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Comment by lukebuehler | Hacker News Reader

I wish learning Latin/Greek as a spoken language would become the default pedagogical method.

I recently studied ancient Greek extensively in the Boston area. I was well aware of the living language community--people that speak and write Greek/Latin as they learn it and not just read it--and even joined some seminars, but these are all not for credit and are usually run by non-accredited institutions. Since I was in a masters program, I needed the credits for my language work. And I realized, it is nigh impossible to learn Greek as a living language in an academic settings. It's a real pity. Ancient languages are largely taught to pass the advanced language exams like the comps. If you want to learn it as a living language you have to step outside the academic mainstream.

Edit: clarify the credit thing.

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> If you want to learn it as a living language you have to step outside the academic mainstream.

Your tone makes it sound like there is some conspiracy to keep ancient Greek out of curricula. In fact, the reason is that there is virtually zero demand. The "academic mainstream" are the student body that has no interest in it. I too took ancient Greek. There were 6 people in my program. It was closed two years after I completed it.

No, I do not believe there is a conspiracy like this. What I said was specifically about living language style learning vs. the traditional sight reading and then translating type of learning. The latter is the primary style, and if you want the former it is very hard to find in the universities. I know about the dwindling demand for ancient language learning in general, but in Boston there is still quite a bit of demand in the bigger universities.

However, I do think there could be more interest if learning Greek/Latin would not feel like such an immense grind, going at it more as a living language style would help a bit (it still hard, though).

If other languages were taught like Greek or Latin, I'm certain there would be almost no interest as well.

I must one of the few people that loved the grammatical-translation method and hated the "communicative" method. I had to learn English in a "communicative-centric" fashion and it was a torment: it was all memorizing useless sentences like "What is your name?" "What is your favorite color?" and then recite back with the teachers and classmates. After 11 years I couldn't even read Harry Potter while after 2 years of Latin Grammar I could read whatever author I was pleased with and had no more need to mentally translate.

I spent seven years of school learning Latin based on Kennedy's Latin Grammar. I took an exam after five years, and failed. I retook it after seven, and scraped a pass.

By contrast, I got top marks in a French exam a year early; and top marks in German after just a year of lessons. The difference is that the modern languages were taught mainly conversationally (i.e. not based on a grammar book, but "as she is spoke"). I wish I had learned Latin that way. It would have been a lot less painful, and I'd have spent much less time in Latin classes.

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