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Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

seumasjeltzz.github.io

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#21

For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata[1] by Hans Ørberg. Ørberg's way of teaching Latin is, in my view, excellent because it is based on a natural view of learning a language: show something, say what its name is, use its name in simple sentences, work up from there. Each time introducing new words surrounded by already-known…

> Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις".

This works in theory, I guess, but in practice it's just absolutely awful. the Rosetta Stone courses work like this and I spent about 6 months maybe? working through the Korean class. I was only able to form my own sentences because I also bought some grammar books that taught me about particles and the "topic" of a sentence that you put -ga or -i after (depending if it ends in a vowel or consonant) and several other similar concepts.

But also, even pointing at an object or showing pictures didn't work. I remember at one point being shown two pictures and thinking I was being taught "behind" and a word that English doesn't have, for "far behind." Ah, how interesting I thought! Nope, not at all. It was "near" and "far." The only reason I learned this is because I started screenshotting every slide to an actual Korean friend I had and asking for translations of every word (I'm sure I drove him crazy). The reason I stopped doing the class in fact was that he wasn't always awake when I wanted to do the lessons (ironically since he was Korean-American and I was awake in the middle of the night usually lol - if he'd lived in Korea our schedules would've aligned better).

Anyway, after that experience I don't agree with this method at all. Maybe complete immersion does work, because people can correct your misconceptions, but learning from a book without any feedback is a horrible experience.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#22

For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata[1] by Hans Ørberg. Ørberg's way of teaching Latin is, in my view, excellent because it is based on a natural view of learning a language: show something, say what its name is, use its name in simple sentences, work up from there. Each time introducing new words surrounded by already-known…

I think Ørberg is too extreme. His approach would work better with just a little bit of english thrown in to explain things. Reading his books, I often found myself looking things up anyway.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#23
I clicked, not really sure what it was about and started reading the first paragraph, armed only with my STEM-derived knowledge of the alphabet and I got it instantly. So it seems to work. Very interesting concept.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#24

I only did Greek Language Transfer and Duolingo for a couple of months, but some words and even sentences sampled at random do make sense to me. Would you recommend the book to modern Greek learners as reading material?

Modern Greek speaker here. No. The grammar and syntax are noticeably different, and the words are related but not the same.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#26

For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata[1] by Hans Ørberg. Ørberg's way of teaching Latin is, in my view, excellent because it is based on a natural view of learning a language: show something, say what its name is, use its name in simple sentences, work up from there. Each time introducing new words surrounded by already-known…

> Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις". This works in theory, I guess, but in practice it's just absolutely awful. the Rosetta Stone courses work like this and I spent about 6 months maybe? working through the Korean class. I was only able to form my own sentences because I also bought some grammar books that taught me about particles…

You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely awful” and “a horrible experience” — when replying to a post about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which many people have tried and absolutely enjoyed, and indeed successfully learned Latin from.

All that this shows is that a course using this method can be either well-designed or not (possibly depending on the language and learner), and we don't know which one the current Greek one is.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth pointing out that LLPSI is essentially Hans Ørberg's life's work. It's been adjusted and fine-tuned for decades, and it really shows. While at a surface level it looks fairly simple, it is no small task to repeat the process with another language.

Giuseppi Peano tried to get people to learn an "unconjugated latin" by writing mathematics in it. eg https://archive.org/details/formulairedemat04peangoog/page/n... (mini rationale https://archive.org/details/formulairedemat04peangoog/page/n... ) Maybe set theory wasn't the best way of introducing a conlang, but I have to take my hat off for the weird flex.

Huh, surprisingly readable.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo also has a Latin course: * https://www.duolingo.com/course/la/en/Learn-Latin Haven't tried it myself.

I am told by people who know better than me that it's quite terrible.

I tried it and I agree. (I've learned Greek and Hebrew via classroom instruction.)

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις". This works in theory, I guess, but in practice it's just absolutely awful. the Rosetta Stone courses work like this and I spent about 6 months maybe? working through the Korean class. I was only able to form my own sentences because I also bought some grammar books that taught me about particles…

You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely awful” and “a horrible experience” — when replying to a post about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata , which many people have tried and absolutely enjoyed, and indeed successfully learned Latin fro…

That's fair, I'd appreciate hearing from someone who actually did the Latin curriculum and learned Latin from it if they managed to do it without additional resources to learn e.g. case endings from a text written in English.

Part of my reason for commenting is also that language-learning is something that a lot of people want to do but is extremely difficult to do & stick with outside of a structured environment/with a teacher. If you truly want to pursue it, I think finding an online class is going to help you considerably more than a self-guided curriculum like this; I probably should've mentioned that before. I wish I'd done that for Korean.

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