I’m a 61 year old dabbler at language learning. I’m going to drift off the ancient language topic a tiny bit in this post, just to introduce myself.
I studied Latin in high school, and got to the point where I could barely begin to read Caesar, and I haven’t done much with it since. I learned Samoan to a quite good level (for a foreigner) when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa. I learned Tagalog while I worked in a refugee camp in the Philippines.
A few years ago my interest in ancient languages was reawakened when I read (in translation of course) through some of the “Great Books” from Moritmer Adler’s list. This really stirred up my interest in ancient Greek, and I bought a copy of Pharr’s Homeric Greek, and made it through the first few chapters before I got distracted.
The past three years, I have spent learning Spanish on my own. I’ve reached a point of diminishing returns, I could be a great tourist and pretty much talk about anything with people (if they don’t talk too fast
, and I can read things at the newspaper/Harry Potter level. Great literature still demands a dictionary.
I did some reading about medieval Spanish, which leads naturally to Latin.
I stumbled across this site, and learning an ancient language looks fascinating. I’m surprised that there are even audio resources available now. I learned much of my Spanish from Assimil, including a lot of repeated shadowing, which is the next best thing to a conversation in my opinion. I am not planning to give up my life to study ( I like my life
, but I’m going to start plugging away at Adler-Milner materials, and maybe a bit of Ollendorff Greek. I have a language habit or doing an hour of Spanish after dinner; I’m going to add Latin, and maybe acient Greek, into the mix. I really don’t know what I’m doing with ancient Greek…
Sorry about the long post.
Welcome! You’ve learned an impressive number of languages, and it sounds like you learned most of them in the best way possible–by speaking them. It’s a bit harder to do that with Latin and Greek, but it sounds like you know how to find good resources.