LATIN

Wheelock's Latin. Forever.

>>8798324
Five years in hs. My section was latin/ancient greek.

It's one of the last schools in my country (Switzerland) allowing students to put such an emphasis on it. Unfortunately, they're running out of recruits when it comes to greek.

>>8798336
Not OP but are you able to read the original greek texts? Like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, John Green?

>>8798324

Orberg, only method at all likely to teach someone to read Latin as opposed to painfully and often inaccurately "decoding" it with a dictionary at the elbow.

>>8798344
I think Orberg is fine when you're in a classroom. When you study by yourself though, it becomes progressively painful.

>>8798327
Agreed.

>>8798344
This, Orberg senpai is life, and love
But cramming the cases along also helps
http://www.jonathanaquino.com/latin/
>>8798349
Actually Lingua Latina is written in a very humorous way and is basically structured like a novel. With Wheelock you're forced to decipher Cicero and Catullus with little to no context and insight.

why is latin so hard to learn?

>>8798343
Shut the fuck up Graziano

>>8798474
Only if you're an ignorant anglo monolinglet.
Europeans find latin very familiar and comfy

>>8798474
It's not.

>>8798542
true

Why wouldn't you just study a romance language that's still alive like Spanish or French?

Unless you want to be a Latin scholar, this seems pointless to me.

>>8798564
to read latin shit obviously.

>>8798474
it isn't, vocab is easy because you already use a lot of latin word even if you're an anglo, the only problem may be for people speaking languages with simple grammar like English.

>>8798573
So, you intend to waste a veritable decade of your life studying a dead language in order to read the language at a level well below that of any leading translator.

>>8798564
>>8798594
>Spanish or French
And what good would that do to me? I don't plan to ever move to Spain, latin America, or France, so as far as practicalily goes, these languages are about as useful to me as any 'dead' ones. At least ancient languages open a door to antique literature in it's original form, plus you get to be a smug cunt by studying something only few thousand people on planet Earth can speak fluently

>>8798597
I guess I just assumed you wanted to interact with and engage with living people and current texts, either on-line or in person. I guess that was a stupid assumption.

>>8798336
nice.
initiation au latin and ermaion master race

>>8798594
>decade

>>8798641
Plebeian detected.

>>8798641
it was

>>8798597
>only few thousand people
lmao wut

What's the best latin textbook I could buy to study latin by myself?

>>8798324
http://lexicity.com/resources/latin/

Enjoy.

>>8798803
Quick google search, anon. Pope himself estimated in 2013 roughly 100 fully fluent lation speakers, so you see my estimate was super optimistic. Obviously a heck lot more people can read freely and construct sentences, but reaching spoken fluency in a dead language is incredibly hard.

>>8798474

Syntax + an ambiguous case system. Greek has lots of particles and articles, plus a somewhat more analytic syntax, and a much more complete verb system which makes for fewer periphrases. The case system in Latin itself is not so much of a problem as the fact that one form could be any number of cases/numbers. "Manus" could be any of four forms, "incendio" could be either of two, "aquae" could be three, "omnis" could be four. When you have long complex sentences this can get very confusing when you're starting out, as it's easy to force the sentence into a meaning that you think is grammatically correct, when there's a much better meaning that is fully grammatically correct.

Greek is hard because of its complex morphology and unfamiliar vocabulary, which is also much larger than the vocabulary of Classical Latin. But third year Greek students can usually read Greek more fluently than third year Latin students.

>>8798949
Why by yourself? Take some private lessons, it's far better and you will learn more rapidly

>>8798324
I learnt Latin at school?
How come this place has people who has not taken latin/greek classes at school?

>>8799038
Because that costs money.

>>8799109
Because most schools don't offer it.

>>8799109
You probably grew up in an ivory tower.

>>8799109
>How come this place has people who has not
>who has not
>has not
>has
Well they sure as fuck didn't do a very good job with your English.

>>8799127
>>8799222
What kind of shitty public schools did you attend? lmao

>>8799246
>What kind
The vast majority of schools don't.

>>8799034
Just an observation- but I've noticed from my extremely limited study that Homer has rather more logical syntax than Virgil. As in, he doesn't separate words in agreement willy-nilly.
Of course, some of this is due to Virgil's higher artificiality, and some to that hexameters were developed for the Greek language and have to be forced onto Latin (honores Maroni), but...

