure and focus my practice of Greek, given the other demands on my attention imposed by graduate studies.