Languages

I have taken up Latin...

Not the song and dance, but the Latin language; Classic Latin to be precise, and I am busy learning conjugations, declensions and case endings.

Several years ago, when I was visiting my daughter and her husband in California, we enjoyed afternoon tea in the local book store while leafing thru books we wanted to buy. One particular day, my daughter and I were browsing books on French grammar and spied Peter Jones’ book, Learn Latin. We each bought a copy.

The book, originally written as a series of articles in London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph over a period of twenty weeks, comprises twenty anxiety-free chapters with enough grammar and vocabulary to permit reading poems of Catullus.

I approach learning foreign languages like I do all my hobbies, with lots of enthusiasm, and devote a lot time to it until another of my hobbies begins to encroach on the study time. Then one of the projects gets short shrift, gradually fading away like old soldiers. I don’t bail out of the chosen activity, only postponed it because sometimes I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

I’m having more fun learning Latin than I have had with other languages, and plan to get thru all twenty chapters. There are wonderful YouTube lessons and RSS feeds on the internet that I also follow. I can’t figure out why Latin was so distasteful and difficult when I took it in high school!

The other day I googled for something Latin and found an interesting web site. I started reading a paragraph and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could understand most of it and thought to myself that my concentrated studying was paying off. Then I did a double take. It was not Latin I was reading, but Spanish.