Monolingual Learning Resources ala Lingua Latina

Textkit Community Open Board
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Although I’ve received paltry welcome or replies to my posts so far, I figure it’s more important to persevere with my goals than to expect instantaneous courtesy or avid assistance. Perhaps another enthusiast trying to learn multiple languages with monolingual resources will benefit from my efforts, and for their sake, I’ll just keep walking.

I partially killed other threads discussing possible monolingual sources with what I presume to have been my overenthusiastic requests, so I’m taking the initiative to move it to this new topic and let sleeping dogs lie. Here goes:

This is a monolingual learning resource list for people to add to at their own convenience. Given that I only speak English and my damaged Spanish, I’m humbly basing my judgments on what I’ve been able to find that’s close to Lingua Latina in scope and practice. In addition to Greek and Latin, I’m including the major European languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German). All together, these are the languages I myself am trying to learn, so I’ve a vested interest in gathering recommendations and critiques. So far, I’d rank these as the “best”:

Latin: Lingua Latina per se illustrata and related materials
(Description: The ideal model for this method of a thousand names. All it needs are reconstructed Latin audio recordings for the chapters Orberg didn’t record and a monolingual lexicon.
Recordings: Upcoming, if I can find satisfactorily pronounced recordings or make them myself.
Grammatical Supplements: From what I’ve discovered, the most comprehensive Latin to Latin lexicon to date is the 1743 edition of Stephani’s lexicon, available here in a set of scans from John Adams’s personal copy.
Variants: I’m curious as to whether the Accademia editions differ significantly from the Focus issues.)

Greek: The Italian Athenaze and related materials
(Description: Aside from the Italian explanations of grammar and vocabulary and the bilingual exercises, this is the closest thing to Lingua Latina for Greek.
Recordings: The Oxford audio CD of the first five chapters for the less Hellenic English edition is available online. Recordings of the subsequent chapters of similarly high quality will be posted here once found or made.
Grammatical Supplements: Both a monolingual grammar and lexicon would be great, but the available public domain works seem to be ill-scanned or are out of my ken to judge. Once found, both would be posted here.
Variants: Said English edition has less Greek and more English, but is still one of the better English Greek textbooks along with the JACT Reading Greek course.)

Spanish: Lengua española: comprensión
(Description: This needs copyediting from what I see on Google Preview, but it looks like a spot-on imitation of Lingua Latina.
Recordings: If I can acquire a copy of this book, I could make audio for it with my Latin American native pronunciation.
Grammatical Supplements: La Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) is the authority on Spanish, whether I like it or not. Whether their judgments are entirely justifiable I cannot say, but from what I’ve read, their dictionary, grammar, orthography guide, and usage guide are all extremely well done and thorough. There is both a Nueva gramática básica and an Ortografía básica that function nicely as monolingual learning tools for beginners and a Diccionario práctico del estudiante that is partially written to include us Latinos with our impure diction. Unlike the French Academy, the RAE is very enthusiastic about teaching foreigners and criollos correct spanish, so there are many resources from El Instituto Cervantes available, including online resources such as Practica Español that are intuitive and mono- or bilingual.
Variants: Also available on the Internet Archive or Google Books are Hall, Worman, Diez de la Cortina, etc. but as a native speaker of a living language I find most of their vocabulary and syntax choices unrealistically fussy and outdated (not to mention racist in Worman’s case!).

For French, Italian, and English, it just so happens that Orberg’s original collaborator on the Nature Method made identical books in each language respectively. If any French or Italian speakers are willing to record audio, I’d gladly post it here. I’m probably going to record the English audio myself at some point soon.
English and Italian are not nearly as regulated as Spanish and French are, but Oxford is considered the authority for the Queen’s English. As soon as I get my Greek and Latin down and fix my Spanish, I’ll tackle this group and post appropriate resources.

For German, there seems to be nothing close to these books, but Worman’s German set (lessons plus graded reader and grammar) looks very good in comparison to his other readers. I’m planning to take a while with the classical and romance languages before tackling this tongue.

And with that, I’ll return to my personal studies.

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Ok, excuse me?

I figure it’s more important to persevere with my goals than to expect instantaneous courtesy or avid assistance

. What exactly are you saying here? That the fact that people aren’t flocking to aide you is somehow rude? People are busy. Moreover this is an old forum with a lot of data on it. Obviously the point of fora contra websites is the more instantaneous format but the other benefit is, yes, the archived information. This is somewhat of a tedious question that comes up here now and then. More importantly posters like Markos have worked pretty tiredly on gathering both inductive and monolingual resources.

