How many of you guys can actually read Latin/Greek?

Is this a joke? Latin isn't easy at all regardless of whether or not you have an English or Romance background. There's 5 declensions to keep track of and 4/5 of the nominal cases look identical half the time. Greek on the other hand only has 3 declensions and each one is easy to distinguish. Also, I don't know why you say that you're a biologist as if that's supposed to prove your point, when almost all medical and scientific terminology is Greek and not Latin. Regardless, that's just a matter of looking in a medical or scientific dictionary. Greek is the best language to learn if you want to open yourself to a wide corpus of literature.

Everybody learns differently. It's useless to compare "ease;" we ought to discuss what studying the language is useful for.

I read latin and german, picking up latin was insanely easy, I basically picked it up in a latin philosophy reading group. greek is more difficult.

Well, like I said, Greek has the largest corpus of literature aside from Sanskrit (which is going to be the hardest for anyone to learn - particularly Vedic), so I would say it's the most useful. That's not to say that Latin doesn't have some good texts, they are just much fewer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ancient Greek much more variable than Latin? In that Attic Greek is usually a different course altogether from Homeric from Koine? Wouldn't that cut the "largest corpus" down significantly, barring learning so many variations of the language?

I'm speaking from ignorance.

Not really. Homeric Greek has a wider vocabulary than Classical but the grammar is identical with some slight variations that you can pick up without instruction. Koine is just a simpler form of Classical Greek without much difference in vocabulary.

And I should add that people often learn their first Greek in a Koine-specific course and then find that they can't read Classical because it is so much more complex, but that's an issue of going from a simpler form of the language to a more complex form rather than vice-versa.

I can read Hebrew?

that is the opposite of greek

After grammar the first thing we did learning greek in highschool was reading the Iliad and Odissey, because basically you learn attic dialect.

Where did you go to high school that they let you take Greek? Seems like every American high school just offers Latin.

In Italy the 10% of students in the free education system studies ancient greek and latin in highschool for 5 years.

>10%er

Jealous. I bet you hate it right?

Yeah but most of that is Byzantine dogshit. There is undeniably more Greek content in quantity, but how can you seriously believe that it has more modern utility than Latin, which is so much more helpful for modern languages? We can argue all day which language had more original texts worth reading (with some undeniable frontrunners like Homer, Plato, etc.), but Greek is fucking dead, and the majority of surviving texts would arguably be of no interest even to someone already interested in learning the language. Also the vocabulary is so much more extensive and twisted that it seems absurd to consider it more approachable than Latin.

PS where do you even hope to get access to this bulk of Greek lit? So much of it is just garbage not worth reading, let alone publishing. Gonna read the Suda online or what?

I find it pretty cool now that I don't have to translate, but I don't remember almost anything and the only utility I found is to figure out the words meaning by their etimology.

Have you actually tried to learn a modern language based off your knowledge of Latin? It won't help you at all. Latin won't help you at all with French or Spanish or Italian - being around French or Spanish or Italian speakers is the only thing that will do that. Latin is just as dead as Ancient Greek.

And no, none of it is "Byzantine dogshit." The Byzantines barely wrote anything. You can't possibly say that the corpus of Latin is greater when you consider the amount of epic, tragedy, lyric, history, philosophy, and other poetry that was written in Greek between the 7th and 1st centuries BC.

You're either trolling or talking out of your ass.

>Have you actually tried to learn a modern language based off your knowledge of Latin? It won't help you at all. Latin won't help you at all with French or Spanish or Italian - being around French or Spanish or Italian speakers is the only thing that will do that. Latin is just as dead as Ancient Greek.

Latin helped me enormously to learn French and Italian

Byzantines wrote a lot but they wrote in medieval Greek which is a separate language from Attic, far more distant than the Attic-to-Koine distance. A lot of your reading will be AD, not BC, if you really read a lot of Greek.

>being that pleb

If you can't get how linked greek and latin are to modern languages, you didn't studied that languages at all.

>Latin helped me enormously to learn French and Italian
I will continue to doubt this unless you can highlight some specific points where Latin helped. It's made even less relevant by the enormous amount of Romance that's already in English.

>Byzantines wrote a lot but they wrote in medieval Greek which is a separate language from Attic, far more distant than the Attic-to-Koine distance. A lot of your reading will be AD, not BC, if you really read a lot of Greek.
Which is read by no one aside from Byzantinists. Like I already said, I'm referring to everything from Homeric and Hesiodic epic to the New Testament. That encompasses seven centuries of literature, while Classical Latin encompasses two centuries and Medieval maybe one or two depending on what you actually think is worth reading.

I don't think you understand the topic of the argument.

>betwen 7th and 1st centuries BC

So, Homer, Hesiod, Theognis, and Pindar...and nothing else until the 5th century BC. 4 major dramatists, a few others surviving in bits and pieces, some minor epic poems (eg, Dionysiaca), Plato/Aristotle, neo-platonists, almost entirely fragmented pre-socratic philosophy, fragmented rhetoric, fragmented poetry, and a lot of fragmented and often shitty history (fuck you Diodorus). The corpus of Greek is bigger mostly if not only because of AD era content, which, like you said, is only pursued by Byzantinists.

