[HN Gopher] Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
___________________________________________________________________
Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
Author : gone35
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-12-29 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seumasjeltzz.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (seumasjeltzz.github.io)
| [deleted]
| yawboakye wrote:
| first 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, i'll take it for a
| spin. i've had polis' speaking greek as a living language
| (https://www.polisjerusalem.org/resource/speaking-ancient-gre...)
| sitting on my shelf but haven't had time to study.
| schoen wrote:
| It does have a corresponding Greek title: E Ellenike glossa
| kath' auten photizomene (right at the top). I assume the use of
| the Latin title is to help people who are familiar with Orberg
| recognize immediately what this is.
| blep_ wrote:
| This is pretty great. I've often wished for the concept of LLPSI
| in other languages, I'm glad someone is doing it.
|
| Also, I should try working through LLPSI again.
| ryyr wrote:
| i encourage those interested to seek out Athenaze (in italian)
| instead. i commend the effort put into this though
| troad wrote:
| Why in Italian? Athenaze has an English version as well. Is the
| Italian version substantively different or improved?
| notdang wrote:
| yes, the content is very different. The Italian version is
| more like what the subject of this post is, Orberg style.
|
| The Italian edition is an expanded version of the original
| textbook, but they don't have permission to sell it in other
| markets.
| notdang wrote:
| As an alternative, there is the Spanish translation of the
| Athenaze Italian edition, which is very close to the Italian
| one, and not like the English one.
|
| Currently slowly trying to go through it.
| olah_1 wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| I was concerned that the Latin title might be a bad sign, but it
| turns out the main title is E Ellenike glossa kath' auten
| photizomene and the Latin is only an explanation for people who
| are familiar with _Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata_.
| mickeyp wrote:
| This is clearly riffing on Orberg's _Lingua Latina per se
| illustrata_ , which is a great introductory book to teaching
| yourself Latin. There are no explanations of anything; you have
| to deduce the meaning of the Latin phrases using the contextual
| clues given to you in the form of pictures and maps. And it works
| well.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Duolingo also has a Latin course:
|
| * https://www.duolingo.com/course/la/en/Learn-Latin
|
| Haven't tried it myself.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| It is woefully inadequate. It uses exclusively the present
| tense and misses the vast majority of the language's grammar.
| giomasce wrote:
| I am told by people who know better than me that it's quite
| terrible.
| quercusa wrote:
| I tried it and I agree. (I've learned Greek and Hebrew via
| classroom instruction.)
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| 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?
| afthonos wrote:
| Modern Greek speaker here. No. The grammar and syntax are
| noticeably different, and the words are related but not the
| same.
| Bayart wrote:
| Being a big fan of Orberg's work (I like to gift _Lingua latina
| per se illustrata_ to friends), I 'll definitely check it out.
| Having it as an epub is much appreciated !
| narag wrote:
| I 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.
| toto444 wrote:
| I am making one for Japanese here :
| https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html . It makes use of
| emoji and pixel art to illustrate simple stories. The only thing
| required of the reader is knowledge of Hiragana and Katakana.
|
| It reached the HN frontpage a few years ago and I've kept working
| on it since then. It now contains close to 100 pages (~500 words)
| and everything has been proofread by a native speaker.
| [deleted]
| buggythebug wrote:
| How are you able to learn Greek with this??
| anvandare wrote:
| For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition
| to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se
| Illustrata[1] by Hans Orberg.
|
| Orberg'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 ones and letting the pupil figure it
| out. All in the target language itself, exactly how we acquired
| our mother tongues. Vocabulary is acquired through repetition,
| grammar is acquired through "getting a feel for what sounds
| right". Using the brain's own mechanisms for deducing meaning and
| deriving rules.
|
| The book is definitely going to need illustrations, just like in
| LLPSI[2]. Hard to understand what 'polis' means per se, but not
| if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying
| "polis".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg
|
| [2] https://blog.nina.coffee/img/lingua-latina.png
|
| [3]
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f5/c3/10/f5c31074eeb418bc51e7...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Also worth pointing out that LLPSI is essentially Hans Orberg'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.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Giuseppi Peano tried to get people to learn an "unconjugated
| latin" by writing mathematics in it. eg https://archive.org/d
| etails/formulairedemat04peangoog/page/n... (mini rationale ht
| tps://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.
| toto444 wrote:
| I am writing one for Japanese (I was not aware of LLPSI
| when I started) and I use things that are common knowledge
| to a lot of people like set theory. I have used a few
| unusual things on the way.
|
| I have recreated the UI of a fashion Ecommerce site such
| that the user is so familiar with the button labels ('buy',
| 'add to cart', 'recommended items') that they can easily
| guess their meanings.
|
| I teach HTML using simple Japanese. I make use of the fact
| that "<span style="background-color: yellow;"> </span> "
| uses English words but is not English. That allows me to
| say things such as 'to change the background colour to
| yellow you can add this tag' without using English. It's
| definitely cheating but I have found that cheating is
| actually good practice when it comes to help people guess
| the meaning of words in a foreign language .
| senkora wrote:
| Huh, surprisingly readable.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > Hard to understand what 'polis' means per se, but not if I
| take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "polis".
|
| 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.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 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'
| schoen wrote:
| Probably "essen" (to eat, for a human) and "fressen" (to
| eat, for other animals).
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| That's was it, thanks!
| tgv wrote:
| 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 your life. Vocabulary is easily corrected, since
| native speakers know how to, but they rarely correct
| grammatical errors, and seldomly know the rules. Some
| languages have it easier than others in this respect, of
| course. E.g., English has small grammar and almost no
| morphology.
|
| Good feedback is important, and if there's no teacher, you
| can correct yourself (to a certain extent) if the text book
| also explains the rules.