Furthermore, and I’m not sure how to say this, honestly the whole endeavour looks rather foolish. I mean in the other thread on “Demotic” you’ve posted a Greek school kid grammar. Let me re-emphasis that. I have half a dozen battered copies, they’re given to 11 year olds, and you are asking if that can replace Smyth. I have a huge set of leather-bound dictionaries, they’re L&S, translated into puristic Greek and you know what? They’re useless. They’re useless because there are new editions and studies out. They’re useless because the definitions are often vague and unhelpful cf to the English originals too. Modern Greek materials aren’t going to be inherently better than English or German or French. In many ways they’re much worse. You’d have to be touched in the head to want to use Babiniotis over Horrocks. Certifiable. Nor does this count as monolingual.

You’re running around in circles trying to find material that doesn’t exist while ignoring the small amount of decent stuff already posted on this site like, for example: http://www.scholiastae.org/docs/el/greek_grammar_in_greek.pdf

If you want to make a thread compiling everything, great. I think that would be helpful, but I’m warning you you’re unlikely to find much. Anything of quality will already be known to us and a lot of stuff out there is actually bad, but the enthusiasts seem only sporadically to grasp that fact. People aren’t deliberately ignoring you. There’s a paucity of material. That said, I’ll be happy to help search when I’ve sent off my current project grant proposals but there’s a reason people use what they use.

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Scribo,

Please don’t misunderstand: I meant for that statement to reflect that I don’t expect any instantaneous support. Literally, free of resentment–I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t expect anything of the sort, and what you’re saying about people being busy and the forum being loaded with this kind of data is what I basically intuited from the lack of responses. I apologize for seeming foolish or overeager, as I did in the first post, and I appreciate your response. The purpose of this thread is exactly what you noted, to go through the forums and websites and post what I find in one place. Whether or not it’s bountiful is besides the point: what matters is that these resources become available in one place.

Annis’s website has been helpful for me in the past, and I will make sure to continue using it for my studies. I understand your frustration with my questions about Demotic, but be assured, I’m only a beginner and this is the pursuit of an amateur, so please be patient as I navigate what you’re clearly an expert in. What else would you recommend for me to avoid any future foolishness?

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I’m not saying you’re foolish. You’re just eager in something all of us were originally to some degree or other but eventually will meet the same wall as all of us. There’s literally next to nothing and in that sense it is foolish. Markos is the only one of us with some success and even that is extremely limited.

The gold mark is Orberg and nothing comes close. I doubt it even can and others have discussed the problem with such a method for Greek. Carolus Raeticus has some Latin-Latin dictionaries incidentally.

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It seems sometimes being not good at English is an advantage… I did not understand what it was saying at the beginning of OP, so I did not get the point why Scribo is so angry hah~

I am using the book of Lingua Latina per se illustrata. It is a great book. But I can not accept its audios. I prefer classical pronunciation while it is ecclesiastical. I will very appreciate it if you could record a classical version.

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Hello,

I remember not answering your post in the Latin forum because I wasn’t sure of what you meant by “monolingual Latin Resources”. For me every book in Latin is a “monolingual Latin resource”, and putting a link to every book ever published in Latin wasn’t something I wanted to do :slight_smile:

At the end of your post, you asked for

but even this is too vague as there are dozens (hundreds ?) of Latin grammars in Latin. So my guess is that you would have got more answers by being more specific about what kind of resources you want (grammar, texts,…), for which level (total beginner, beginner, intermediate), which kind of Latin (Classical, Medieval, Renaissance,…), etc.

This approach (“can you help me find this exact kind of book I need/am interested in now ?”) seems more interesting to me and less time consuming than listing a whole corpus of monolingual resources.

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Apologies once again! You’re completely right, and I should’ve been specific. In Latin and Greek, I’m hoping to gather together sources suitable for beginners to intermediate learners in the classical versions of both languages. Something I’m especially curious about are descriptive grammars and rhetoric handbooks with writing exercises ala Sedgwick, but I’ll take my chances for now.

Why did I flounder into Demotic and generalize? At first I was hoping for anything, but instead, I’ve decided to use what I have (Lingua Latina and the Italian Athenaze), record audio for both, and go looking for more when I’ve improved a little. I don’t want to continue my foolish floundering in vain, so as Scribo suggested, I’m trying to do a more thorough search on my own and limiting my activities to this thread. I would delete the other threads out of embarrassment if I weren’t trying to move on past my fumbling, as I originally confessed *in what must’ve been unclear terms to irritate Scribo so).

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For German I would recommend Harold Von Hofe’s Im Wandel der Jahre (and some other books he wrote). They’re not quite monolingual - English definitions in the margins, but they’re really good.

