How to read Middle and Old English

I had the exact same ambition once, I gave up after finding no proper language learning mechanism for Old English save some YouTube videos. Middle English is fairly easy to get the hang of after a while for an English speaker, given it's post-latinization.

>>9106587
Chaucer's dialect of Middle English is close enough to modern English that you can go into it blind and be fine (as long as you've got an annotated copy so you don't have to look up what "eek" means every time it comes up). if you have problems with certain lines, Harvard has a line by line translation (http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/CTlist.html) that is rather helpful. Old English is more difficult, and I read a translation of Beowulf so I can't really comment on it

>>9106736
>>9106771
thanks

>>9106587
Read The Pearl Poet, Gawain and the Green Knight is his most famous work

>>9106813
I have looked into this and it seems very interesting, but like I say the language is very obscure, how did you learn to understand it?

>>9106796
Reading it out loud helps a lot too since there wasn't a standard writing for words.

>>9106587
HENRY SWEET

>>9106587
bear in mind that what you're asking for here, are just shortcuts. At some point in your pursue, you'll eventually have to just jump into the works and gain proficiency just as slowly and painfully as with any other second language.

if at any point you feel lost and scared, just tune in for your uncle shia and listen to his words of wisdom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0

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Not sure if its released in America but here in Britain there's a pretty good book called Learn Old English with Leofwin. It's intended more for kids, but that simplicity is welcome because you'll be always leaping to conclusions thinking you know what a work means or how a letter sounds because of over-familiarity.

And because that book uses written OE it would pay to get a cheap dip pen and ink so you don't end up with your writing looking shit.

The aesthetics of OE are very strong.

>>9106920
cheers lad, I am from UK, will look into it.

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>>9106587
>>9106736
Middle English can be read with fluency by any Modern English speaker who has a slightly advanced vocabulary, or merely gets accustomed to certain morphological, syntactical, and lexical features. It's not all too hard - apart from when you try learning Early Middle English (pre-Chaucer).

Old English, however, is a language unto itself. Learning to read such is akin to learning German or Old Norse. I say such with experience.

I've been pursuing OE for unto a year now, and I'm far from fluent in it yet - though I know most of the conjugation tables and whatnot. A big problem with OE is learning the completely foreign vocabulary, whilst using it with the vocabulary maintained by MoE. It leads to a lot of mistakes when you end up pronouncing or reading things completely incorrectly.

Pic related is my corpus of OE materials a friend provided me; a lot of it is available on internet archive. I'd post the files if I could, but this isn't /pdf/.

>>9106909
What anon says is correct, you have to put your head down, and pen to paper. There are no shortcuts to learning any of it. All the inflection needs to be learned to native proficiency.

>>9106920
Leofwin is a decent book, and it's helpful that it's intentionally written as an easy means to submerge yourself into it. Learning the simple stuff like such is always a great aid (I've done so with Japanese and Pokémon).

Also OP, there are a great number of sites that can be helpful for learning OE.

https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol_toc/engol
http://www.ucalgary.ca/uofc/eduweb/engl401/lessons/index.htm
http://medievalstudies.uconn.edu/resources/electronic-resources/old-english-language-literature/
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/english/oldenglish/learning.aspx

Use these as some introductory materials.

>>9107037
thanks for intense response, I will check out the introductory links you gave, can i ask what your educational background is, I mean that is an intimidating amount of OE material, what is your reason for learning so much?