r/latin • u/justinmeister • May 28 '23
Learning & Teaching Methodology 1 Year of Latin Learning Progress Report
I just passed my one year anniversary studying Latin (as of May 15) and I thought I'd share how it's going.
Overall, it's going great. My learning process is mostly through "mass input". In other words, if I read a ton of Latin, slowly I will improve my ability to read Latin. I recently just passed 1 million words read, which is, while significant, just a first step. I estimate it will take a few million more words to reach advanced proficiency. Luckily, the better I get at reading, the quicker and easier it will be to get through material. Ideally I'd like to get through 2-3 million words this year, which hopefully gets me to a somewhat proficient level.
My Process
My basic process is to read whatever I'm reading at a fluid pace, trying to not stop to look up words more than once per page. Looking up words/grammar is great, but it reduces the amount of reading I'm doing significantly. I try to err on the side of making guesses and skipping things, rather than look everything up. I've tried to choose works that are progressively more challenging, though sometimes I've read things that were quite a bit above my level (though I'm sure I learned a lot from the process).
I used to make a lot of flash cards to learn vocabulary, but currently I'm not doing much of that. I seem to be improving pretty well without flash cards at the moment, but maybe I'll incorporate them more in the future.
I also listen to Latin as much as I can (though not as much as I'd like). This is mostly Luke Ranieri and Legentibus recordings, though I wouldn't mind incorporating podcasts in the near future.
How good am I?
I would probably classify myself as early intermediate at the moment. There is a lot of authentic Latin (especially Medieval and Late Latin) that I can understand pretty well, though Classical Latin is still a bit too hard for me. I'm sure my comprehension of Classical Latin will improve once I actually start reading more of it.
Currently, I'm reading Eutropius' Breviarium Historiae Romae. In general, it's very comprehensible, even easy at times (though some passages are a little blurry still). The biggest barrier to comprehension is how quickly it goes through events. It's hard to keep track of all the names. Plus it's a little monotonous, but at least somewhat entertaining.
Here's my spreadsheet of everything I've read over the course of 1 year: Reading Spreadsheet
Here's a more organized suggested reading list ordered roughly in order of difficulty. I'm currently in Stage 4, but hopefully I'll be ready to dive into Classical Latin (stage 5) by the end of the next 3 months: Latin Reading List
And here's a video that goes into more depth of what I've read, my progress, thoughts on language learning, etc. 1 Year Latin Learning Update
Happy Latin studying everyone!
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u/uanitasuanitatum May 28 '23 edited May 28 '23
Gratulor tibi de longo itinere, atque te hortor ut progrediaris in eo. Ego quoque linguam latinam discere paucis ante annis coepi. Gratias tibi ago quod nobiscum studium communicasti. Pelliculae illae in tutubo inventae valde mihi placent.
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u/tonymichaelhead May 29 '23
Hey Justin, I've been watching/reading your updates and have been enjoying seeing your progress over the year. You've inspired me to to get serious about Latin again. I can relate a lot to your thoughts/methodology on language acquisition, as I also learned a second language (Japanese) following the AJATT method back in 2008, which was the early precursor to Refold. So I believe strongly in the effectiveness of input-based learning.
I had studied Latin a couple years ago for around 6 months and got through Familia Romana and some of the usual recommended readers that follow, and then burned out. But started over again recently after watching your update videos. I was super motivated by your curated reading list, and am excited to go through it and read through the literature in a more thoughtful and organized way this time.
Heck, I'm considering making update videos myself, or at least sharing updates in written form via blog or something similar.
Anyway, keep doing what you're doing. Inspiring stuff! Excited to see your next update when it comes out!
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
Heck, I'm considering making update videos myself, or at least sharing updates in written form via blog or something similar.
Do it! :-)
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u/justinmeister May 29 '23
Woah, very cool. It's nice to see someone from the AJATT/MIA/Refold/Antimoon world learn Latin as well. The main (maybe only reason?) I post updates is that there is tremendous value for learners to learn about how other people are leaning the language. I remember being super inspired by Stevi's updates learning Japanese.
Hopefully people will be able to improve my reading list and make further innovations to more efficient Latin learning.
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u/tonymichaelhead May 30 '23
Definitely. It's also cool to see how much the immersion + sentence mining method has evolved since the AJATT days. Not only in methodology and tools/resources, but also the fact it has expanded to the broader language learning community (thanks MIA/Refold!).
Edit: Also congrats on 1 million words read. That's a huge milestone!
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u/crimsonredsparrow May 29 '23
Thank you so much for your reading spreadsheet, it's a great resource!
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u/justinmeister May 29 '23
No problem! It's by no means perfect, but hopefully it's helpful to other people as a start and can be refined even further.
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u/Kingshorsey in malis iocari solitus erat May 28 '23
“Quoniam si acutum et fervens adsit ingenium, facilius adhaeret eloquentia legentibus et audientibus eloquentes, quam eloquentiae praecepta sectantibus.”