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hi, i definitely think monolingual resources are the way to go for vocab (but maybe not for other areas of learning), because you make the link between the word being defined and the words used in the definition. i.e. the definition of X is YZ. Then when you see X again it reminds you of Y and Z, and when you see Y or Z it reminds you of X, etc etc. it keeps looping you into the language and reinforces vocab retention.

vocab retention at my stage is the key point to work on, and this is in my 10 years+ of learning classics the most effective way to keep this engine running. learning vocab by referring out to another language just means the vocab disappears away with time.

the key thing which unlocks this, and the key resource that you should try to collect if you’re keen about this, is versions of the classics with scholia, and on the latin side look up delphini editions, you can get scans of lots of them for free online.

i have a few editions of the iliad at home, in one version (monro’s version) i spent months scribbling in english my notes on rare vocab etc. when i came back to this after time away i retained little of it. then when i found editions of the iliad with scholia, i no longer needed to use any other resources to read the iliad and even now the word links i made years ago between homeric vocab and attic vocab are still there, maybe because of my continuous attic reading. now i don’t use the monro version anymore, just the ones with scholia or clean versions.

as i said this applies to vocab - i don’t know if learning about latin grammar written in latin vs latin grammar written in english makes much difference, because you don’t get that looping reinforcing effect I was referring to above – perhaps there is a benefit, but i’d like to see that clearly explained.

i also personally write all my notes on my texts in the same language as the text (ie i create my own scholia), but that’s a personal pref, and i have aquired some monolingual dictionaries (e.g. discussed here a few years ago: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/latin-latin-dictionary/7800/1 ) but the key useful resource is texts annotated with scholia.

it’s quite easy to find editions with scholia, editions usually refer to that in the title, just google “cum scholiis” and you’ll find lots.

i don’t know however if you could replicate the benefits of using monolingual resources by studying books of synonyms. maybe! the concept is the same, understand how a group of words link together semantically, which can replace another etc and then every time you see one of them it will trigger in your head, maybe consciously maybe not, the map of the relations. i got in through the monolingual resources but there may be other ways equally good.

hope that helps!

cheers, chad

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Hi, Chad,

I like the phrase. I have been trying to articulate why I prefer mono-lingual resources in Ancient Greek to the Indirect Method of Grammar-Translation. I have a hard time expressing it. “It is impossible to say just what I mean.” I really like thee, Dr. Fell/the reason why I cannot tell. Maybe one has to experience the reinforcing loop to see its value? Or is that too facile?

as i said this applies to vocab - i don’t know if learning about latin grammar written in latin vs latin grammar written in english makes much difference, because you don’t get that looping reinforcing effect I was referring to above – perhaps there is a benefit, but i’d like to see that clearly explained.

I think you may have a point. I don’t much like meta-language in either L1 or L2 because they are both a type of anti-loop, they take you AWAY from the language, forcing you to see it in alien terms. I do think the anti-loop is stronger in English than in Greek, if for no other reason that limited fluency in writing Greek forces your L2 meta-language to be less hair-splittingly nuanced than your L1. For me, the anti-loop gets stronger the more detailed the meta-jargon becomes. Smyth, for example, because his English is so brief and because he always quickly provides Greek examples, is less of an anti-looper than most.

My working hypothesis is that simplified Ancient Greek paraphrase can replace the need for either translation or meta-language. I hope, at some point, to be proven either right or wrong. But my experience with, say, Gaza’s Attic paraphrase of the Iliad or with Phillpotts simplified Greek paraphrase of the Anabasis, has led me to believe that L2 paraphrase can produce that same reinforcing loop back into the language of which you speak. Or, at the very least, it avoids the anti-loop that Grammar-Translation of necessity produces.

But that’s an experience, and not, as you seek, a clear explanation. I wish I could do better.

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The internet archive has Initium: a first Latin course on the direct method by Appleton and Jones. It is mostly monolingual. Also, you may want to check out the Palaestra materials by Avellanus.

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Rouse’s Greek Boy explains new vocabulary in simple Greek.

Volume 2 of Greek Boy is a Greek to Greek vocabulary.

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Actually, the first books I found which were in the vein of “Lingua Latina” happened to be for learning German.
In fact, I found these before I found Familia Romana and the whole Lingua Latina set.

The books are a set by Hermann Kessler, generally titled “Deutsch für Ausländer”.
I found a link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Deutsch-für-Ausländer-Leichter-Anfang/dp/3801800075

They (or the first at least) are a bit more boring and repetitive than Familia Romana, but very much the same kind of thing, and helped me very much in my learning.