I have often ask myself if there could be a complete method of learning of an ancient language only what is necessary in order to be able to read and understand. I mean e.g. why bother to learn which cas to use after every preposition, if I don’t need to write but only to understant what I read? Has anybody else thought of that? Why bother to do translation exercises into these languages if only the opposite is necessary in order to read? I must confess that I always have skipped every exercise that is not mere reading or translation into French and now I can read and understand e.g. the Gospels in Greek and Ritchis’s Fabulae almost without dictionary, but reading just slowly in order to pay attention to cases of nouns, persons of verbs a.s.o. And I enjoy reading and just understanding, without translating. Am I completly wrong?
I’d say that for a simple text you may be able to get away with ignoring case, person, tense, etc. but you would have a hard time with more challenging texts. It’s easy to misunderstand a sentence if you don’t pay attention to those things. If you expect you will eventually want to read poetry, playwrights, history, you’re going to need the experience of having paid attention to details.
Yes, but I don’t mean cases and tenses, these must be known of course, but what case one must USE after a certain preposition ? If one never has to write or speak? Or in what circumstances you need subjonctive ?… Is it not enough just to recognize it?
Okay, I misunderstood. If you’re asking if you need to develop competence in translating sentences into Greek in order to be able to read Greek well, personally, I don’t think you do. I’d also agree that you probably don’t need to know all of the details of the various forms of conditional sentences as long as you recognize the moods being used when you’re reading. That’s just my opinion. (The use of the optative in indirect discourse in the past tense is, however, not intuitive.)
What you are asking is a very normal and healthy thing to ask. There are books that focus very much on “natural reading” and how to promote that, without having to soak up 600 pages of grammatical explanations. One famous book for Latin is called La Familia Romana, well that is the first book. For Ancient Greek, there is Athenaze, the Italian version really is better if you can read Italian. The idea is focusing on reading rather than grammar, though both of these books also instruct you on the grammar, but after the readings. Having said all this, I, personally, have come to love grammar, not as some detestable set of rules to memorize, but as recognizable patterns that will save you enormous time in learning. Just reading to learn is a cumbersome process. There are many experts on this site. I am only a low intermediate reader, but God knows I have tried a lot of methods, and what I have said works best for me.
My suggestion is begin with the reading, then begin to add some grammar for pattern recognition.
Thank you very much for advices. I have already read Familia Romana but Roma aeterna was a bit difficult so I read Ad Alpes and now Richie’s Fabulae. For the Greek I began by Koine Greek “par les textes”, than read the Gospels and then Athenaze. Now Logos which seems “easy”… I have also found that pattern recognition is very helpful in grammar e.g. in the “th” for passive, the iota for dative case… I love cases and find them very useful, and I begin to love tenses too: sometimes I miss the future infinitive in our modern languages - isn’t that funny?..
Oh, I had not read your initial note carefully enough. You have done many things. As a French person, if I understand correctly, you probably grew up with many “courses” of grammar already!
yes, the future infinitive is interesting. Don’t you find the Ancient Greek “Middle” tense rather like the French “verbes pronomineaux” ?
Yes indeed the Middle tense is like “verbes pronominaux”. Especially interesting I find also to compare the cases in ancient and modern languages and how they were reduced from the 8 Indo-European to 4 or 5 in some modern languages, to 2 in English and one in French (although there were two cases in French only 500 years ago, the second case not the same as in English!). And pronouns still have a declension in English and in French. (Please excuse my English, I am not sure of all these grammatical terms…)
French grammar is indeed more complex than the English one, especially for verbs. I first learned French as a foreign language and now, after 45 years in France and speaking French better than my native tongue, I ask myself what is the use of so many complete verb conjugations : some verbal forms I met, even in literature, once or twice in so many years and hundreds of books and many forms never. That is why I thought of a bit of “optimization” of learning langages…
I agree with what others have said. Grammar is fundamental in language (any language), but I read ancient Greek for the sake of what’s written in it. The grammar is interesting in itself, but it’s the literature that makes it truly worthwhile. The grammar can be learnt more or less by osmosis, through reading lots of Greek, but using a reference grammar too makes for efficiency.
So what I advocate is reading as much Greek as possible, in all sorts of genres, combined with more systematic study of the grammar and lexicon. But different strokes for different folks.
I think we can refine this question by splitting it up:
- Do you need ‘grammar’ to be able to read? The answer is yes, obviously, languages use grammar for meaning and relationships between words!
- Do you need to study the grammar separately from the vocabulary as an end in itself? No. You can learn by reading comprehensible texts, and there are quite a few methods out there that will help with this.
- Does producing in a language help with learning how to read in it? Absolutely.
So my answer here is that it is absolutely possible to learn to ready by reading with the right method (e.gr. LLPSI), but note that progress is slower and you may reach a ceiling, as you mention has happened with Roma Aeterna.
As someone who’s also still learning… If your goal is to read, IMO it makes sense to not worry too much about the details that matter less for recognition.
