/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18534787]

Convince me that this is not the best way to learn a dead/reading-only language.

I don‘t see why you‘d ever learn grammar first before you know vocabulary. Most texts will make sense anyways as a romance/germanic language speaker once you know the vocabulary. Everything else comes with reading, consistency, repetition and time.
Traditional/school and uni learning methods seem to want to teach you everything about the language before you‘ll ever see a text, withholding everything but the bare minimum.

[Anonymous No.18534795]

>ut = as
>sum = I
>eius = his
lmao

[Anonymous No.18534799]

You lee oos kay suhr

[Anonymous No.18534832]

>>18534795
I mean, okay, good point, I didn’t even read what it said. But this is no point against the method. Brute force vocabulary and make grammar along the way. That vocabulary has go be of course more accurate, account for multiple meanings.

[Anonymous No.18534886]

>>18534832
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU
kek, I just found the overly simplistic definitions funny but you are right. Memorizing the most common words in any language makes like 75% of the text comprehensible. You should watch this vid about word families. It is a presentation, albeit with shitty audio, on how to increase vocab efficiently. A quick summary: learn the most common words and study the prefixes and suffixes to acquire many more at the same time.

Word: to accept
Word family of accept
>acceptive
>acceptedly
>acceptability
>acceptable
>acceptilation

Word: clārus, -a, -um
Word family of clārus
>clāreō
>praeclārus
>clāritās
>dēclārātor
>dēclārātiō

Wiktionary is a gold mine for this.

[Anonymous No.18534912]

>>18534787
>>18534886
They have books called "a frequency dictionary of (x language)". Comes with definitions and examples of usage. Looks hopeful to me, you guys may want to check that out too.

[Anonymous No.18534922]

>>18534787
lol, "cum" is a word in latin?

[Anonymous No.18534964]

>>18534787
You will not be able to make sense of any sentence in Latin without grammar, since the words take different forms according to case. Also, you will find it much easier to learn the vocabulary if you are actively practising using it in translation and composition.

No idea why you would want to learn Latin though, it's a complete waste of time and I regret spending years of my highschool on it when I could have studied a real, actually useful language like German or French. Latin is for pseuds who want to earn pseud points at dinner parties with their pseud friends, and for people who want to dedicate their lives to becoming professional translators. You won't get better at Latin than someone who has spent their entire life studying to translate, so you may as well read the published translations. And it's not like the Romans were great intellectuals (that's the Greeks) and they were wrong about most things anyway and the things they were right about you can read in English

[Anonymous No.18534965]

>>18534787
Did you learn Latin this way? And if so, were you successful?

[Anonymous No.18534975]

>>18534787
a lot of those words have very important alternative meanings you know?

[Anonymous No.18534982]

>>18534787
>cum

[Anonymous No.18534988]

>>18534964
what are you talking about? latin is a great language and a fascinating subject.

[Anonymous No.18535014]

>>18534922
Never heard of "magna cum laude"?

[Anonymous No.18535045]

>>18534964
This. Imagine not learning how2code.

[Anonymous No.18535047]

>>18534964
Cringe

[Anonymous No.18535632]

the most common words are often used in the greatest number of ways. prepositions are always a bitch.

and, as others have said word modifications are a function of grammar. either you learn about cases, tenses, and so on or you memorize the dozen forms of each verb instead. learning grammar is the shortcut.

[Anonymous No.18535640]

isn't that like saying, if you know these English words then you're pretty much fluent because they make up so much of the text
> he
> she
> it
> is
> was
> at
> in
> then
etc

[Anonymous No.18535671]

>>18535632
I agree. I don't think any one can intuitively understand something as basic as indirect statements or questions without studying Latin grammar. There certain grammatical features, some common, some rare, that you simply can't get from knowing or being fluent in a modern Romance language.

[Anonymous No.18535785]

>>18534787
vocabulary means nothing to your brain outside of context. But you will probably not be convinced until you actually try your crap and fail miserably.

[Anonymous No.18535834]

>>18534787
How to tell people you cannot read Latin without saying you cannot read Latin.

The way the language is structured even if you knew all the words in a sentence you wouldn't be able to make sense of it at all without knowledge about grammar. You need to know the declensions to understand if it's the gallic war, the war of the gallians or in gallia, a gallian at war, a beautiful gallian etc. not real examples, more than 20 years since I learned Latin, but I did it for 6 years and I can guarantee you, you won't get anywhere with just vocabulary in this language.

[Anonymous No.18535841]

>>18534787
In a lot of Latin sentences the word order is more or less random, and the only way to know which words belong together are their declensions. You'd not be able to know what a sentence is about at all with just the basic vocabulary.

[Anonymous No.18535842]

>>18534832
you're retarded if you think learning vocabulary words twice to correct shitty frequency lists justifies your stupid views.

[Anonymous No.18535852]

>>18535842
actually make that at least 4x times because of pronunciation errors and common mispellings even in standard texts. latin isn't as easy as your stupid frequency lists dumbass.

[Anonymous No.18536028]

>>18534787
use vocabulary for nouns/adjectives. learn the conjugation rules while learning verbs. you need a bare minimum knowledge of grammar while learning the nouns, otherwise you wouldn't know what differentiates servus from servum.
tenses are the most difficult part in my experience, and that's more than just vocab and very important to the sentence. basic grammar like syntax is very easy.

[Anonymous No.18536101]

>>18534787
You've assumed Latin is like English and that all you really need to learn is vocabulary. Latin has a different grammatical structure to English. You need to know all the declensions and conjugations to understand a sentence, otherwise you won't know who's doing what or what's going on at all, even if you know the vocabulary. Case endings with certain nouns can look so different from the standard nominative form as to be unrecognizable, unless you know how to form the endings based on pronunciation rules. This is even more so the case with Greek. Basically, you're going about this wrong.