31–40 of 63 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
My suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg
The industry we do I think we are well suited to appreciating the devotion you can give to a craft or knowing something well. It's pretty inspiring and also shocking how someone could be so devoted to something for so long and how little it gave him other than what he intrinsically got from it. We should be thankful that we live in a perfect time for those of us who want to devote ourselves to engineering and compute…
He spent quite a lot of time in the Vatican and may well have been one of Foster's students.
I sometimes think whether his great talents were wasted as a priest* but stories like this help me think they were not.
* there were expectations of you going into the priesthood if you were the eldest son in an Irish Catholic family.
I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
My favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.
My favorite quote: About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in. ”
I agree completely. Language is alive, and learning words is much easier for me if they're in context. I'm not learning Latin, but I am learning Chinese. I wrote http://pingtype.github.io to put spaces between words, colours for tones, pinyin romanisation, and a literal translation on the line below. I could probably do the same for Latin. First I'm doing English-to-Chinese (the other way), then I might try Taiwanese…
I went looking for google translate style audio, and found the Advanced > Audio button, and hit a bug. Page load; for Chinese input, enter "中文 輸入"; Translate; Audio; surprised by English input and Chinese spaced having cat and ffmpeg command lines.
Feature idea: permit repeatedly playing the audio for just a part of the phrase. Often when using ggl translate, I want to rehear just a syllable or word I'm unsure of, or am having trouble with. Google makes you rehear the whole thing, which is simple, but discourages double-checks, and impairs iteration.
My favorite quote: About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in. ”
Like Rome, the physical world has science and engineering stories that are highly connected, richly interwoven, and best taught that way. By exploring in conversation with one who is familiar with them. Like the "hydrology" example, hydrodynamics is best taught by swimming (in VR/AR) - sure there's a Reynolds number order-of-magnitude scale and slider on the side, and length and time, and a live Navier-Stokes on the wall, but that's all in service to playfully messing around in/with fluids. In K-4. Like Latin, the way science is taught doesn't work, doesn't inspire, and leaves out lots of accessible engaging stories. Like Latin, perhaps there's hope for change. Unlike the instruction, you really need an conversation system with eye tracking, to notice your interests, answer questions, and mentor understanding. An expert and teacher to walk with. Anyway, my thanks.
I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
Unfortunately, grammar is super easy to test.
Shouldn't someone point these folks at VR headsets and livestreaming stabilized 360deg video? It doesn't matter that he can't walk and is stuck in the US. With someone to be his walking and conversation companion in Rome, and to hold his eyes, he could walk Rome every morning, telling stories, and recording it for posterity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
My advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek). I studied Latin to degree l…