ITT: Convince me to learn Greek and Latin

Yeah, maybe some fucking embarassing easy author like Cicero and Caesar! But try to read some worhwhile genius like Lucretius, Iuvenal, Virgil... KEK, you'll need years of practice, unless you're such a shitty plebeian to be satisfied with a 50% comprehension of the text
>inb4 "Just finished reading ___" with frogface on the left
KEKKEREKEKKEKKEK hang yourself if you think I'm going to beleive you

I'm Italian and I'm not a brainlet. Italian is the closest language to Latin, many words are almost the same. We study Latin since the first year of high school, that is to say for five years. Currently I'm studying Letters at the University and two exams foresee oral (which means instant) translation from Latin to Italian. Well, I can assure you that NOBODY, neither in high school nor at the university, can fluently read in Latin. I spoke with dozens and dozens of people in my university and no one, not even the finest students, can do it. We know grammar, syntax, phonetic, linguistics of Latin better than any other student of the world. And yet we can't read the originals like we read in English, Spanish, French, German. Why is that? There are two possible alternatives:
1) we are not being educated to simply READ Latin, but to teach it; to analyse it; to translate it; to understand it. While, on the other hand, Americans (or whoever) just learn to read Latin in a practical approach like a child does in first grade, whithout worrying about all the important outlines a language has.
2) 99% of people who claim to be able to read in Latin on this board are just shameless liars.

Thanks for providing further proof that modern academia is a lame joke

And you? Why don't you provide further proof of how do you learn Latin? Enlighten me on your functional and efficient method.

I speak Ancient Greek and it's the most beautiful language ever. But you look like a coward and a lazy man, you'll probably never be able to learn it. Stick to your mediocrity, will you ?

I'm Italian and let's be honest: almost no one becomes fluent in Latin by the fifth year because almost nobody really study it intensely, and this happens because the amount of studying required to get good grades is not even close to the time you should put into it to become fluent. Also you should admit that virtually no one gives a shit about Latin literature: now that we're in our 20s we can see that reading the latin classics is a actually stimulating and suggestive experience. This was not the case when we were 15 years old.

Also there are, at least in Classical Licei, people who truly get proficient by the 2nd year: people who usually end up studying it in the universe. As far as I've gathered from my experience (have been in 4 different Licei) almost every class has at least one of them: genuinely interested students who voraciously read in Latin, perfectioning their fluency in a shockingly low amount of time. In this case passion is more important than discipline.

You learn any foreign language the same way. Grammar, core vocab, reading. Strange that I have to explain such basic things to someone who claims to be italian and therefore should be bilingual.

Once you plebs read Suetonius i'll excuse your plebbery.

hey dude everybody really does not speak english at a level it would be enjoyable to have a conversation
it's all about what you are interested in
"570 million people speak spanish blaablaa" yeah, but if you don't want to hang out in South America or Spain, that's not the language to learn
people should think first what they are interested in, culturally for example
cause it's hard to learn if you don't have motivation, pussy isn't enough i would say, one can get it without intellectual merits...

i've had a lot use with swedish even tho only 10 million people speak it... "learn chinese..." never had a situation where it would have been good to know chinese, (i might end up in a one someday)

+ every language one learns supports other languages, you create a web kinda
and if you're interested in etymology can figure out a lot of words in different languages even tho you don't know those

my two cents

I've been trying to teach myself Latin for several months. I'm working my way through Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. I've found the Vulgate fairly approachable, since it has nice, short sentences and generally simple grammar. Caesar is still way beyond me at this point. Aside from just learning more vocabulary, I need to really drill and memorize all the different conjugations.

As for why, I think it is fun. It's no more pointless than any other thing I do.

jonathanaquino.com/latin/

It's better to just memorize the inflections right away and never bother again.

Do you actually know Latin, or are you replying to my posts just because you have nothing better to do? If you had studied Latin you'd know the mere grammar-core vocab-reading process is not enough for Latin, because of the hardship imposed by the cases and the constantly changing meaning of the words. Greek and Latin produce significance not from the single words, but from the concatenation of them inside the sentence, which makes such languages different from any other modern language. I'll give you that you have to read a lot, though, and that's what Italian students in fact don't do.