>>8799264
And the vast majority of people read nothing but airport novels and genre fiction if they read at all

>>8799278
And this is relevant how?

>>8799283
That "but this is how the common plebs operate" is not a good excuse.

"B-but there's a lot of shit schools in my country" is no excuse for attending one.

>>8799242
D E S T R U C T U S E S T

>>8798336
>five years

valaisfags are rare and must be cherished

>>8799222
No? It was a public school. Boy, noneuropean school systems suck dont they?

I have a good knowledge of Sanskrit, would that make it easier to learn Latin and Greek? I

>>8799466
Same here, my public school taught both Latin and Ancient Greek.

Apparently that's not a thing at all in the US and you need to go to a private school to get any worthwhile education whatsoever

>>8799494
...no?

>>8799494

no you dont, you are lying on an anon forum

OP here, thanks for all the serious contributions. I got a copy of Wheelock's latin this afternoon. I might start it tomorrow.

Which languages were spawned by sanskrit same way romances by latin? Read on my copy of the Ramayana sanskrit is the grandfather of spanish, but that sounds like a stretch

File: 42c.png (616KB, 2000x2067px) Image search: [Google]

616KB, 2000x2067px

>>8801067
None. :^)

>>8801097
>Sycilian a separate language from italian

Truly, i know nothing

>>8799494
theoretically, yes because Greek and Sanskrit are pretty closely related PIE languages, but honestly I doubt if it'd help too much if you didn't also know a great deal about linguistics which would help you connect the languages.

Certainly understanding cases will be a huge benefit

>>8801255
And OP, there are so many online resources to help you. I'd suggest buying the Lingua Latina books if you find yourself getting bored with Wheelocks. Dickinson's website has some great annotated texts for beginners (probably second year stuff tho), and Tuft's Perseus website basically has the canon digitized--you can click each word even to see its form. Hugely helpful

>>8801274
Hey anon, are you referring to this one? >> http://dcc.dickinson.edu/

A friend of mine has the whole Lingua Latina set so I might take a look at those.

Thank you.

>>8801382
Will this teach me how to create copy pastas such as the one where Roman Pepe spills his pasta at the forum?

>>8801393
It's basically a phrasebook.

>>8801323
yeah. Great resource. Annotated texts, quizzes, context

First learn Italian then make the jump back

>>8801487
Does it work for greek, too?

>>8799689
Untrue, I went to a public HS in USA that had Latin; so do a lot of schools, especially in the South. Greek is pretty rare at the secondary school level though.

>>8801423
Nice. Thanks bro

>>8801067
Sanskrit's the mother of Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, and a lot of other modern Indian languages. Sanskrit's close cousin Avestan is an ancestor to modern Persian.

Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek are all cousins descending from the Indo-European protolanguage. Their other cousins include the ancestors of modern Russian and English.

Because Sanskrit is in the same language family as Spanish, there are several words that are almost identical. For example, "it is" in Sanskrit is "asti" (Spanish "está"). "Mother" in Sanskrit is "mātri" (Spanish "madre"). There are hundreds of these connections, and they even include grammatical parts of words. The Spanish word "simposio" comes from Latin ("symposium"), ultimately from Greek ("symposion"). It means people sitting together, with the prefix "syn-" carrying the meaning of "together." The Sanskrit prefix meaning "together" is "sam-".

Idk about materials for learning Latin, since I took three years in HS and four in college, but Wiktionary is super useful for beginning latinists. You can type in any form of any word and get a quick definition, often with some etymological info. It's pretty much useless for Greek, though, so for Greek I recommend Tuft University's Perseus website, which links words to their corresponding entry in the major Greek dictionaries.

Once you get better at Latin, you should definitely get used to using the Oxford Latin Dictionary, if you have access to one (many libraries have them). That's the most definitive record of classical words as they were actually used.

>>8801638
Thanks

>>8801487
No, this is an awful idea. Learn Italian from Latin to get the benefit.

>>8801487
This is absolutely retarded.

>>8801644
Learn latin through Wiktionary? Really?

>>8798594
Why is it a waste? And it's not like you are spending every second studying, you fucking idiot. And if it takes you a decade, you are probably mentally deficient.

>>8804674
Wiktionary is very useful.

>>8804810
Not for learning a language though. Don't you agree?

>>8804674
No, use wiktionary as a tool to assist with your own language learning. It gives the conjugation or declension of any word you give it. That's hugely helpful.

In hindsight, I recognize now you may be trolling