Latin has fewer centuries to draw on, but is more dense (except when compared to 5th century BC Greece). Hellenistic era is shit for Greek works. Literally what the fuck are you talking about of note after classical Greece except for the Bible? Almost everything is garbage and/or lost. And yeah Latin didn't have a long tradition, but had writers like Cicero cranking out some of the single biggest contributions to what survives as primary sources. And while "classical Latin" may have technically died way back when, it continued for all time as a language of academics. Fucking Spinoza wrote in Latin.

>No AD content
Plutarch, Lucan, Galen, Epictetus, Aurelius.... Although there isn't too much there are great medieval Byzantine philosophers; notably Psellos. All history related to Eastern Europe before the 1600s is written in Greek.

Latin is only good for the Silver Age poets, Christian lit and Descartes. All philosophy and arts are handled better by Greeks in Greek.

>I will continue to doubt this unless you can highlight some specific points where Latin helped.

Understanding grammar and how it's possible to learn a language by understanding it as a sort of logical system and then immersing myself in translation until the system's rules become instinctive helped a lot. When I taught myself German, French, and Italian, I knew what kind of learning was possible, and I knew roughly how it'd go, and I knew I could do it on my own, so I knew what kind of textbooks to look for. I got some difficult but substantial ones and taught myself the languages (to varying degrees, still ongoing).

By contrast, I took a German language course and a French language course at a fairly prestigious university. The German language course introduced us to two tenses over the course of an entire year, and it was 98% focused on shit like how to properly sign your letters on job applications. I got a final grade of 95 and didn't know a single bit of German at the end of it. The French language course was an intensive you-gotta-learn-French-motherfucker course explicitly for doctoral students who need to pass their language requirements. It used a shitty cram-intensive book that didn't actually explain anything, just gave you long lists of exceptions to memorise. By the end of it, I guarantee you, not a single person in that class knew French. I got a 93 final grade and barely remembered a few random things.

I had also used Michel Thomas and Pimsleur in the past. Taught me nothing, remembered nothing. Tried Rosetta Stone once, and it was hilarious garbage. Of course, I didn't know all this at the time, so I wasted hours on them. My friends, who have less reason to learn a language because not in university, are still languishing with good intentions to use Pimsleur and shit like that and will be for years.

I approach all languages the way I was forced to approach Latin. Learning classical languages teaches you basic Indo-European grammatical logic, and also how to learn it.

>Which is read by no one aside from Byzantinists.
Byzantinists study the Roman Empire, and Classicists don't? The Roman Empire which almost entirely existed AD? "Byzantinists" don't even really study the hundreds of years of Late Antiquity proper. It's mostly studied by Classics scholars.

Patristics is huge right now, as is Hellenistic philosophy, which of course intertwines significantly with Patristics. Neoplatonism has arguably had more influence as the received form of "Platonism" than Plato had, historically, and of course. Pre-Imperial Greek thought was only spottily influenced by Plato and Aristotle.

Lucan is Latin but otherwise fair points. Unfortunately the majority of Plutarch (Moralia) is overlooked and eclipsed by his Lives.

How did you learn Latin? I'm interested in doing so but have gotten mixed reviews of different textbooks, and the only consistent view that has emerged is that there is no single best resource. Would you agree, or could you readily recommend something?

I learned Latin in high school, but I haven't touched on it since. My college requires 3 language courses (all the way up to intermediate level), so I might just go ahead and take it again.

>3rd declension
>easy

I can, but I had an extremely autistic childhood thanks to my parents.

Well, grammar school taught me basic Latin; wasn't that hard really, knowing English aswell made Latin very much easier. I'm able to read some Latin and understand it -- but at this point it's a Spanish village to me.

-os = genitive
-i = dative
-a = accusative

Doesn't get much easier than that.

You clearly have no clue what you're bullshitting about. The Iliad and Odyssey comprise nearly 28,000 lines, plus Hesiod and the lyricists which are smaller but certainly worth reading. You forgot to mention or are unaware of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, all of whose work survives in full.

And Hellenistic Greek actually has some good stuff. Have you really not heard about the Argonautica?

Five years of latin, four years of greek.
Very few people can actually "read" latin and greek. Learning both together helps tons though.

I founded a casual translation club at my uni just recently, for students who used to study them and stopped, but want to keep practicing to maintain their level. We're meeting next week to discuss what texts we'll be working on next year.

That is an awesome image you have there... I'm sold on Greek. I was slowly working my way through Latin, but I realized that the only thing I really want to read in it is Ovid (and Cicero, but I want to start on a text in my target language within a year). Otherwise all of the classic lit I want to read is in Greek.

I had never heard of these until today: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_novel

The Byzantines actually saved 5 Hellenistic novels.