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| 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 the things they can
| make sense of on their own. I suppose LLPSI would be easier
| for someone who has already taught themselves an Indo-
| European language and is used to Indo-European grammar.
| Latin, for me, was the first language I learned, so I had
| jumped into the deep end. "Allen and Greenough's New Latin
| Grammar" is another book I used occasionally (it's the best
| Latin grammar book IMO). As for your comment on feedback,
| if I can understand what I'm reading then that's all I'm
| interested in. I'm only learning Latin to read ancient
| Latin literature. I don't want to compose or translate
| Latin. An example of feedback for me, would be to read a
| page of Caesar's The Gallic War in Latin then read the same
| page in English afterwards to see how close I was to
| understanding everything. So far I've been close on almost
| everything, so the feedback I'm getting is that I'm reading
| Latin the way it was written 2000 years ago.
|
| Here's what I read in order:
|
| LLPSI with Colloquia Personarum, Pugio Bruti (waste of time
| btw) and Fabulae Syrae. After that I read Epitome Historiae
| Sacrae, the Vulgate, Fabulae Faciles, Ad Alpes, Julius
| Caesar's Invasion of Britain and half of LLPSI 2. Currently
| I'm reading The Gallic War. I also started studying German
| at the start of this year using the book "German for
| Reading" by Karl Sandberg which is taking up 1 hour per day
| of my time so I can't spend 2 hours on Latin per day which
| is what I was doing from 2020 to early 2022. I wouldn't say
| I'm fluent at all, but on a good day I can comfortably read
| Caesar (with a dictionary).
|
| My goal since the start (January 2020) has been to read
| Ovid's Metamorphoses, which hasn't worked out yet, but it's
| a work in progress.
|
| * Big shoutout to LatinTutorial/Benjamin:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@latintutorial
| tgv wrote:
| One point for the discussion: learning to read is not the
| same as learning to speak. The latter is considerably
| more difficult.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| 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.
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| 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.
| svat wrote:
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| 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.
| troad wrote:
| 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:
|
| _Roma in Italia est. Italia in Europa est. Graecia in
| Europa est. Italia et Graecia in Europa 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| 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.
| troad wrote:
| 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 conjugate verbs,
| and English speakers tend to be big fans of LLPSI. To its
| credit, it reinforces 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 ad
| nauseam.
|
| I too wonder how well this could be achieved without
| relying on language similarity. I suppose it would be
| possible, but it may need to rely heavily on logic
| (maths?) or extra-linguistic reasoning (e.g. map reading,
| or timetable reading)? The trick seems to be to tap into
| pre-existing adult skills, which is what I think sets
| LLPSI apart from "immersion" approaches.
| gnubison wrote:
| 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 _silere_ - > _silens_ - > _silentem_ - > silent
| -- but it's not like I read through and it only makes
| sense because of cognates.
| schoen wrote:
| 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.
| dwringer wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Rosetta Stone only works well with romance languages.
| Anything with alien grammar isn't going to be picked up
| without some explanation.
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| I think Orberg 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.
| thom wrote:
| 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).
| schoen wrote:
| Hans Orberg 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 Orberg 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.
| bshimmin wrote:
| Thank you for posting this! I gave myself a pat on the back for
| being able to get through the first chapter unaided thanks to my
| A-Level in Greek _mumble_ years ago...
| Jun8 wrote:
| What a surprise! I was always envious that Orberg'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 modern settings and a
| modernized vocabulary (see the many references given here:
| http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...),
| the same is not true for Greek, which is a pity.
|
| If you still have some resolutions to make for 2023 let this post
| be a sign to pick learning Greek! The book that's most
| recommended to start with is Athenaze. Also, you can use the
| great and friendly community at Textkit
| (https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/) it also has texts of
| many good resource books. And there's also the Perseus Digital
| Library with the goal of making all Greek material available:
| http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
| agravier wrote:
| The idea seems cool but I don't understand how this is meant to
| be used in practice, for a beginner. As support for a structured
| course?
| ikurei wrote:
| > 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...
| giomasce wrote:
| 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.
| That seems much less obvious with the Greek alphabet.
| tgflynn wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| Someone could record an audiobook version so people can
| read along and figure out the sound values on the fly.
| schoen wrote:
| 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
|
| Aa, Alexandros - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/com
| mons/0/00/Alejandr...
|
| or
|
| Aa, Athenai - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_of_At
| hens#/media/Fil... (although some readers might assume that
| the word illustrated is Akropolis rather than Athenai)
|
| 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 perimetros 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
| Alexandros Alexandros
|
| or of Athens and say Athenai Athenai
| ogogmad wrote:
| It would be amazing if there was something like this for Mishnaic
| Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Classical Arabic too. Super
| helpful!
| tgflynn wrote:
| My vote would be for Sanskrit, though I'm very pleased a Greek
| version exists.
| klht wrote:
| It exists, and it's very good.
|
| https://en.amarahasa.com/
| tgflynn wrote:
| Thanks, I've actually looked at that a bit (though there
| seem to be some recent additions I hadn't seen). It seems
| like a somewhat different experience. With the Latin
| version there seems to be enough vocabulary overlap that I,
| knowing only English and French, could pretty much follow
| along with very little help. I guess there's less
| vocabulary overlap between English and Sanskrit so it's a
| bit harder. It's very good to have the web interface where
| you can click on a word to get the translation. One thing
| that would be nice to have, since I'm also learning
| devanagari, would be to have the popup include the
| romanized text when the main script is set to devanagari.
| giomasce wrote:
| 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
| fcatalan wrote:
| 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.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| It's like bootstraping a compiler
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-29 23:00 UTC)