Learning new languages

[Anonymous No.14213245]

I'm looking for advice on learning new languages. I could just google it, but strangely enough I trust /lit/s opinion more. Do any books give advice for becoming bilingual? I'm an English only speaker and want to start reading a whole bunch of languages. Specifically Latin, Ancient Greek, and Vedic Sandskrit. If you have any book reccs about those specific languages, that'd be great too.

[Anonymous No.14213284]

>>14213245
Learning dead languages won't make you bilingual since you can't actually use them. Don't be daft and study a living language, it will not only be easier, but also more practical. Just knowing a foreign language makes you less of a brainlet than 90% of mankind. Once you do that, consider learning any one programming language, unless you plan to become an irrelevant boomer who doesn't get reality within 15 years. Once that's done, you can dedicate some personal time on luxury timesinks like latin.

[Anonymous No.14213301]

>>14213284
I really wish to translate the classics written in these languages. If I'm able to learn these, I'll be easily able to learn other languages after.

I just really want to read classical authors in their original language. Cicero, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Homer. I want to see them in their glory.

[Anonymous No.14213327]

/int

[Anonymous No.14213349]

>>14213245
>Latin and Greek
#F!9o4QEIIK!P3piz8Bfw-z7jgb7Q8NWDg
>You can find Sanskrit and other stuff in here
#F!x4VG3DRL!lqecF4q2ywojGLE0O8cu4A
>Germanic Languages
#F!x4VG3DRL!lqecF4q2ywojGLE0O8cu4A!ItEgnZKb

I've only studied Latin so if you want to learn that I'd recommend a combination of Wheelocks and Lingua Latina. Or Latin: An Intensive Course by Moreland and Fleischer. The Cambridge textbook is quite popular too. All these books and more can be found in the Megas. The key to learning is discipline (I know that sounds obvious). You should study your target language for at least an hour every day, preferably longer. Do your flashcards every single day. Download Anki or Quizlet on your phone and flip through them when you can. Practice the grammar paradigms. Do all the textbook exercises you can and keep a notebook. In six months to a year you'll be ready to start engaging/translating actual texts.

[Anonymous No.14213360]

>>14213327
But I already posted here.
>>14213349
Thank's man.

[Anonymous No.14213423]

>>14213245
>Specifically Latin, Ancient Greek, and Vedic Sandskrit
Stop watching Luke Smith and get a real degree.

[Anonymous No.14213444]

I thank god every day I learned Latin as my first language other than English, because it taught me how to learn languages in a way that makes complete sense to me and takes all the vagueness and mystery out of the process. To summarize it the best I can, learning a language (for reading purposes) comes in two phases: 1) 80% learning the grammar and morphology, 20% practicing on texts you actually enjoy; and 2) 80% practicing on texts you enjoy, 20% learning the grammar and morphology.

What I mean by this is that in the first phase, you can't get around learning fucking the grammar. It's all well and good to build your vocab, but you need to know the difference between these sorts of sentences in your target language:
>I did that, and you did it too.
>If I were to do that, I would be certain that you are able to do it too.
>Assuming it is the case that you will do that, you will need to do this as well, so I will consider how best you might achieve it.

These are weird and disjointed, but they are (basically) grammatically correct. If you're a native speaker you don't think much about how much is going on in these sentences, but changes in voice, tense, aspect, mood, and inflection when using subordinate or coordinate clauses governed by conjunctions, participial phrases, etc., all need to be learned. How the fuck else are you going to know that Russian sometimes uses the genitive case, whose usual meaning is simply the possessive ("X's ball," "the ball of X"), to indicate comparison? Or that the instrumental case, whose usual meaning is simply "by means of," often completes the copula ("X is Y"), but only in the past and future? You can't learn these things without reading a book, unless your only goal in learning the language is to say and understand simple indicative phrases like "the restaurant is over there."

This sounds like torture, but notice only the first phase is 80% this, 20% real texts. That's because you shouldn't look at the grammar and morphology as a secret code that needs to be memorized perfectly. Instead, you should look at it as a series of rules you want to know, but that you are allowed to fuck up freely while learning them. There will always be certain things that slip your mind and you have to google later, even when you're fairly good at the language. This is why in the early phase, you want to do 20% working with real texts that interest you, so that you don't go stir crazy reading nonstop grammar and always thinking "how the fuck am I going to remember all this arbitrary shit?" It's also absolutely crucial to get a large stock of raw vocab in an area that interests you -- fuck learning the words for "mitten" and "cabbage," if you're mostly interested in reading history books. Learn ones you care about at first, that are relevant to you, by reading texts you care about.

