While browsing Wikipedia today, reading about languages, language families and stuff, I asked myself.. After learning English by watching movies (at least partially) and learning Japanese by watching movies and reading books I have a pretty good idea of how to learn a language that is alive and thriving, but what about dead languages or constructed languages?
If you guys were to learn.. say.. Latin or Esperanto, do you think one could apply input orientated methods, SRS the Bello Gallico and listen to.. well I'm sure there's a few bands out there that sing in Latin.. all the time, even though the amount of (enjoyable) input you could possibly acquire is quite limited?

I think that if you're the sort of person who wants to learn Latin you'll probably find the kind of input available enjoyable, or why are you doing it in the first place? ;-)

(There do seem to be Latin podcasts and other audio texts available; and of course Harry Potter has been translated into Latin...)

Yeah! You could definitely do it! Of course, it's a lot harder to find media in Latin, but there is tons of literature available to mine and enjoy.

So that you get a feel for how (classical) Latin is believed to have been pronounced, I think I would start with something like George Sharpley's Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin with the accompanying CD.

The podcast Latinum also looks pretty good.

There are a lot of free resources (like textbooks and vocabulary lists) on Textkit. It also has a good, active forum.

A good, non-technical introduction to Latin grammar is Latin 1: The Easy Way.

One of the classic Latin textbooks is Wheelock's Latin. It's cool because all of the Latin in it comes from authentic sources, but it can be quite technical. (I tried working through it on my own when I was maybe 10 or 11 and didn't get very far.) I think it would be a good resource to use, though, after starting with a different introduction to the language.

There's also quite a bit of Latin literature on Project Gutenberg.

Like pm215 said, the Harry Potter series has been translated into Latin. So has some Ogden Nash, A. A. Milne, and probably a lot more.

There's also news radio in Latin. (How cool is that? See also "Finland makes Latin the King.")

Not to hijack your post, but Esperanto is kind of in the same boat... Yes, there are active speakers, podcasts, blogs, etc... But finding entertainment media seems to be pretty limited. Unlike English and Japanese, there's a very real chance I could actually read everything ever written in Esperanto and run out. Hehe. Movies and TV are pretty slim pickings.

I've decided to just do what I can with it, and then supplement that by actually talking to people, either via text or voice. It's good practice anyhow, and there actually isn't much point to learning Esperanto if your goal isn't to meet people.

I think you guys are missing a few things here...maybe thinking too much into this. First, we do sentence mining with Japanese because it's so different from the Indo-European languages we know. Word-for-word translation is simply not possible between English and Japanese or German and Japanese. You have to change the way you think about a lot of concepts and then think how you'd say it in Japanese. Making this transition is not easy, so we translate whole sentences and ideas. The syntax of Latin is not nearly so alien and word-for-word translation (with certain idioms being the exception) is, more or less, possible.

Second, Latin has no native speakers. I don't know the entire linguistic history, but people on the streets of Rome spoke Vulgar Latin and various dialects thereof. Written Latin existed even in Roman times as a purely written language. Therefore, it matters not one bit how you pronounce it, as long as you're consistent. Internalizing word stress and sentence intonation patterns can therefore be skipped. Whether you're motivated by a desire to maintain historical accuracy or speak without an accent, both are impractical propositions with Latin.

Finally, your knowledge of loanwords derived from Latin in your native language and English, as well as (I suspect) your ability to decline nouns in German will all boost your progress in Latin from the get-go. When studying Japanese, there's a few loanwords from English and other familiar languages, but the core vocabulary is entirely alien. Thus, we do things like SRS and frantically try to get up to even the minimum level required to understand more than a single sentence. With familiar languages like Latin, you'll be starting out at a stage that might have taken you a year to reach had it been Japanese.

If it were possible to set up an immersion environment with Latin from the early stages, of course that would be great. I'm just saying you might not need it. Learning the grammar is more a matter of memorizing verb conjugations and case endings than it is of changing the way you think about concepts. No, that's not a natural or organic way to learn a language, but 100% of the time you'll be using Latin, you'll be able to have access to a bilingual dictionary and a grammar reference chart.

Sounds like an interesting project. Good luck. Be sure to start 'tagging' buildings with vulgar latin, like they did in that show Rome (?).

@jajaan: A lot of things about Latin are not that familiar to English speakers, for example, noun declensions, all of the different cases, the flexible word order, the verb conjugations, and so on. I think mining would be a really good way to pick a lot of this up.

nest0r Wrote:Be sure to start 'tagging' buildings with vulgar latin, like they did in that show Rome (?).

Yep, that's correct. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_profa...ar_culture

shirokuro Wrote:@jajaan: A lot of things about Latin are not that familiar to English speakers, for example, noun declensions, all of the different cases, the flexible word order, the verb conjugations, and so on. I think mining would be a really good way to pick a lot of this up.

Noun declensions are alien to English, but not German, which is the OP's background. Flexible word order and cases... I think this is really stretching it. We have cases in English (certainly in German), we just don't call them cases. Instead of inflecting the end of the word a certain way when it's the subject of the sentence, we just put it to the left of the verb. In our minds, in other words, the concept of a sentence subject exists and it corresponds to the nominative case in Latin. Same goes for accusative case, genitive, dative (with some effort), and the rest. Free word order is really a non issue when all the constituents of a sentence are marked for a 1:1 correspondence with grammatical parts of an English sentence.

