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> Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις". This works in theory, I guess, but i

> Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις". This works in theory, I guess, but in practice it's just absolutely awful. the Rosetta Stone courses work like this and I spent about 6 months maybe? working through the Korean class. I was only able to form my own sentences because I also bought some grammar books that taught me about particles and the "topic" of a sentence that you put -ga or -i after (depending if it ends in a vowel or consonant) and several other similar concepts. But also, even pointing at an object or showing pictures didn't work. I remember at one point being shown two pictures and thinking I was being taught "behind" and a word that English doesn't have, for "far behind." Ah, how interesting I thought! Nope, not at all. It was "near" and "far." The only reason I learned this is because I started screenshotting every slide to an actual Korean friend I had and asking for translations of every word (I'm sure I drove him crazy). The reason I stopped doing the class in fact was that he wasn't always awake when I wanted to do the lessons (ironically since he was Korean-American and I was awake in the middle of the night usually lol - if he'd lived in Korea our schedules would've aligned better). Anyway, after that experience I don't agree with this method at all. Maybe complete immersion does work, because people can correct your misconceptions, but learning from a book without any feedback is a horrible experience.

svat 4y ago
You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely awful” and “a horrible experience” — when replying to a post about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which many people have tried and absolutely enjoyed, and indeed successfully learned Latin from. All that this shows is that a course using this method can be either well-designed or not (possibly depending on the language and learner), and we don't know which one the current Greek one is.
- RheingoldRiver 4y ago
  That's fair, I'd appreciate hearing from someone who actually did the Latin curriculum and learned Latin from it if they managed to do it without additional resources to learn e.g. case endings from a text written in English. Part of my reason for commenting is also that language-learning is something that a lot of people want to do but is extremely difficult to do & stick with outside of a structured environment/with a teacher. If you truly want to pursue it, I think finding an online class is going to help you considerably more than a self-guided curriculum like this; I probably should've mentioned that before. I wish I'd done that for Korean.
  - schoen 4y ago
    An interesting thing about LLPSI is that it does include abstract discussion of grammatical rules and concepts - in Latin, once readers have learned enough to permit following the discussion. So it's not just learning from example and trying to pick up grammatical rules intuitively. Like when I took my German class, it was taught by immersion but included discussions, conducted in German, of how grammatical rules work. LLPSI is also attempting to do that kind of thing.
  - troad 4y ago
    You are entirely correct in your criticism of Rosetta Stone, but LLPSI genuinely takes a very different approach. (I've done both, though for different languages.) LLPSI is carefully structured, precisely to teach things like declension and conjugation. As an example, this is very first line: Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Europā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. This is not what most people mean by immersion. It's not a natural dialogue you're expected to understand by osmosis, it's an extremely carefully designed series of sentences aimed at manually bootstrapping your Latin. The book contains grammar explanations - wholly in Latin - from chapter 2 onwards. Every chapter has a grammatical concept it's designed to illustrate, and it manages to introduce fairly complex ideas - passive conjugations! ablative declensions! - in a deeply intuitive way, entirely in Latin. It's an incredibly satisfying course. If you have any interest in Latin at all, or are just looking for a New Year's Resolution, I would heartily recommend it.
    - 4y ago
tgv 4y ago
Complete immersion has good results, but this is pseudo-immersion at best. There are schools that teach following similar methods as Lingua ... per se illustrata, and while people do get the basics, I haven't heard from anybody that reached fluency through it. Language is pretty complex, and if you start out with the wrong idea about certain aspects, without feedback, you're likely to repeat the error for the rest of your life. Vocabulary is easily corrected, since native speakers know how to, but they rarely correct grammatical errors, and seldomly know the rules. Some languages have it easier than others in this respect, of course. E.g., English has small grammar and almost no morphology. Good feedback is important, and if there's no teacher, you can correct yourself (to a certain extent) if the text book also explains the rules.
- AntoniusBlock 4y ago
  I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least the things they can make sense of on their own. I suppose LLPSI would be easier for someone who has already taught themselves an Indo-European language and is used to Indo-European grammar. Latin, for me, was the first language I learned, so I had jumped into the deep end. "Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar" is another book I used occasionally (it's the best Latin grammar book IMO). As for your comment on feedback, if I can understand what I'm reading then that's all I'm interested in. I'm only learning Latin to read ancient Latin literature. I don't want to compose or translate Latin. An example of feedback for me, would be to read a page of Caesar's The Gallic War in Latin then read the same page in English afterwards to see how close I was to understanding everything. So far I've been close on almost everything, so the feedback I'm getting is that I'm reading Latin the way it was written 2000 years ago. Here's what I read in order: LLPSI with Colloquia Personarum, Pugio Bruti (waste of time btw) and Fabulae Syrae. After that I read Epitome Historiae Sacrae, the Vulgate, Fabulae Faciles, Ad Alpes, Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain and half of LLPSI 2. Currently I'm reading The Gallic War. I also started studying German at the start of this year using the book "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg which is taking up 1 hour per day of my time so I can't spend 2 hours on Latin per day which is what I was doing from 2020 to early 2022. I wouldn't say I'm fluent at all, but on a good day I can comfortably read Caesar (with a dictionary). My goal since the start (January 2020) has been to read Ovid's Metamorphoses, which hasn't worked out yet, but it's a work in progress. * Big shoutout to LatinTutorial/Benjamin: https://www.youtube.com/@latintutorial https://www.youtube.com/@latintutorial
dwringer 4y ago
I used a rosetta stone course as a supplement to several semesters of studying Spanish in school, and while I can't disagree with you about the necessity of other methods to learn certain concepts, I think it helped me considerably with getting enough fluency to do well in university courses. Granted, I had already taken some courses in Spanish already; I was not trying to pick up grammar rules from scratch.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Rosetta Stone only works well with romance languages. Anything with alien grammar isn't going to be picked up without some explanation.
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Same here; a long while ago I tried to teach myself German via rosetta and it was not good. I remember the point where I gave up which was where 2 different words were used for food. Food for an animal, and for a person [1] I just wondered if there was a mistake, or what. A simple note saying 'yes there are different words for this unlike in English'[2] but no. I guess that was the final straw, I felt I was fighting something very poorly designed and basically not doing its job. [1] Maybe it was 'to eat', I can't remember. [2] In english there are actually different terms for human and animal edibles used in some contexts, these being 'food' and 'feed'
- schoen 4y ago
  Probably "essen" (to eat, for a human) and "fressen" (to eat, for other animals).
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    That's was it, thanks!
- netsharc 4y ago
  There's a brand of snacks (nuts and dried fruits) that uses the name "Studentenfutter", which means "Student Feed".