Al liceo classico avevo 9 o 10 in latino. Mi piaceva e sapevo che la mia scelta sarebbe stata quella di proseguire gli studi all'università (sebbene abbia optato per Lettere moderne piuttosto che Lettere classiche). Ogni tanto leggevo qualche opera per conto mio, soprattutto Ovidio e Catullo, ma non mi è mai passato per la testa di leggerli in latino. Credo che la scuola semplicemente non abitui lo studente a farlo, ti insegnano tutte le nozioni necessarie ma non ti trasmettono la passione verso la lingua in sé e per sé. Io adoravo la letteratura latina, ma al di là di qualche lettura metrica, che trovavo divertente, non ero affatto interessato a scoprire la lingua degli autori. E questo si vede ancora oggi: nonostante abbia fatto Lettere non riesco a leggere gli autori più difficili - per lo meno non riesco a leggerli come se fossero autori italiani o inglesi. Ho sempre bisogno di fermarmi a ragionare sui casi, sulla grammatica, a fare la traduzione mentalmente. E la cosa peggiore è che non riesco a capire se è l'insegnamento che mi ha fottuto (non abituandomi alla lettura quando sarebbe stato il momento giusto) o se sono io che devo cambiare totalmente approccio. Ma cosa faccio? Vado su duolingo come farebbe un americano ritardato e mi rimetto a imparare il latino da zero? O devo forse leggere leggere leggere accontentandomi di capire solo il significato complessivo (cosa che non è da me)?

is almost as if learning a dead language in the same way as you learn living one is pointless and retarded

baka those cultural marxist are ruining academia

>is almost as if learning a dead language in the same way as you learn living one is pointless and retarded
It is. You don't have to learn to speak Latin and Greek, because it's completely useless. You learn to read and translate them, stop.

Not that user, but that's not modern academia. The learning method he described is far from modern, and better ones have been created and used in the meantime. The problem is in the old and conservative academia that won't accept those superior methods as standards.

It looks like you don't want to learn Latin or Greek, so don't do it, you fucking cretin, why do you need the approval of an internet community of dilettantes to decide what to do? Go learn mathematics, go study STEM, whatever you want, it's your life.

>cases
My native language (russian) has even more cases, I don't give a shit sempai
>changing meaning of the words
What
>not from the single words, but from the concatenation of them
What
Are you saying compound words aren't present in modern languages? Or do you mean words like eadem/quis-/-que/-ne?

>better ones have been created and used in the meantime
For example?

Not only you didn't answer my question ("do you actually know Latin?") but you also got it all wrong. I'm not talking about compound words, I'm talking about how the language actually signifies its content. When you read Latin, especially poetry (I always refer to poetry because it's what interests me the most), you can not simply make a mental translation of the words you see on the page. In order to fully understand the text, you have to think with the author, you have to adopt his sensibility and his particular view. If you try, for example, to translate word-for-word a line from Lucretius, you'll get a meaningless slime of terms. Latin is difficult because you need to get what the author was actually trying to say in his unique and remote mentality. A certain association of words can produce a meaning that is not included in the list of the meanings of those single words. It's not always like I + I = II. Sometimes you have I + I = O. And you have to figure out how those sticks make a circle instead of a series of sticks. If you're not arrogant enough to deny this, you must realize that such a level of understanding can be gained only from decades of practice. And, again, I'm not talking about the fucking Bible, which is plain prose and it's easy but doesn't pique my interest.

>latin
>vulgar latin

>For example?
I was forced to study Latin like the Italian user for two years, so I don't really know much Latin, but I've heard of one or two professors in the country using them. Basically, you have to develop an ear for the language instead of mindlessy learning the suffixes and declensions. This is, of course, science fiction to most of the academics, at least in my country and Italy.

Perhaps you could give us an example instead of pontificating about dumb shit your college professor stuffed in your brain?

How is this different from learning idioms in any other language? All languages change the meaning of words based on context. You develop a sense for this by reading a lot and being exposed to as much material as possible.

Well that's not what the academia thinks in my country or Italy. Here, suffixes are learned by rote memorization. Texts can go fuck themselves.