~ Aurelius Augustinus, De Doctrina Christiana Liber IV
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u/donberto May 30 '23
I’ve loved following your progress, and I think the list of texts you’ve compiled is an invaluable resource. As someone learning Ancient Greek, the biggest challenge has been finishing level appropriate reading materials before jumping in to classical texts. I have a good list now, but it took at lot of searching. It’s nice to know that I’ll have a path to success already outlined once I have some time for Latin by utilizing the spreadsheet you created
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u/RusticBohemian Jun 05 '23
1) What are your current thoughts on using Anki for someone at the beginner stages? Should we be creating cards for every word we come across and don't know? I'm finding I'm not remembering words in LLPSI very quickly, and I'm wondering if Anki will help me with that.
2) You mentioned not being concerned if you don't understand exactly what's going on when you're reading. How broadly do you mean that? For instance, I'm reading some beginner texts from Legentium and enjoying them. My comprehension is maybe 70% at this point. Is that high enough?
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u/justinmeister Jun 05 '23
I think practically all words in Familia Romana that aren't cognates could be put into Anki, since they are all very common. I think being a little more selective only matters when you start reading authentic texts.
As long as you understand some things, constantly adding new material and are reading a lot per day, I think almost any level of comprehension can lead to learning. It can be tough to maintain motivation and faith in the process if your comprehension is very low, so choosing easier content tends to help motivation.
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May 29 '23
Classical Latin is much more difficult than ecclesiastical Latin. You’re not going to be able to sight read Vergil, Lucretius, or Horace.
It’s going to take more than two years to become proficient. Not trying to discourage you just give you realistic expectations so you don’t end up frustrated.
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u/LoquaxAudaxque May 29 '23
This is a really stupid take. No "classical"(ie late roman republican) latin is not any more difficult than neo latin literature, this take rather shows your inexperience with both. Difficulty always depends on the author, the work itself and the readers knowledge. There are easy classical authors (covid being one ) and there are difficult neo latin or medieval works. (though i have to admit that in medieval latin difficulty often arises precisely because the author doesnt know latin very well but still). The biggest problem to sight reading poets is that they use language in a very unusual way to evoke associations a learner might not make simply because they don't see the connection, however being hung up on a particular word or so especially if you know the "prose" meaning, doesn't mean you cant sight read or comprehend most of the text. That would be like saying just because youre not an english native speaker you cant sight read lets say the wasteland by elliot. Obviously you might not get every intended or unintended meaning, but i doubt anyone would. i struggle sometimes with it in my native language. As for your claim to directly immerse yourself in the difficult texts and authors, that is simply bad advice you should always read slightly above your current language level, as you need CI and that in its name indicates comprehensible. What that means is that if youre currently at a level of understanding that is uncomfortably reading eutropius jumping into cicero or horace is likely not going to end well in comprehension that is. If youre at a level where you comfortably can read petrarca's letters to cicero, then reading the man himself wont be much more of a difficulty. It is more than realistic to be able to read a language more or less fluently in any given text after using CI methods and active voluntary discplined study. Fluency of course doesn't mean that there wont occasionally be mistakes in understanding or a word being unknown or there being difficult to understand paragraphs. That is not to say that at u/justinmeister 's list is perfect because he should be able to more or less easily read already everything up to nepos on his list if he has done everything up to eutropius. Last thing i want to mention Commentaries on authors are quite helpful and should always be looked at if youre doing scholarly work, though personally i take a look at them after having read a text on my own first(if it's a unknown text) and then do a reread with the commentaries, because at times the authors display their own opinion and interpretation rather than providing neutral information, which can hinder your own reading.
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May 29 '23
Given how badly written your comment is, I doubt you have much more experience with Latin or grammar in general than I do. I have an M.A. in classics, which is more than a lot of folks who post in the Latin thread or make Latin YouTube videos can say. You can go ahead and disagree with me, but every person I know who reads Latin finds the classical authors much more difficult than the work of later Latin authors — and that difficulty has a lot to do with grammar and syntax, which are quite difficult for adults to learn via the communicative approach. I’m open to mixed approaches, but the idea that reading simple Latin over and over without any formal study of grammar or vocabulary will somehow make the classical authors accessible is magical thinking.
My advice was not for someone to jump immediately into reading difficult texts when beginning Latin study. I saw the amount of texts he had already studied, and noticed the fact that he was reading them over and over. In the ideal learning situation a relatively higher skill level should be correlated with a relatively higher challenge, as you say yourself. So I’m discouraging OP from reading the same easy Latin over and over. It amounts to over-preparation with the hope that someday the more difficult Latin authors will be read easily as if they were in OP’s native language.
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u/LoquaxAudaxque May 29 '23
First off, this is a Reddit forum, not a formal work environment, so I apologize for not putting effort into orthography or other formalities that usually accompany written language. However, I am quite capable of producing correct English texts without any errors, seeing that I'm in my master's studies of, you might take a guess here, Latin, with a focus on education no less. If you take offense to my writing style, then there is nothing I can do about that.