svat 4y ago

You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely awful” and “a horrible experience” — when replying to a post about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which many people have tried and absolutely enjoyed, and indeed successfully learned Latin from. All that this shows is that a course using this method can be either well-designed or not (possibly depending on the language and learner), and we don't know which one the current Greek one is.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago
That's fair, I'd appreciate hearing from someone who actually did the Latin curriculum and learned Latin from it if they managed to do it without additional resources to learn e.g. case endings from a text written in English. Part of my reason for commenting is also that language-learning is something that a lot of people want to do but is extremely difficult to do & stick with outside of a structured environment/with a teacher. If you truly want to pursue it, I think finding an online class is going to help you considerably more than a self-guided curriculum like this; I probably should've mentioned that before. I wish I'd done that for Korean.
- schoen 4y ago
  An interesting thing about LLPSI is that it does include abstract discussion of grammatical rules and concepts - in Latin, once readers have learned enough to permit following the discussion. So it's not just learning from example and trying to pick up grammatical rules intuitively. Like when I took my German class, it was taught by immersion but included discussions, conducted in German, of how grammatical rules work. LLPSI is also attempting to do that kind of thing.
- troad 4y ago
  You are entirely correct in your criticism of Rosetta Stone, but LLPSI genuinely takes a very different approach. (I've done both, though for different languages.) LLPSI is carefully structured, precisely to teach things like declension and conjugation. As an example, this is very first line: Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Europā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. This is not what most people mean by immersion. It's not a natural dialogue you're expected to understand by osmosis, it's an extremely carefully designed series of sentences aimed at manually bootstrapping your Latin. The book contains grammar explanations - wholly in Latin - from chapter 2 onwards. Every chapter has a grammatical concept it's designed to illustrate, and it manages to introduce fairly complex ideas - passive conjugations! ablative declensions! - in a deeply intuitive way, entirely in Latin. It's an incredibly satisfying course. If you have any interest in Latin at all, or are just looking for a New Year's Resolution, I would heartily recommend it.
  - 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

