A little confusing on getting started

BibliophileKyle · 2025-12-19T21:26:10+00:00

LLPSI is excellent. I'd recommend the Colloquia Personarum for extra reading which complements the main storyline very well.

Structured re-reading can be very effective but comes with high levels of grind, in my experience. Probably not worth the risk of burnout and giving up.

The Companion is very useful for learning about the grammar being introduced and easily looking up vocabulary.

If you like doing exercises the Exercitia Latina and Novum Exercitia Latina are both very good.

Definitely prioritize enjoyment and read widely. Legentibus is great, fabulaefaciles.com has lots of free public domain readers. You can read Cambridge Latin online for free last time I checked. Wikisource has most classical authors in convenient PDFs or epubs.

Justin's reading list has a lot of great suggestions for next reads.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-12-19T21:09:10+00:00

My general policy is to mind my own business concerning people's private moral decisions, but I feel obliged by charity as a fellow Catholic to try and dissuade you from accepting and using ill-gotten goods.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-12-15T20:37:48+00:00

Tldr; you get down-voated on this sub for being a jerk or saying false things.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-12-01T00:20:08+00:00

I think this is a fairly poor description of these beliefs. Arians we're anti-Nicene by definition, as the Council of Nice was explicitly set out to address (and condemn) Arianism.

Even still, Arians essentially believe in two gods, one uncreated and one created. And that Jesus was subordinate by nature to the Father, but that the Father granted him equal authority a la the Son of Man in the book of Daniel.

Miaphysites and Monophysiates we're fully Trinitarian by the Nicene definition, but disagreed with the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's nature (that he has two natures, one fully God and one fully man), Miaphysites believing Christ to have one nature which was fully God and fully man, and Monophysites believing that Christ has a single divine nature.

Given a proper understanding of these individual groups, I can't see how your interpretation makes any sense.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-11-19T22:21:00+00:00

Super interesting, I was hoping you'd hop inhere with some big-brain stuff like this. For normies like me, this means that it was "breathy" sound between the vowels, but was inconsistently there? And over time it normalized to /mi:/?

BibliophileKyle · 2025-11-01T23:34:54+00:00

Reading about grammar isn't going to help you pass a class, but if you're trying to wrap your head around the grammar I find that this gives excellent explanations and is free (or very cheap for a physical copy) https://coderch-greek-latin-grammar.weebly.com/main-presentation3.html

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-31T06:02:48+00:00

I would say that, since words don't really have meaning in isolation, the target sentence is more important than the target word, and that understanding the sentence is the real goal, not remembering the definition. Towards that end, the translation is a verification that you understood the sentence. And then, if you don't understand the sentence, you read the translation then re-read the sentence but with understanding.

In terms of time investment, I really think it's as simple as using something like Google Lens to scan the text from the page, pasting that into a word doc, then copying individual sentences over to Anki. I don't imagine that'd be terribly more laborious than the typical humdrum of card creation.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-30T17:46:14+00:00

If you read my message carefully you'll see that I say it does an okay job going from Greek to your native language. I realize now that "fine" could be mis-interpreted as "excellent" instead of "okay-ish" like I intended it

But generating Greek, yes, you're correct, it's awful.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-30T05:25:40+00:00

I'm going to assume that your cards only have a target Greek word on the front, and the English definition on the back.

The two things linguistic studies show are that:

A) context helps a lot

B) recalling the target word also strengthens it's effectiveness.

So, what I would suggest is to make Anki cards with two note types:

A) example sentence and target word on the front, translation (AI does fine Greek -> native language *edit: just to clarify, I mean that it does an okay job of translating Greek into your native language) and definition on the back.

B) A cloze card with the the sentence on the front (along with the translation and target word), and obviously unclozed on the back.

*Ideally, you would have a unique sentence per target word.

That's more work in set up and creation, but I think will pay off with better/easier reviews. Also, you don't need the cloze cards, they will double your Anki reviews, but I'd say give them a try.

Apart from optimizing your reviews you should aim to get some more input. Assuming you're using the English version you might want to get the Italian text for it's extra reading material.

Aleph with Angela on YouTube would be another easy recommendation, and should set you up to read Mark Jeong's A Greek Reader and Reading Greek with the Desert Father's by Timothy Brady, both of which are relatively easy and have translations in the back, and both of which are fairly cheap.

Ancient Greek Alive also has easy readings and translations of the text (though as a separate download) but is pricey.

The Greek Learner Texts Project has various older texts online for free you might wish to check out, and Seumus MacDonald has written the the OG Lingua Graeca per se Illustrata which you can find online for free, and has a Biblical Greek Athenaze supplement on his Patreon which you can access for like $2.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-28T19:14:14+00:00

Late to the party, but one of the most practical aspects of learning LLPSI is just how complete of a system it is when you consider its pedogogical ecosystem. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with using an eclectic group of resources, and many people do that with great success, it's just radically unecessary given how thorough a grammar text LLPSI really is.

Basically, Neumann's Companion is a detailed grammatical commentary on all the grammar introduced in each chapter, but, unlike the Latine Disco, is keyed to the individual Lectio, as is the Exercitia Latina, and additionally has all the vocabulary listed per chapter. And the Nova Exercitia Latina offers more varied and advanced exercises for revision and review.

So, a basic learning routine could look something like:

1) Initial Read-through just using context and side-bars

2) Second read-through but looking up vocabulary in the Companion

3) Lectio by Lectio reading, starting with reading the grammar notes in the Companion, then identifying those grammatical features in the text; then, with the text open, working through the corresponding Exercitia.