Yeah, those are pretty interesting. I think they're all available in updated Loeb translations.

Koine Greek, NT in particular

My Greek is bad, I didn't keep up with it after school. I can definitely work through something though with a dictionary and a grammar, but painfully and slowly. I need to take it up again.

Latin I read very well. Someone I'm very familiar with, like Plautus or Cicero, I can read nearly fluently, though I'll still have to look up an unusual word now and then. And with someone I'm less familiar with, there will be an adjustment period of a week or two and then I can read him as well as anyone else.

>greek is harder than latin

Not at all, I think it's easier, though I didn't keep up with it. The cases are WAY less ambiguous. The article makes it much easier, too. And the verb system might be morphologically complex but it's also really very regular and such a big verb removes the need for so many weird periphrases. Greek syntax is crystal clear and logical, like a magic language almost. Latin is quite the opposite, at least to an English speaker. The vocabulary is harder, obviously, and the alphabet might be a hurdle for some people, but overall Greek is easier.

It's not that naive, I basically taught myself Latin by going far ahead of the classes. 30 minutes a day goes a long way. Orberg is the best method, though do learn the grammar properly.

I marvel at your ignorance, as if nothing Latin after 500AD is worth reading. I guess you know nothing about medieval lit, let alone renaissance lit.

>Hellenistic era is shit for Greek works

Look through the Anthologia Graeca

Knowing Latin or Ancient Greek is so cool. You guys who know either are really cool.

>and Medieval maybe one or two depending on what you actually think is worth reading.

>maybe one or two

Do you want me to make a list for your stupid ass? Here's the medieval Latin I've read just in the last year or so, every one of them fascinating and worth reading in the original:

>Gildas' De Excidiu et Conquestu Britanniae
>Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
>Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae
>Gregory of Tours' Historia Francorum
>Virgil Grammaticus' Epitomae and Epistulae

Don't be such a little ponce

>excidiu

Typo obviously

I can read Latin. I haven't in probably a decade though.

Podex perfectus est

The latin poets are superior imo

That's a hard one for me. The Greek language just feels like silver to me. I know it's a lame as hell comparison but I think of those Lord of the Ring movies and Quenya and whatnot. Greek is like that for me, phonologically, scriptually, and syntactically. It's otherworldly.

Latin feels much more clumsy. Latin words are often less precise and it takes years to get comfortable with Latin syntax.

I'd say they both have great poets; the Latin poets are harder, though.

I wish there was more of Lucilian. And my god if I haven't literally had dreams about Varro. I dreamed that someone stole all of my books, among them a copy of Varro's De Novem Disciplinis (which is in reality lost), and donated them to library of the local university where I work.

I went to the library to get them back and was told my books would not be returned because I did not understand them.

It's such a bitch to get used to a different alphabet even if it takes you just a day to learn it. I'm trying to learn Russian from knowing English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. I've got the spoken side way more advanced than reading and writing because it just takes so long to get trough a text when you're unfamiliar with the symbols it's written in. The main problem has been that so many letter are similar but represent different sounds.

If I wanted to learn Greek am I fucked if I try to pursue it on my own? Do I need an instructor of some kind?

>dream

Positively absurd.

There's a 99% chance you're fucked but don't let that discourage you, 99% of people are complete idiots after all.

I'd join an online forum so you can ask questions, which you will have.

Really 30 minutes a day will get you to some competency over 2-3 years but most people get frustrated and give up within 6 months.

I shouldn't have said 99% of people are idiots because that's not at all true, but 99% of people don't have the patience to learn Greek independently. But you may well be one of those who can. It's not inherently any more difficult than any other language, if anything it's easier than all of them since your only goal is to read it, not to speak or write it.

No! Try for one grammar point and a small translation every day. You can budget your initial 30 minutes daily as 10 for review, 10 for new grammar, then 10 for translation.

Sub-divide your grammar pretty minutely (for example "today I'll look at feminine, singular, first declension nouns in the dative") and simply keep at it. On particularly inspired days you can do both a verb grammar and a noun/adjective grammar in one sitting, and after about 2 weeks you'll start to notice how fast this pacing will take you.

Good luck user

Is there a certain text or application or something I should be working from?

Learn to Read Greek and Learn to Read Latin were the most helpful to me. Fuck Wheelock,Athenaze, et al and fuck Caeculius in his ass

>Illiad and Odissey
>attic dialect

Hansen & Quinn is widely considered the best Greek textbook, and for good reason. I believe there's still a .djvu file of it online for free, while a physical copy will set you back about $35.

This guy is developing an entire series covering Hansen & Quinn for free: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq5ea-jR9u2puDaLoRL-nBkpwrkURbLjT

The quality isn't that great but he's probably better than most college Greek instructors.

I feel like Latin and Greek are more or less equivalent in quality when it comes to historical writing.

In poetry though I think Greek clearly is superior. I read the Aeneid and it totally lacked the feeling of Homer.