[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)