Something that I’ve learned recently-ish in the paradigm of δίδωμι, where the stem vowel varies between ω, ο and ου through its various tenses. But for recognition, the exact distribution doesn’t matter that much - there’s usually enough other clues to tell you which tense it is (at least for the level of texts I’m reading right now). So you can get away with not memorizing the vowel distribution right away.
Another example, for Latin, is that you don’t have to know that well which declension each noun is, especially when you’re reading macronized texts. If you see -īs, -ibus or -ēbus (the last being pretty rare), you know it’s plural dative/ablative and that’s usually enough for understanding the sense, even if you don’t know which declension the noun is (the gender, OTOH, matters more for recognition because you often need it to match nouns with adjectives). But by exposure you’ll eventually know which declension each noun is - for example, if you’ve seen a lot of amīcīs and no amīcibus, you’ll eventually remember that amīca/amīcus is first/second declension.
So to summarize, focusing on recognition rather than production can ease your learning curve a bit by allowing you to ignore some details initially. And when you have enough exposure you’ll acquire those details anyway, so in the end you won’t be missing much.
Thank you very much for the details; it is exactly this sort of approach that I meant. I had the same remark concerning ibus ; for δίδωμι you gave me a very good idea concerning verbs. I think there are many such “tricks” (the iota at the end of a noun : if not nominative plural it can only be a dative, whatever the declension). It would be interesting to build a sort of list of “recognition tricks” I think…
At the end of the day, it’s just pattern matching exercises, which is how you acquire languages naturally anyway, and I’m sure every learner does this subconsciously to some extent. But definitely build that list of tricks if you find it useful!
Just a small comment based on English. Many people are extremely good at reading English as a second language but are unable to write it without errors. For example, they will sometimes say unidiomatic things or misuse some propositions or words in subtle ways. But these people get perfect scores in whatever reading comprehension tests you put in front of them. I say so based on self reported scores you find online. It would be extremely hard to say these people don’t understand English with almost perfect comprehension despite not knowing all the grammar and not being able to write fully in accordance with it.
I am pretty sure Greek is the same. From my own experience, my reading skills have kept improving for 8 years now and yet I wouldn’t even know how to write a single sentence of my own.
It is exactly the case for me in English - I always read English authors in original (vocabulary was the problem in the beginning), but cannot write or speak without errors (I do try to get over this, because I need to exchange a bit in English). In Greek I also keep improving but only thing I can say (not write) is the Lord’s Prayer.
Well, I’ll just say that I find, as a teacher of Latin, that students often don’t really fully understand the concept until they are translating into Latin (we often use Magistrula). That’s when the lightbulb sometimes finally goes off in their heads.
As for prepositions, I think it’s a waste of time to try memorizing lists of what case what preposition takes. I just teach them tha a preposition either has a movement forward (accusative) sense or a motion away from or stationary sense (ablative). The dictionary states which case a preposition takes so I don’t think anything beyond that is necessary.
Please, what concept exactly do you mean they don’t understand until they are translating into Latin? Thank you.
Just generally any concept. For example, forming participles, since I did this yesterday. It was only as they were doing the English to Latin that a lof them realized that, oh, this works like an adjective and has to match. Even though we had started with the Latin to English, some didn’t quite understand until we did it the other way around. However, many of the students did understand it just from the Latin to English, but the English to Latin seems to be a way of really making sure everyone has fully understood in a way that Latin to English doesn’t always make clear. English to Latin, in other words, can unconver blind spots. Only for basic concepts though–since we don’t have native speakers and since we inadvertently will express things differently from native speakers, I don’t really agree with using Latin as a spoken language as we want to instill native patterns into students, and this can only happen by lots of exposure to authentic Latin. That’s why I wouldn’t use Familia Romana myself, and why I would only make limited use of Medieval Latin since my goal is for students to be able to read natively-spoken Latin of the period 100 BC to AD 150. But I would have them translate simple sentences into Latin. They also get a verb test in which they have to translate things like “they will be seen” into single word Latin equivalents (with the principle parts given). But you’ve become pretty fluent in English so you surely must have picked up your own best practices for learning a languaga effectively!
Thank you so much for this explanation! Very interesting also what you say about spoken / read language. In fact I was interested at first in Church latin, in order to understand also medieval latin like e.g. Stabat Mater. Of course it depends of the goal you want to achieve, as you say. I would love to read theater - that could be considered a spoken language, if it were not in verse; but there is no Latin theater in prose, is it? And my difficulty with verse is the order of words - I mean, if the goal is to read fluently, if very slowly, and to enjoy e.g. a play (if I analyse every sentence I can understand, but that is not really reading…)
Perfect writing is more a question of exposure than knowledge, surely? Most of the English speaking world doesn’t formally learn grammar these days; schools just give corrections rather than formal instruction.
I think it’s to be expected that production lag behind comprehension. I doubt such people who get perfect scores yet can’t accurately write have actually read as much as they believe.