/lit/ - Literature

>>17064792
It's truly up the individual's ability and effort. For example, some kids can pick up algebra quickly while others need to have it explained again and again to catch on.
In my case, as a burger, I was raised trilingual (English, Spanish, French) so picking up on the Latin vocab wasn't the hard part. The grammar was but luckily my professors were old school and demanded us to learn it by rote (writing out paradigms again and again), taught us a few mnemonic techniques, and gave us a ton of reading material going from easy to hard in order to get our brains used to the structure. On the other hand, I've heard the misfortune of other classics majors who spent the first year on Wheelock's and, by the second year, were expected to translate Virgil.
Thankfully, in the US, the rules for mastering the classical languages are lax, i.e. be able to read well while placing less emphasis on writing.
In the old days, schoolboys were learning this for a decade before they hit university where they were expected to write their essays eloquently in Latin like Cicero or in Greek like Thucydides.

>>16726537
Them dollar dollar bills, y’all. His works are required reading in English schools across the world, a greater feat than winning any Nobel.

>>16591127
The guy who discovered the remains of Troy in the 19th ce said he learned ancient Greek as follows:
1) learned the Greek alphabet
2) read modern Greek translations of Literature he had reread again and again as he compared words with the original to avoid wasting time w/ a dictionary
3) once he mastered modern Greek, memorized ancient Greek declensions for nouns and verbs
4) absorbed the structure of its grammar by the extensive reading method

>Of the Greek grammar, I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules ; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in schools with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must he altogether wrong, and that a thorough knowledge of the Greek grammar could only be obtained by practice, that is to say, by the attentive reading of the prose classics, and by committing choice pieces of them to memory. Following this very simple method, I learnt ancient Greek as I would have learnt a living language. I can write in it with the greatest fluency on any subject I am acquainted with, and can never forget it. I am perfectly acquainted with all the grammatical rules without even knowing whether or not they are contained in the grammars ; and when ever a man finds errors in my Greek, I can immediately prove that I am right, by merely reciting passages from the classics where the sentences employed by me occur.

in other words, fpbp

>>16427072
Salve, amice

>>16383356
dw fren, the bliss of mental expansion surpasses physical pleasure