Anyone here learning an ancient language? I'm learning

I've been learning Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classical Arabic for decades. More recently I got into Sanskrit.

Latin is trivially easy, not to spoil your party too much. Sanskrit will rape your anus repeatedly.

Are there any online resources for learning Latin?

>>1846550
Yeah, tons.

Best to work from a textbook however, since then you can follow it rather than not being sure on what to learn next. Also focus on grammar first.

>>1846535
>Latin is trivially easy

hmm, you think so? I only speak English so all of these strange grammar rules are confusing the hell out of me.

Got any tips for a beginner? My lecturer keeps telling us to read as much as we can, but we're not really at that stage yet. Even simply sentences still mess me up.

>>1846566
As far as languages go, Latin is very regular and easy. Back in the day, Latin grammar was taught from an early age, and through it, also English grammar. These days, neither of the grammars are taught.

Tips: practise every day without fail. You'll get better over a few years.

It's rediculous.
At the same time, i feel, Latin is absolutely needed if you're into medieval/early modern history.
English: this
Latin: nom: hic haec hoc
gen: huius
dat: huic
acc: hunc hanc hoc
abl: hoc hac hoc
English: these
Latin: nom: hi hae haec
gen: horum harum horum
dat: his
acc: hos has haec
abl: his

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>>1846608
writes rediculous
talks about languages

>>1846605
>and through it, also English grammar.

Which was a mistake and gives us such things as proscribing "split infinitives" when such things are perfectly normal and natural in Germanic languages.

>>1846608
Yeah, you really need it if you want to do a masters in ancient history/medieval studies. Need at least 1 year of study, and it's better if you've got more.

Gonna go study pronouns today, since I fucked them up on the test last Friday. Also got to learn around 50 words from the 2nd declension for this weeks vocab. Kill me now.

>>1846514

Does Hebrew count? Because it's both an ancient and a modern (revived) language.

>>1846643
Yeah of course.

How are you finding it anon?

>>1846657

Reasonably but not absolutely difficult. I don't really have much linguistic training overall, and Hebrew grammar is weird. Furthermore, you get all kinds of stuff where you just don't have clean translations from words to and from English, it works off of a completely different set of categorizations.

For instance, it's often considered a minor stylistic mistake to phrase a sentence passively in English.

>John went outside to throw out the garbage

feels a lot more natural than

>The garbage was thrown out by John, who went outside to do so.

In Hebrew, sometimes you're supposed to use passive sentences, and other times you're not, and while I can kind of intuitively note when you are and aren't, certain formations just feel wrong, I can't kind of come to a formulation as to when you do and when you don't, which is annoying.

>>1846804
I don't know Hebrew, but most (all?) semitic languages are based on three-consonant roots.

SLM. SaLaM = peace. iSLaM = one who is at peace. The trick is where you put the vowels, which varies with subject and tense and a host of minor pronunciation factors. Of course, like all languages, this system is subject to 'erosion' over time, which is really just the way people speak in everyday situations. Humans like to save effort and make it easier to pronounce certain combinations, so the theoretical three-consonant root may show elisions, or maybe one consonant switches in some cases.

Also, you're learning Hebrew. Not English, or Heeblish/Engbrew or whatever else. You just have to accept that the structures of another language are not always like those of your own native language (unless you're lucky, and learning a related language from the same family). It's easier said than done, but you've got to try to think directly in a language. This will come with time. DO NOT TRANSLATE.

>>1847337


Root structure and conjugation wasn't quite what I was getting at, in fact, that's one of the easier parts, I'm sorry I wasn't clear in how I was explaining things. It's really overall sentence grammar that's more giving me trouble, because


A) it's not structured anything like English grammar.

B) There are grammatical nuances that are conveyed in Hebrew that are skipped over in English that are just tough to wrap my head around.

Going back to the passive sentence choice example from above; if you said something in the passive voice, you'll sound funny in English, and VERY occasionally you'll use it to demonstrate the sentence subject's passivity, or when the actor is unknown. For example

>John got mugged

is probably more elegant than a lot of active constructions, where the mugger's identity is either unknown or unimportant.

Hebrew uses passive voice a lot. And conjugation aside, you have not quite grammatical rules but implicit assumptions about when and where you should be using it. For instance, a lot of the time, passive voices are used to indicate relative social status in Hebrew; someone doing something on behalf of a superior often gets the sentence rendered in a passive voice.

So for the taking out the garbage example, let's pretend John is an adult and a married man. In Hebrew, the choice between active and passive would imply who really wears the pants in the relationship, when you don't have something like that in English.

That's the sort of stuff that's tripping me up, not individual word translation or conjugation or vowel placement.

>>1846629
Indeed. At least the Latin grammarians showed how grammar should be analysed or taught.

>>1846632
> 50 words
Should take you an hour max.