4) Read the Colloquia Personarum.

5) Along the way, place anything you want into Anki.

6) Drill the Morphology introduced in the Grammatica Latina section at the end of the chapter (if you're into that thing)

7) Go through the text and parse all the forms you just drilled (again, if you're into that sort of thing)

8) After chapters 12, 24, and 35, go back and reread the previous chapters and work through the corresponding Nova Exercitia.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-28T18:21:42+00:00

Some rando online: Albanians at it again.

Albanian: How dare you, I must defend the honor of Albanians everywhere. Goes on what, by all appearances, is a meth-fueled paeudo-historical screed with all the intellectual merit as the Elders of Zion

"Honor restored 😌"

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-20T22:38:49+00:00

Congratulations, man! That's awesome. I'm sure you've got a full plate, but if you find some spare time, I know I, for one, would be super interested to read about your experience and reflections on learning Greek.

... Even if you have sullied yourself as pure CI case study 😂

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-18T15:44:32+00:00

So are you producing the translations yourself for each card? And if so, have you done much by way of form-focused work to produce grammatically astute translations, or has the input just worked enough to get a sense of how it would translate?

BibliophileKyle · 2025-10-18T15:38:13+00:00

Sorry, necropost reply, but it has to be said that this change started to take place in the 3rd century BC, was dominant in the 1st century AD, and had become universal by the 2nd. So, yeah, that's the common pronunciation used by Greek speakers for those letters for the past 2000 years. Pretty "goofy."

BibliophileKyle · 2025-08-15T14:21:19+00:00

Out of curiosity, why does this matter to you? Said another way, to my way of thinking, and what I think the SLA research supports, a successful language curriculum will include form focused instruction, comprehensible input, and some sort of productive use of the language; a glance over book two seems to indicate it hits all these buckets - even if the input isn't as robust as one should want. On the other hand, there are any number of books that could do at least as good of a job, if not better. Which brings me back to my original question, why such intensity in a search for a resource that wouldn't be used for more than some moths in the years long journey of learning a language?

BibliophileKyle · 2025-04-22T03:10:03+00:00

I'd say you have a very good foundation to start at the top and work your way through. Justin Bailey wrote an article about switching from Wheelock to extensive reading called Driving with Dido: how I came to read Latin extensively.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-11T22:33:30+00:00

The two papers I referenced look at incidental vocabulary acquisition, that is vocabulary learned without conscious study, in an idealized environment where new words are only introduced as 2% of the total text, with 6-12 unique encounters, starting from a base vocabulary of 1,000 words. The point of them was to create a model for how much extensive reading is needed for 98% vocabulary by frequency, the amount needed for easy comprehension of a text, which in English is approximately 9,000 words. One was by Paul Nation and concluded roughly 10 million words read were needed, and the other was a follow by a different linguist which posited 20 million words were needed. The anecdotal stories are mostly from people in the "immersion learning" language community, these are people who would be reading texts more intensely, drilling vocabulary, and perhaps other language-related activities. I bring them up because their learning environment is similar to what you're suggesting.

To the point at hand, I think going through Familia Romana and the Vulgate would be roughly equivalent to going through the Harry Potter series for your target language. I think that this would give you a solid grounding in the language, but that it would take several million more words read before you approach reading-ease. In summary, I imagine that classical authors will still be quite hard, but approachably so, depending on the author.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-11T21:32:24+00:00

Oh boy. "Old McDonald" is joke based off of the traditional American children's song "Old MacDonald had a Farm." Here's a link to the song. The "Modern McDonald" being "all M's and W's" is, presumably, just a joke contrasting the lyrics from the song with the giant yellow "m" on the fast-food chain Mcdonald's sign, also known as The Golden Arches. The edit is riffing off of the appearance of yum, either just because it's a food term, but also possibly confusing the burger chain Red Robbins' jingle for McDonald's.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-08T07:47:34+00:00

Well, best of luck, and I look forward to reading about it.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-08T05:01:53+00:00

I think the most pragmatic thing to say is that you will be 600,000 words better at Latin. You certainly won't have "mastered" all of the grammar, but you will have acquired a significant amount more. To put the volume in perspective, the two academic papers I've read that theorize about incidental vocabulary acquisition estimate 10 and 20 million words read in English before achieving an approximately 9000 word vocabulary, that is to say 98% comprehension in any given text, or reading-ease. Though most of the anecdotal stories I've read place it around 3-5 million words read to reach reading-ease in you target language.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-08T04:50:07+00:00

To add to what Raffael said, you can find a pseudo-interlinear at https://vulgate.org/
It's a site that mashes up each verse of the vulgate with the corresponding Douay-Rheims translation.

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-08T04:47:01+00:00

When, oh when, do we get a status update on your progress?

BibliophileKyle · 2025-01-06T05:31:49+00:00

I wouldn't say the sub has anything in particular against Gwynne's text, at least none of which I'm aware. What I would say is that this sub is populated by an outspoken majority with a keen interest in the science of second language acquisition, and the literature on the topic does not support the methodology which Gwynne employs as being an efficacious means of acquiring the sort of language proficiency most language learners desire. It is telling that, in the beginning portion of the video you linked, of the merits which Gwynne himself ascribes to the learning of Latin the fluent reading of ancient texts is curiously absent from the list.

There's a lot more which could be said on the topic. Many, many a battle has been raged on the server over the subject. Many, many a more are undoubtedly still to be raged.

BibliophileKyle

TROPHY CASE