I AM the Italian user. I agree with you that the old and conservative academic method is bad, since I studied Latin at school and I consider myself not good enough at it. But "developing an ear for the language" can be bullshit as well. What do you learn, exactly? To fluently read Cicero in the original without noticing all his particular and precious skills? What is the point of that? I see people on here reasoning like this: "just read DFW in English so you can appreciate his writing style etc", but for Latin. Well, it doesn't work like that. I could have been studying English for six months and still understand DFW, but if you have been studying Latin for the same duration you CAN'T fully understand, let's say, Tacitus. And that's because Latin uses a very free word order that hides inexhaustible meaning in many points of the sentence. It has a more subtle and underlying significance. In order to get all that, you have to study Latin both in the old academic way and in the new way you mentioned. Just like any non-English speaker does with English: grammar and syntax at school, practice with travels and Veeky Forums. I challange you to find one person that has the chance to do the same with Latin.

>you can not simply make a mental translation of the words you see on the page. In order to fully understand the text, you have to think with the author, you have to adopt his sensibility and his particular view. If you try, for example, to translate word-for-word a line from Lucretius, you'll get a meaningless slime of terms.

Man this is exactly how it works with every language. The only difference is that you actually practiced English a lot on your own because you needed it for browsing the interesting part of the internet.

Look at the people who had high grades in English but didn't constantly consume English media for their own interest. They probably suck at it just like you suck at Latin. 5 years of classroom learning mean absolutely nothing, and one semester of Latin Language at university even less.

I had one classmate (I did Liceo Scientifico) who could basically read and even speak Latin as we read and speak English, but he ordered latin books and comics and then read them on his own time (there was no internet at the time), traveled to take part to conventions of enthusiasts where they spoke to each other in Latin etc.

How the fuck did you manage that? Are you a NEET who can spend his time studying at home?

>Are you a NEET who can spend his time studying at home?
That's the only way you can learn Latin, there's no alternative

Gershom Sholem said the same to Walter Benjamin with respect to Hebrew. It used to be called application, now it's either NEET or autistic. Yet another instance of a classic virtue become an indisposition. Good work, user.

What I meant was that to become fluent in reading Latin in such a short space of time you must invest a high proportion of your time (I'm guessing several hours a day) into doing so. This is incompatible with a full time job and education.

Jesus Christ, do americans really think that learning a new language is a superpower bestowed upon select few?
You learn one as a stupid baby, it's not hard.

I'm not American.

>Second, literally all Latin and Greek works have been translated into English, which would do just fine, unless you're autistic.
This is not true at all. Actually, there is a significant number of Latin and Greek texts that have never been properly analyzed by academics.

And is it surprising? This board has never even heard names like Lucilius, Petronius, Apuleius, Rutilius Namazianus.

Vocabulary may be translatable, but grammar isn't, especially with Latin. Latin makes possible poetic forms that simply can't be done in English.

It is feasible if you don't have a super competitive job. For example, if you work 7 hours a day mon-fri, you have a few hours every day you can devote to your goal, plus the whole weekend. Even if you focus just half of that on learning Latin you will be very advanced after one year.

People keep telling this of every language, and it is wrong every time. Of course if you only speak English you don't even realize how much doesn't get translated.

Look at the bibliography in the philosophy or literature essay you are reading, and count how many articles/books are only available in German, French or Italian.

Even without going into very specific areas, look at a list of the complete works of your favorite authors, and many times you'll see that not all of them have been translated.

What OP says is the truth. You only learn those languages if you want to waste your time being trapped in a Classicist bubble - never engaging with new ideas.

alexsheremet.com/greek-and-latin-in-an-age-of-better-things/

>Apuleius
gutenberg.org/ebooks/1666
There's this 17th century translation of him if you want it.

>implying practical utility is the main reason something has value.

You must be from the US or the UK.

The point of Latin and Greek is spiritual formation of the elite. GIovanni Gentile made them both compulsory in the Italian Classic High School and Italians now have the average highest IQ of all western countries on the planet. Coincidence? I don't think so.

If you're going by that standard, then you might as well learn Chinese.

I didn't ask for a translation (I'm not even English/American). I said Veeky Forums doesn't know anything about them and still a lot of people act like patrician latinlords

not him but Apuleius gets mentioned a lot here for obvious reasons of rule 34

>highest IQ of all western countries on the planet
>significantly below average in every PISA and PIAAC study for years
>universities at large absolutely shit for anything but liberal arts
Yeah, sure. Whatever you have to tell yourself to stave off suicide pasta nigger. FYI they're part of classical gymnasial education in a dozen other European countries including UK.

