Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#52Earlier 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…
I used a rosetta stone course as a supplement to several semesters of studying Spanish in school, and while I can't disagree with you about the necessity of other methods to learn certain concepts, I think it helped me considerably with getting enough fluency to do well in university courses. Granted, I had already taken some courses in Spanish already; I was not trying to pick up grammar rules from scratch.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#53i 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?
The Italian edition is an expanded version of the original textbook, but they don't have permission to sell it in other markets.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#54It would be amazing if there was something like this for Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Classical Arabic too. Super helpful!
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#55For 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.
Even though it's often claimed to be appropriate for self-study, I think Ørberg thought that the commonest way it would be used was with a teacher, who would either teach by immersion (I've met people who used it that way) or by speaking a modern language to the students. I'm sure one thing he saw as a benefit to the Latin-only texts is that they could potentially be used by people all over the world, regardless of their native language, without having to be translated or localized for different audiences.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#56I 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
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can I use LGPSI to teach myself Greek? Honestly, not yet. Would I like LGPSI to get to the point where you could entirely use it, by itself, by yourself, to learn Greek (as you can do with LLPSI)? Yes, certainly. It's not at that point, and I don't expect it to reach that point especially quickly. https://seumasjeltzz.github.io/LinguaeGraecaePerSeIllustrata...
I wonder how they are going to make it easier to understand the Greek alphabet. With LLPSI at least it can be given for granted that the great part of readers will be able to decode the Latin alphabet (and, say, understand what "Roma", "Italia" and "Europa" are even if they don't know Latin yet), given that English, Spanish and French made it (in different ages) the "alphabetus francus" for basically the whole world.…
Αα, Ἀλέξανδρος → https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Alejandr...
or
Αα, Ἀθῆναι → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_of_Athens#/media/Fil... (although some readers might assume that the word illustrated is Ἀκρόπολις rather than Ἀθῆναι)
I'm not sure there are famous-enough ancient Greek people, places, or things to use for each letter, though. Optimistically, you could maybe have a few gods, a few philosophers, a very few places (on a map?), and then you might be stuck. Even using Homer brings in a challenge, because beginners won't yet know about the rough breathing mark and most would expect his name to begin with an H letter, as in Latin, rather than an O letter, as it does in Greek.
You could try to use things where a loanword from ancient Greek is still used with exactly the same meaning in most modern European languages (like περίμετρος for the outside of a circle), but this might turn out to depend a little too much on people's native languages and prior education.
A slightly weird compromise might be to use Latin transliterations alongside each word at first, like you could have the picture of Alexander and say
Ἀλέξανδρος
Alexandros
or of Athens and say Ἀθῆναι
AthēnaiRe: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 peopl…
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#59https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Salute,_Jonathan!
Anyone can translate this into the language they are trying to teach as well. However, it may work best for western european style grammars, I am not sure.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can I use LGPSI to teach myself Greek? Honestly, not yet. Would I like LGPSI to get to the point where you could entirely use it, by itself, by yourself, to learn Greek (as you can do with LLPSI)? Yes, certainly. It's not at that point, and I don't expect it to reach that point especially quickly. https://seumasjeltzz.github.io/LinguaeGraecaePerSeIllustrata...
I wonder how they are going to make it easier to understand the Greek alphabet. With LLPSI at least it can be given for granted that the great part of readers will be able to decode the Latin alphabet (and, say, understand what "Roma", "Italia" and "Europa" are even if they don't know Latin yet), given that English, Spanish and French made it (in different ages) the "alphabetus francus" for basically the whole world.…