Look, I'm not saying that sentence mining wouldn't be a good way to pick things up. What I'm saying is that it's overkill. You're leveling a bazooka against an old cow that you could probably take care of with a swift swing of a mallet. Why go to all the effort of finding a heavy-weapons dealer, obtaining the licensing and money, and purchasing a bazooka when you've got a mallet in the shed and can use it to get the job done directly? That's what you're doing when you try to sentence mine Latin, entering thousands of sentences into SRS and treating it as though you couldn't understand what comes out if you had translated it word-for-word. All you need for Latin is the vocabulary and the surface grammar. You already have 90% of the syntax, unlike with Japanese.

On the other hand, if all you have is a bazooka then everything looks like a fantastic target :-)

Learning a dead language is often a different procedure from a living language, because of what jajaaan says -- there are no native speakers of the language and no new things are being produced in it (Latin is somewhat of an exception).

This is an issue if you want to learn classical Japanese. AJATT doesn't work because you can't do i+1 or a lot of the other strategies; AJATT really assumes an environment where you have easy access to large amounts of material in the language you want to learn. When you study a dead language, you typically learn to read specific texts rather than the whole "language" -- in fact often in speaking of a dead language, multiple periods of language are lumped together in one term.

I believe that grammar tends to be much harder to ignore in learning a dead language than a modern one, both because of the nature of the resources available and the relative lack of material in the dead language.

SRS could assist you in learning a dead language, but SRS and AJATT are not the same thing.

Another reason why I think AJATT would be a waste of time for a dead language is that there is no practical purpose for producing a dead language (except just for fun). AJATT is geared towards a whole-language approach; it's overkill if you are just looking for comprehension.

Start attending Mass?

pm215 Wrote:On the other hand, if all you have is a bazooka then everything looks like a fantastic target :-)

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/din...nct_before

Thanks for your advice guys.
I personally do not intend to learn Latin in any serious way until after I'm satisfied with my Japanese (almost there) and Korean (mid-2012.. maybe), so it will be quite a while until I can actually try out some of your advice. But reflecting on my Korean studies, what jajaaan wrote seems to be true. Learning a language that is related to one that you already know really boosts your progress - even if it's just vocabulary for the most part in this case. It would be great if the same would hold true for Latin.

Also thanks for those links shirokuro, I'll be sure to make good use of them.

wccrawford Wrote:Unlike English and Japanese, there's a very real chance I could actually read everything ever written in Esperanto and run out. Hehe. Movies and TV are pretty slim pickings.

While you could probably run out of watching Esperanto material within a day, there is certainly more written material in Esperanto than you could ever read in a lifetime. The amount of original material is probably more than anyone could read in a lifetime, let alone the thousands and thousands of translations.

But I wouldn't reccomend doing the sentence method for learning Esperanto. The best thing to do would be to is to buy a cheap 'teach yourself book', read a couple of books and talk to some friends, and you'll be fluent within a couple of months. After 6 months I attended a conference in which no English was spoken, and I can't think of an occasion where I couldn't express exactly what I wanted to say. It's really easy

Of course, the sentence method would be just as easy, but I'd personally prefer a method where you don't have to SRS.

jajaaan Wrote:First, we do sentence mining with Japanese because it's so different from the Indo-European languages we know. [...]

I don't think that sentence mining is done with Japanese just because it's not an Indo-European language. Mining can be used really effectively to pick up all sorts of things: vocabulary, grammar, idiomatic expressions, contextual expressions, and so on. The whole idea of mining is that you're learning the language in context, and this principle can be applied to the study of any language, even your mother tongue.

Quote:[...] Therefore, it matters not one bit how you pronounce it, as long as you're consistent. Internalizing word stress and sentence intonation patterns can therefore be skipped. Whether you're motivated by a desire to maintain historical accuracy or speak without an accent, both are impractical propositions with Latin.

Of course, it is not actually known exactly how classical Latin was pronounced. I agee that developing a consistent pronunciation is really important and would be enough for a lot of people. Still, there are sometimes good reasons for trying to follow an accepted method of pronunciation. For example, a person who wants to understand Latin as they hear it used at church would want to at least be familiar with the ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin.

Quote:[...] No, that's not a natural or organic way to learn a language, but 100% of the time you'll be using Latin, you'll be able to have access to a bilingual dictionary and a grammar reference chart.

But some people want to get to a stage where they don't have to rely on those.

yudantaiteki Wrote:AJATT doesn't work because you can't do i+1 or a lot of the other strategies; AJATT really assumes an environment where you have easy access to large amounts of material in the language you want to learn.

I think it might be possible to do true immersion in Latin in terms of reading. You could theoretically replace all of your reading material with things written in Latin. (Of course, this would pretty seriously limit your choice of reading material, hehe.) Anyways, you don't always have to do true immersion to do i + 1. It might be possible to follow an i + 1 approach, or at least something pretty close to it, with Latin because of how much Latin literature is available.

Quote:Another reason why I think AJATT would be a waste of time for a dead language is that there is no practical purpose for producing a dead language (except just for fun).

Not always true. For example, there are classicists who are paid to translate modern literature into Latin and ancient Greek.

Evil_Dragon Wrote:Also thanks for those links shirokuro, I'll be sure to make good use of them.

No problem. ^_^

No idea how accurate this is: http://www.romhacking.net/community/912/ (3 NES games translated into Latin)

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Books-Tr...U680OJKFWW

Here's ~40 stories that accompany Wheelock's Latin (apparently there's a lot of supplemental material for that guide): http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Designed-A...0865162891

Also, plenty of audio to accompany the above guide: http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Wheelocks...rid_pt_1_2