Giovanni Gentile was in fact also an orientalist and together with Giuseppe Tucci founded one of the most important Italian institutes for the study of oriental cultures.

Focusing on wester culture during youth, though, also helps building a sense of cultural continuity between past and present - which is also part of the spiritual formation of the individual.

>Focusing on wester culture during youth, though, also helps building a sense of cultural continuity between past and present - which is also part of the spiritual formation of the individual
I completely agree

I'd suggest taking a look at Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles and the textbook Latin via Ovid by Goldberg. Both ratchet up the difficulty of the vocabulary and grammar so gradually (but quickly) that they bring you up to a reasonable reading fluency (for simple sentences) in a short time, while also giving you the tools to work through more difficult texts. The usual method of vocabulary + grammar doesn't seem to work very well for most people, leading to frustration, but reading from the very start makes it interesting.

I won't kill myself just because I'm smarter than you!
Also, why do you pretend you have Greek and Latin too, when in the UK and the US they are either optional or taught in private schools accessible only if you have a shit-ton of money?

Which of Greek and Latin is the more useful language to learn, from a literary perspective?

Is Greek significantly more difficult to learn?

>is greek harder

no it just takes an extra day or two to get started as you memorize their alphabet, otherwise the grammer is pretty close, cop this if u wanna kno more:

amazon.com/Greek-Latin-Roots-English/dp/0742547809

Both Greek and Latin are offered as A-levels everywhere, retard.

the public schools i went to in massachussetts offered french for pseuds, spanish so puerto ricans could get an easy 'A' keep their gpa up, and latin for patricians...you had to pick a language, plebs picked degenerate forms of latin, patrishes picked the original

Why are you lying?

>offered as A-levels everywhere
This isn't true, but in any case the pre-requistes at GCSE are certainly not offered everywhere.

they're not taught just anywhere to A level I think is user's point. likewise you can take Arabic at A level anywhere but it doesn't mean your school will teach you Arabic lit from 11-17 or even that schools teaching Arabic are common.

>french for pseuds
What's a pseud?

well in evangelical red states they probably don't want you learning latin because it might lead you to the evils of catholicism or something, but in new england you can get latin if u want it

Learning a language ins't a vagary or a fad. It takes years of arduous study.

Even if anyone "convinced" you to learn one or the other, you'd give up after a weekend.

back to le redditte, newbuddy

>le secret klub xD

I've been on Veeky Forums since 2012. Just haven't been on Veeky Forums in a while.

>I won't kill myself just because I'm smarter than you!
That's highly doubtful.
>why do you pretend you have Greek and Latin too
Because they are part of the curriculum in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Once again reminding you that these subjects have nothing to do with IQ or academic performance, where Italy is behind almost every other Western European country. Now fuck off.

You Will get a shit ton of pussy

>Italians now have the average highest IQ of all western countries on the planet

Man I agree that Italian high schools (liceo classico) are patrician as fuck, but in this same thread it's already been said that you don't actually learn Latin and Greek from school education, so your point is pretty vague and useless. It's great to start dealing with ancient languages and works when you're only 14, but in order to read the originals and be wise you have to practice by yourself for months and concentrate all your efforts on the reading and not on the grammar, the syntax or the translation.

Well, they probably should replace them with more English classes, considering even in the more developed North absolute majority doesn't speak a fucking word of it beyond elementary school phrases in spite of country being a tourist mecca.

Please explain the connection between being smarter than you and killing myself.

Also, I was mostly referring to the system of the US and the UK in comparison to Italy. I know you googled really hard before finding about Germany, Austria and Switzerland - the point is that none of these countries have Latin and Greek COMPULSORY in the curriculum, and that Italians, who instead have it in one kind of their public high school, are averagely smarter. :D

You mean the more developed north 'Germany' where the second most spoken language is Turkish?

