How are you able to learn Greek with this??
Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The book also includes a map of the places mentioned, at the time of Classical Latin that the narrative is set in. I’m only about half way through, but there really aren’t that many cognates. An aha! moment every so often, sure — like silēre -> silēns -> silentem -> silent — but it’s not like I read through and it only makes sense because of cognates.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#63For 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.
I used Jeanne Neumann’s companion text as a jumping off point into deeper stuff (and because at least a couple of times with just the original text, I spent several pages with the wrong idea for a word and felt embarrassed).
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Cognates and illustrations definitely assist, and the book uses both freely. Chapter 1 begins with a map, for example. It’s a very clever strategy, one especially well suited for teaching Latin to people already speaking an Indo-European language.
I imagine it would be less useful to people who speak a language that doesn’t share the features of Latin. A map isn’t going to be of much use if one’s native language doesn’t have the concept of plurals, and one therefore struggles to comprehend the est / sunt distinction altogether. Then again, English doesn’t decline nouns or conjugate verbs (for the most part), and English speakers tend to be big fans of LLPSI. To its credit, it goes slow, and reinforces its lessons very well. The rest of chapter 1 is basically spent on variations of the above grammar point, introducing new nouns but reusing those two verb forms again and again in different variations, illustrating their use and how they contrast.
To your question, I also wonder how well this kind of bootstrapping approach could be achieved without relying on language similarity. The trick seems to be to tap into pre-existing adult skills or knowledge - e.g. logic, map reading. I think this is what sets LLPSI apart from “immersion” approaches like Rosetta Stone, which are based on the erroneous assumption that adults (do / should) learn language as toddlers do.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah, I see, thank you!
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#66Earlier 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…
There's a brand of snacks (nuts and dried fruits) that uses the name "Studentenfutter", which means "Student Feed".
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#67What a surprise! I was always envious that Ørberg's famous book and approach had no counterpart for Ancient Greek. In fact in every bookstore I’ve checked books on learning Latin far outnumber those for Greek, if those exist at all. I learned Greek from Grouton’s From Alpha to Omega , a totally unappetizing book. The reason, I think, for the difference is that, while there’s a robust tradition of using Latin in moder…
The 2nd edition JACT Reading greek course is excellent, I highly recommend it.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#68Earlier 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…
Yes indeed a structured environment and teacher would be best… another reason is that self-guided learning also tends to run out of steam/motivation more easily. But it's not as if there's an abundance of classes (online or otherwise) for Latin.
Apart from what others have said about their experience learning Latin from LLPSI, a couple of other points:
• Using the book does not necessarily preclude looking up other resources now and then, it's probably ok.
• Consider your example of getting the wrong understanding of some items of vocabulary, like "behind" and "far behind" instead of "near" and "far". While this is not ideal, at the same time, in a well-designed course (which yours may not have been), you're at least getting a feel for how these terms are used in sentences. The understanding of words can get corrected/refined over time, based on seeing new contexts. What you're avoiding meanwhile is mapping the terms into your native language, in which you have a very clear understanding of words and their fine distinctions. This is a trade-off when one considers what this method aims for: eventually being able to think and compose naturally in the language, without always "decoding"/translating into/from another language. See this post shared by someone elsewhere in this discussion: https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — it describes the problem very well (and incidentally ends with a recommendation of Ørberg's LLPSI in its final paragraph).
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#69> ποῦ ἐστιν ἡ Κωνσταντινούπολις; ἡ Κωνσταντινούπολίς ἐστιν ἐν τῇ Ἑλλάδι. ἆρα ἡ Κωνσταντινούπολις πόλις Ἑλληνικὴ ἢ Ῥωμαϊκή; ἔστι πόλις καὶ Ἑλληνικὴ καὶ Ῥωμαϊκή.
Definitely not the most 21st-century perspective! ('Where is Constantinople? Constantinople is in Greece. Is Constantinople a Greek or a Roman city? It is both a Greek and a Roman city.')
Though I guess Ørberg also talks about geography from an ancient perspective, even though he uses place names he expects readers to recognize.
Re: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Idk who they are, but have they ever learned a second language? It's probably just a gimmicky claim that got them a bit of fame (or infamy), and they stuck by it because of their career. I doubt they can present evidence.
And I don't mean: here's someone who was exposed to a large amount of English, and can now say a bunch of three word sentences. That's cheating. No, I want to see a large, representative group of people that haven't had any feedback on their speaking and writing during their learning reach almost error free, near-native fluency for a totally unfamiliar language (i.e., not an Englishman being exposed to French or a Mandarin speaker to Cantonese).
Edit: I looked up Krashen, but that looks like a hopeless case of academic hubris. E.g., this (http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/why_dont_educators...) is just full of it. And he got influence on education with his absurd ideas.