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Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

seumasjeltzz.github.io

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Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#51
post #47
post #45

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).

That's was it, thanks!

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#52

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…

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.

Rosetta Stone only works well with romance languages. Anything with alien grammar isn't going to be picked up without some explanation.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#53
post #41
post #25

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?

yes, the content is very different. The Italian version is more like what the subject of this post is, Ørberg style.

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

#54
post #13

It would be amazing if there was something like this for Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Classical Arabic too. Super helpful!

It's not precisely what you're asking for, but according to my wife this introduction to Biblical Hebrew is great: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKmeTinUEU27syZPKrzWQQ

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#55

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.

Hans Ørberg was Danish, so it might have been Danish rather than English if he had decided to include a modern language!

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

#57
post #5

Earlier 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.…

I wonder if you could find people or objects whose Greek names would be familiar to enough readers, and have a section with pictures and the names written out. Like

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
  Athēnai

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#58
post #49

Earlier 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…

That's interesting actually. It suggests that a major reason this works is because of its cognates with English that give you a starting point. So for example, a native Korean speaker would really struggle to learn from this curriculum, and the strategy wouldn't work very well to learn Korean. I wonder if it's possible at all to convey enough with pictures to design a curriculum like this when you don't have the help of cognates.

Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

#59
It is worth noting that there is another libre "natural method" book called Salute, Jonathan.

https://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

#60
post #5

Earlier 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.…

It's really not that hard to learn the Greek alphabet. It's just 24 letters almost all of which represent sounds common in English. I'm currently learning the devanagari script for Sanskrit, which isn't exactly an alphabet, and it's a much steeper climb, though I think I'm making progress.
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