>Italy is behind almost every other Western European country
You're mentioning random things you heard from here to there, buddy. Rankings of schools are based on many different aspects. Which one are you referring to?
The user is talking about the setting devised by Gentile during the fascist era, which is regarded as one of the best in the world. Then you can tell me Italian schools are too much on the old-fashioned academic tradition and they don't prepare students for the real world: alright, I agree. But in terms of cultural and historical preparation, Italian schools are impeccable. This is recognized as a fact everywhere and many foreign countries, including the US, hire Italian students with humanities curricula for teaching Latin and Greek. Also, Italian high schools are pretty much exhausting.

southern italy has develop level closer to the maghreb than europe, it's a shithole

All of these countries have compulsory Greek and Latin in Gymansiums which are a conventional way into higher education. Your ardent insistence on wrong information in topics you are clearly completely incompetent in is particularly revealing of the famed Italian intelligence, the clear "superiority" of which as already stated you can see in PISA, PIAAC and average national IQ studies which plainly reveal Italians to be below average in all things education. Kannst natürlich soviel wie möglich um den heißen Brei reden, im Endeffekt bist sowieso ein depperter ungebildeter Tsching.

>Rankings of schools are based on many different aspects. Which one are you referring to?
Any and all, considering they are far from the best in everything.
>many foreign countries, including the US, hire Italian students with humanities curricula for teaching Latin and Greek
They hire people with higher education not 19 year old high school grads.
>Italian high schools are pretty much exhausting.
So are high schools in other countries.

Southern Italy is not open to Europeanization. But it's not Maghreb as well.
Instead of throwing on the table the usual commonplaces you've heard from the TV, I suggest you to start thinking different. Southern Italy has been desperately trying to preserve its traditional culture for decades. So much so that in many high schools of the South they speak in regional dialect instead of in Italian. That's bad from a global and European point of view, but it's good if you consider they still carry on their indipendence and millennial traditions. When it comes to speak about international rankings and labour market you're all good at shitting over local indipendence, eh? Then when it suits you you're ready to shit over globalization.
Italy is a very complex world, think twice before making judgments.

>So are high schools in other countries.
Simply false. Every student that came to my high school on cultural exchange had a very hard time doing even maths or science tests. There were a Japanese, a Chinese, a Hungarian, a Finnish, a Danish, an Argentine, an Irish and if I remember correctly even a German.

The reason why Italian students suck is because most of them are lazy, careless and immature, not because education itself is bad. If they want to stay retarded, it's their choice.
t. Italian

No he means the wealthier region of Italy in the North you fucking retard

Our scores would literally be 20 places higher without the niggers lmao

t. went to american public school

Ancient Greek is not a dead language. Modern Greeks speak it but they are too dumb to realize.

No they don't. They speak Greek, but not Ancient Greek.

If they spoke Ancient Greek, they wouldn't say "s'agapo", they would say "Agapo se".

They also wouldn't pronounce ypsilon and eta like English people pronounce E.

My Greek teacher used to speak Homeric Greek when we took the trip to Athens during high school kek

>muh anecdotal evidence is better than hard stats
>muh exceptional laziness
Just fucking stop. There are both lazy and diligent students everywhere.

And I'm betting nobody understood a thing.

Nicely articulated response

It is actually. All the evidence points towards a lacking educational system. Your 'I know a guy' and 'Italians are magically lazy' are quite literally not arguments.

What are your arguments, instead? I can only see butthurt ravings.

Yeah if you just score US Whites they do better than almost every European country.

Already refered you three times to OECD educational statistic in this thread. If you want to continue living in autistic denial, be my guest, but this conversation has gotten quite boring.

Has gotten quite boring? Really?
Okay, let's change it. How old are you? Where are you from? What high school did you go to? What subjects did you study?

Why would I tell you any of that?

Because I told you a lot of things about me and I feel like our discussion is not equal

>I told you a lot of things about me
Played yourself really.

So? You're not gonna answer my questions? Why hiding on Veeky Forums though?

>why do you want to remain anonymous on an anonymous forum?
Will gladly talk to you on non-personal topics.

That makes me suspect you went to a shitty school...

Don't, Latin is a complex, situational piece of shit you have to put a lot of time in, and if you don't know French, Spanish or such, you're in for a fucking ride.
I had a few teachers that specialized on Latin and they admitted they couldn't claim to speak it fluently due to how contrived it can be in some scenarios.