i encourage those interested to seek out Athenaze (in italian) instead. i commend the effort put into this though
Why in Italian? Athenaze has an English version as well. Is the Italian version substantively different or improved?
Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complete immersion has good results, but this is pseudo-immersion at best. There are schools that teach following similar methods as Lingua ... per se illustrata, and while people do get the basics, I haven't heard from anybody that reached fluency through it. Language is pretty complex, and if you start out with the wrong idea about certain aspects, without feedback, you're likely to repeat the error for the rest of…
I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least th…
One point for the discussion: learning to read is not the same as learning to speak. The latter is considerably more difficult.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least th…
One point for the discussion: learning to read is not the same as learning to speak. The latter is considerably more difficult.
100% agree. If `pure input' people, like Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann, are to be believed then output (like speaking and writing) would eventually come after lots and lots and lots and lots of reading and listening, but I'm a bit skeptical.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#44I can understand the first paragraph just fine. It's been forty years since my year of Classic Greek. I still have the dictionary somewhere, so it seems I could make use of it.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#45For 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…
Same here; a long while ago I tried to teach myself German via rosetta and it was not good. I remember the point where I gave up which was where 2 different words were used for food. Food for an animal, and for a person [1] I just wondered if there was a mistake, or what. A simple note saying 'yes there are different words for this unlike in English'[2] but no. I guess that was the final straw, I felt I was fighting something very poorly designed and basically not doing its job.
[1] Maybe it was 'to eat', I can't remember.
[2] In english there are actually different terms for human and animal edibles used in some contexts, these being 'food' and 'feed'
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least th…
One point for the discussion: learning to read is not the same as learning to speak. The latter is considerably more difficult.
oh yeah that was another thing with Rosetta Stone that drove me crazy - their speech recognition software was not good. I eventually started skipping the speech lessons altogether because it simply would not accept my input. Instead I practiced repeating after the example speaker during the other lessons, and speaking my own sentences out loud when I was "composing" them when working from grammar books. But, again, what I really needed was a teacher and a class.
On a different note, for the one language that I did learn and used to be relatively fluent in after 6 years of taking classes in school (Spanish), I can still somewhat converse in via writing, but I can't speak it at all anymore really. They're totally different skills.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#47Earlier 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…
Same here; a long while ago I tried to teach myself German via rosetta and it was not good. I remember the point where I gave up which was where 2 different words were used for food. Food for an animal, and for a person [1] I just wondered if there was a mistake, or what. A simple note saying 'yes there are different words for this unlike in English'[2] but no. I guess that was the final straw, I felt I was fighting…
Probably "essen" (to eat, for a human) and "fressen" (to eat, for other animals).
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/wit…
An interesting thing about LLPSI is that it does include abstract discussion of grammatical rules and concepts - in Latin, once readers have learned enough to permit following the discussion.
So it's not just learning from example and trying to pick up grammatical rules intuitively. Like when I took my German class, it was taught by immersion but included discussions, conducted in German, of how grammatical rules work. LLPSI is also attempting to do that kind of thing.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/wit…
You are entirely correct in your criticism of Rosetta Stone, but LLPSI genuinely takes a very different approach. (I've done both, though for different languages.) LLPSI is carefully structured, precisely to teach things like declension and conjugation. As an example, this is very first line:
Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Europā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt.
This is not what most people mean by immersion. It's not a natural dialogue you're expected to understand by osmosis, it's an extremely carefully designed series of sentences aimed at manually bootstrapping your Latin. The book contains grammar explanations - wholly in Latin - from chapter 2 onwards. Every chapter has a grammatical concept it's designed to illustrate, and it manages to introduce fairly complex ideas - passive conjugations! ablative declensions! - in a deeply intuitive way, entirely in Latin. It's an incredibly satisfying course. If you have any interest in Latin at all, or are just looking for a New Year's Resolution, I would heartily recommend it.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#50first perhaps insignificant problem: lingua latina per se illustrata is indeed the latin for, paraphrasing here, teaching latin in latin. to borrow from this reference at all, the book should have a comparative title in greek. the first problem with learning greek is getting familiar with the alphabets and their phonetics, a problem almost non-existent with latin since the latin script is very widespread. regardless,…
It does have a corresponding Greek title: Ἡ Ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα καθ᾿ αὑτὴν φωτιζομένη (right at the top). I assume the use of the Latin title is to help people who are familiar with Ørberg recognize immediately what this is.