[Anonymous No.14213451]

>>14213444
Then you get to phase 2, which is flipped: 80% reading, 20% grammar/morphology. The 20% in this phase represents the fact that you will still have the textbook open, you will still be googling and re-reading particularly obtuse shit you forgot, but now you are MOSTLY reading real texts, because your stock of relevant vocab is pretty good at this point. Now those weird sentences -- sentences that use that one meaning of the Latin ablative that you forgot, or that one weird rare form of the comparative -- stand out as relatively rare among the sentences you can parse normally. You can understand conditionals, major uses of the subjunctive, indirect speech, etc. Sometimes these things pile up on each other, or a rare version of them appears that was only mentioned in one page of your textbook, and you still get confused. But by and large you are READING, and such problems can be solved by googling, consulting a translation, or asking a native speaker online.

Phase 2 is where it's all downhill.

Now here is the tricky part: If you learn a language properly the first time, and you learn at least the basics of how grammar works, you can then export this method to further languages with less and less trouble each time. At least Indo-European languages become painfully easy once your brain already knows that everything is more-or-less going to be permutations of the same basic set of rules. For example the Latin ablative, Russian instrumental, Greek genitive/dative all perform similar functions -- the SAME functions in all cases, just delegated to different or differently named cases. Or look at this:

Latin verb endings
>-o
>-es or -is
>-t
>-imus, -amus, -emus
>-itis, -atis, -etis
>-unt

Greek verb endings
>-ω (-o)
>-εις (-eis)
>-ει (-ei)
>-oμεν (-omen)
>-ετε (-ete)
>-ουσιν (-ousin)

Russian verb endings
>-ю or -y (-yoo or -oo)
>-eшь (-yosh)
>-eт (-yot)
>-eм (-yom)
>-eтe (-yo't'yo)
>-ют or -yт (-yoont or -yoot)

I'm not saying these are exactly the same but as someone who learned Latin and Greek first, but it's the same "logic" and I instantly had no problem remembering it as a result:
>o
>vowel + s
>et
>distinct m
>distinct vowel/T/vowel
>essentially Latin "unt" with the "n" lost over time
And Russian is extremely weird and far removed from Italic and Greek languages.

This is why learning Latin first was good for me. Maybe it would be wildly different for other people but that's my experience. All the terms I use in this post are not difficult at all, and fairly intuitive. It doesn't require any special training to learn them. I am not advocating that you become a grammar expert. I am just saying that a normal textbook that actually teaches you the grammar is a great place to start, rather than doing ten years of Pimsleur or of occasionally watching Kanji memorization videos on Youtube, and having some vague idea of the language, but no idea how to read it.

[Anonymous No.14213466]

>>14213451
>>14213444
Also one final note, the first phase I described really only matters for your first couple times of learning a language, or for certain languages where lots of rote memorization is unavoidable no matter what you do (Greek, Sanskrit). But for most relatively easy languages, you can get through phase one VERY quickly, because you know exactly what to look for. It becomes less a process of going "oh god.. what the fuck is the 'instrumental'?" and more a process of "huh weird, they call their ablative-thingy an instrumental. Works basically the same though, and it's actually easier than the Latin one, so whatever."

When you get to that point, phase 1 can be a very short period, as long as you need to tear through a grammar book and know the basics you need to know to get to reading as much as possible.

As for speaking and understanding a language, as I said, this is a method tailored to me, and I mostly care about reading. But I find that speaking and understanding come much, much more easily after reading for a few months, when I can actually engage with people or media about a real topic and parse their complex statements.

[Anonymous No.14213483]

>>14213451
I messed this up in the Russian verb thing.

>-ют or -yт (-yoont or -yoot)
should be
>-ют or -yт (-yoot or -oot)

You can even see here, my brain was thinking in terms of that "-unt means third person plural" logic, and I read it into the Russian unconsciously. I just "felt" that this was a third person plural.

I should also say, it's a common thing for linguists to find Indo-European languages "boring" after a while because they're all so samey. Bad for linguists, maybe, but good for you, since you're most likely interested in IE languages.

[Anonymous No.14213530]

>>14213466
Thanks for the guide. I ll be using it for sure since it's a steong template. Btw I want to learn Russian. How is Russian going for you? I want to study it in the future but I am scared it will be abysmally different to the languages I already know (Greek, french, english). Do they have anything in common as far as structure goes? Or anything else for that matter?

[Anonymous No.14213592]

>>14213483
>I should also say, it's a common thing for linguists to find Indo-European languages "boring" after a while because they're all so samey.

Uralic Master Race (Hungarian) reporting in.

[Anonymous No.14214718]

>>14213466
Great posts.

[Anonymous No.14215297]

>>14213592
>Master Race
>Hungarian