Complete immersion has good results, but this is pseudo-immersion at best. There are schools that teach following similar methods as Lingua ... per se illustrata, and while people do get the basics, I haven't heard from anybody that reached fluency through it. Language is pretty complex, and if you start out with the wrong idea about certain aspects, without feedback, you're likely to repeat the error for the rest of your life. Vocabulary is easily corrected, since native speakers know how to, but they rarely correct grammatical errors, and seldomly know the rules. Some languages have it easier than others in this respect, of course. E.g., English has small grammar and almost no morphology. Good feedback is important, and if there's no teacher, you can correct yourself (to a certain extent) if the text book also explains the rules.

AntoniusBlock 4y ago
I learnt Latin with LLPSI 1. Though I must admit, LLPSI wasn't the only resource I used. I had to use latintutorial's* youtube videos (his videos are great btw) to explain certain bits of grammar that I couldn't understand on my own, like gerunds, gerundives and the subjunctive mood with `ut' and `cum' clauses is what I needed help with specifically, so you're right about people only getting the basics or at least the things they can make sense of on their own. I suppose LLPSI would be easier for someone who has already taught themselves an Indo-European language and is used to Indo-European grammar. Latin, for me, was the first language I learned, so I had jumped into the deep end. "Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar" is another book I used occasionally (it's the best Latin grammar book IMO). As for your comment on feedback, if I can understand what I'm reading then that's all I'm interested in. I'm only learning Latin to read ancient Latin literature. I don't want to compose or translate Latin. An example of feedback for me, would be to read a page of Caesar's The Gallic War in Latin then read the same page in English afterwards to see how close I was to understanding everything. So far I've been close on almost everything, so the feedback I'm getting is that I'm reading Latin the way it was written 2000 years ago. Here's what I read in order: LLPSI with Colloquia Personarum, Pugio Bruti (waste of time btw) and Fabulae Syrae. After that I read Epitome Historiae Sacrae, the Vulgate, Fabulae Faciles, Ad Alpes, Julius Caesar's Invasion of Britain and half of LLPSI 2. Currently I'm reading The Gallic War. I also started studying German at the start of this year using the book "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg which is taking up 1 hour per day of my time so I can't spend 2 hours on Latin per day which is what I was doing from 2020 to early 2022. I wouldn't say I'm fluent at all, but on a good day I can comfortably read Caesar (with a dictionary). My goal since the start (January 2020) has been to read Ovid's Metamorphoses, which hasn't worked out yet, but it's a work in progress. * Big shoutout to LatinTutorial/Benjamin: https://www.youtube.com/@latintutorial https://www.youtube.com/@latintutorial

dwringer 4y ago

I used a rosetta stone course as a supplement to several semesters of studying Spanish in school, and while I can't disagree with you about the necessity of other methods to learn certain concepts, I think it helped me considerably with getting enough fluency to do well in university courses. Granted, I had already taken some courses in Spanish already; I was not trying to pick up grammar rules from scratch.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Rosetta Stone only works well with romance languages. Anything with alien grammar isn't going to be picked up without some explanation.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

Same here; a long while ago I tried to teach myself German via rosetta and it was not good. I remember the point where I gave up which was where 2 different words were used for food. Food for an animal, and for a person [1] I just wondered if there was a mistake, or what. A simple note saying 'yes there are different words for this unlike in English'[2] but no. I guess that was the final straw, I felt I was fighting something very poorly designed and basically not doing its job. [1] Maybe it was 'to eat', I can't remember. [2] In english there are actually different terms for human and animal edibles used in some contexts, these being 'food' and 'feed'

schoen 4y ago
Probably "essen" (to eat, for a human) and "fressen" (to eat, for other animals).
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  That's was it, thanks!
netsharc 4y ago
There's a brand of snacks (nuts and dried fruits) that uses the name "Studentenfutter", which means "Student Feed".