Took me about a year and a half to start reading roman literature with confidence. Learning it was a fun and quite effortless experience, you can probably get there faster with a stronger commitment. However, speaking latin is nigh impossible, so I wouldn't consider myself 'fluent'

>>1847475
> speaking latin is nigh impossible
Why? We know exactly how it was pronounced.

>>1846514
I fucking hate my Latin class so much, the students are stuck-up assholes who took Latin for 19 years before taking this course and the professor is a complete dickhead, any mistake I made is shoved in my face and I'm ridiculed on a daily basis

Although I am learning Latin pretty well

>>1846566
>so all of these strange grammar rules are confusing the hell out of me.
Holy fuck this, my exact problem with Latin right now. I never learned any of this shit before, so I have to learn English and Latin basically

>>1847484
I meant the absolute void of practice oppotunities. As someone to whom english is not a native language, I can see how important it is to be immersed in a language in order to learn it. The only immersion you get with a dead language is it's literary corpus

Ancient Greek and Latin. Holy fuck, I regret everything, and I am speaking as an Italian native speaker.

>>1847504
I'm trying to learn Latin so I can get to Italian better. Oh and Spanish, French, and Portuguese

>>1846608
Latin grammar is full of patterns that make it all easier. Pronouns follow the same general rules as declined nouns, for example, plural genitive will always end in -orum or -arum depending on a gender of the noun, and plural dative and ablative always end in the same way

>>1846622
rideberis: (You) (singular) will be laughed

>>1847532
> plural genitive will always end in -orum or -arum
Except those ending in -um, -rum, or -uum.

>>1847817
ridiculosus, full of laughter/mocking

I learned Hebrew for ten years but dont really use it anymore

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Doing ancient Greek right now. Using Hansen and Quinn's Greek: an intensive course, which from the looks of it, seems to be the best Greek textbook out there.

So far it's been pretty fun, and I like the mental challenge of memorizing all the declensions and conjugations and arcane grammar rules and then using them to read some actual ancient shit.
At the same time, it's also a real pain in the ass -- we're learning irregular verbs (εἴμι and εἶμι seem identical but are two completely different highly irregular, highly used verbs), and I still haven't fully memorized the conjugations for -μι verbs

I know Latin well, but Classical Greek I know to some degree, not very well.
Both were waste of time, should've learn Korean instead. I regret doing it.

Sure, its great from time to time to go back to casually reading Caesar in Latin, but come on. Why?

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>tfw learning solo

Stuff like this is confusing the hell out of me. Especially when apparently The doesn't exist in latin but it keeps putting the in the proper english translation.

I took Latin during high school. I didn't like it at first but it came to grow on me. I don't remember much of it because I haven't kept up with the language which is a shame because the class was actually intensive, but at the least I got a NLE award out of it.
I have a question for you well versed in Latin, is Lupa in fact slang for whore, and how different is the Latin spoken in the Vatican compared to classical Latin?

>>1847408
Interesting. Yea, English is a fairly 'egalitarian' language, in terms of grammar, cases (practically non-existent in modern English) and honorifics and such. We can add extra modal verbs, make a sentence more and please'n'thank yous to make 'subservience'/politeness clear. You could also use third person or just particular vocab, but you don't have to be particularly conscience of the sentence structure itself.

I also speak German (for about 7 years now), and it's a language that forces you to be conscious of social status as well, though probably not as much as, say, Japanese or apparently Hebrew.

Another thing though is that people will detect your accent and that you're not a native-speaker, and usually will cut you some slack and gloss over your mistakes for what you meant to say. Especially for Hebrew, many of whose speakers are first-gen immigrants.

>>1847475
Yea I took a year of Latin in high school. We mostly focused on reading and translating, not much speaking or composition. What I did learn I felt was relatively easy, and I aced both courses, but as it was only the first two levels it wasn't any super exotic grammar.

>>1847492
Yea, rare knowledge is sometimes considered an insiders club. They so rarely get the validation they are soooooo smart (in Latin), that the revel in any chance to bask in their relative knowledge. Can you not quietly respectfully complain? That you are after all a beginner?

I teach English, and really... although correction is important, it is obvious that too much too soon will kill motivation and enthusiasm in learners. I always give grammar correction feedback at the end of a class, anonymous of who made the mistake (they'll know anyway).

>>1847509
I'd just go straight to Italian or Spanish in that case. Latin is the parent language, but it's a different beast. All the modern romance languages have a much-reduced grammar, plus major vocab and spelling differences.

Italian is probably the easiest romance language. Spanish is a bit more divergent, but I think the basics are not too hard. With it, the switch to Portuguese is somewhat logical (just don't let Spanish grammar/vocab interfere with Portuguese!). There are consonant and vowel shifts and vocab is used differently, of course.

French is probably the most divergent major Latin-based language (I don't know about Romanian), thanks to all those bloody Gauls and medieval peasants.

>>1849564
Yes lupa was slang for whore (lupanar : brothel).

Latin spoken in Vatican today differs from classical mostly in pronunciation (kikero vs. chichero), but the grammar rules are basically the same.