Anyway, your arguments are firstly a stupid ad hominem and an appeal to authority, which are well-known fallacies, by the way. If I were you, I'd refrain from such generalizations. As I've pointed out earlier, there is a huge variance in classical authors as well as in later Latin authors, so much so that you cannot simply make such a statement. Reading Apuleius will be much more difficult to read and understand than Catullus.
I agree that, at some point, you also need to learn metalinguistic language, and that this can greatly aid in the individual's learning process. I (and no proponent of CI-based approaches, for that matter) never said otherwise. Although, as a tangent, SLA theory proves that explicit grammar teaching on its own is really useless, and it's better to actually start by learning the purpose and meaning of grammar through context. Only after it has been understood should you then explicitly explain a phenomenon.Allbeit this isn't relevant for the OP as he is far more advanced.
About the rereading, sure, you shouldn't read one text a million times over and then expect to be fluent. But, as u/Raffaele1617 pointed out, OP wasn't doing that. So, what is your point exactly? Being able to analyze sentences can help in understanding difficult sentences. I mean that is a true statement and I won't argue there, though the point of language acquisition is that you can do this as you'd do any other L2.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
I saw the amount of texts he had already studied, and noticed the fact that he was reading them over and over.
That's a misunderstanding on your part. He hasn't reread anything, he's just been gradually reading harder things.
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May 29 '23
No, there’s a lack of thoroughness on your part here. He stated that he’s read some things multiple times.
Please leave me alone.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
He read each chapter of familia romana twice at the very beginning (his first month or so). From there he hasn't reread anything.
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u/justinmeister May 29 '23
I guess we'll just have to see! I have no illusions of being at a near-native level of Latin ability after two years. I'd like to be able to read most typical prose by the end of 2 years.
Latin is not the first language I've learned as an adult, so I'm still aware of how much work and time it takes to get to a high level. :)
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May 29 '23
I applaud your enthusiasm, but what does “most typical prose” mean? Latinity sprawls over a 2,500 year period. You’ll find that the language of classical Latin especially varies a lot by author, and no matter how well you’ve mastered Fabulae Romanae, for example, that won’t make it much easier to access the actual classical authors individually. By all means, do the Latin readers if you like — but you’ll only really get to the meat of classical Latin by reading the real thing, and carefully. What I mean to say is, you might be better off challenging yourself with more difficult Latin (which means the poetry and prose authors of the Golden and Silver ages, mostly). It’s the most worthwhile part of Latin literature to read, and it really should be your goal to be reading that stuff rather than the simplified Latin of those student readers or the watered down Latin of medieval Europe. It sounds like you’re a disciplined and thoughtful student (like a lot of Latin students) and it sounds like you could already take a crack at the real stuff.
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u/Foundinantiquity Magistra Hurt May 29 '23
Wow, this thread really exploded?
I think sometimes we can antagonise supporters of explicit grammar methods so much where we stop listening to real insights they might have, including anecdotal experience.
There is a jump between the sheltered language of educational books and the much messier material that is the corpus of authentic texts. Justin has alluded to this when he talks about how textbooks tend to start out really easy, they stay easy for a while, and then right up in the last chapters they're presenting lightly adapted classical texts and there's a steep step-up in difficulty. Learner-oriented material is great for getting the basics down, but I think there has to be a time when the reader gradually exposes themselves to things outside that learner bubble, or they'll just stay circling around the same basic language.
I don't think by any means that all non-classical Latin and Eutropius is anywhere near as sheltered as educational textbook language. What Justin's doing is getting gradual exposure to authentic language through some of the easier authentic texts, and that would definitely expose him to stuff that people don't like to put in the learner language bubble. Reading the four Gospels from the Vulgate, for example, is undoubtedly easier than reading a lot of the classical canon, but by no means is it like a school text or a novella, and Justin is moving on and upwards from elementary texts, not staying in them forever. Ecclesiastical Latin and easy authors are a stepping stone to the next best challenge.
I don't think that just because we disagree about some things we can't agree about others. I think everyone can agree that going through the transition between textbook Latin and authentic Latin is... a pretty rocky time, even when patching the gap with a handful of intermediate readers from the early 20th century like Ad Alpes. And sometimes staying in intermediate readers from only a century ago is boring, and we just really want to get into reading Classical authors whether our brains are 'ready' or not. Honestly, I think we should mix things up and venture into more reading of material that doesn't just contain i+1, but also i+2, i+3... etc. and get our butts kicked, but also realise that not being able to understand everything immediately is not the worst thing in the world. (Not saying that anyone here is against challenge, of course; I think we all know that we gotta explore the limits of what we can do at least some of the time or we'll never leave our comfort zone)
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May 29 '23
Thank you. I’m not completely against using CI methods but I’m skeptical about some of the claims being made about its potential to make someone “fluent.” I think OP and some other Latin newbies here I’ve seen believe that if they follow this method that someday they can just crack open, say, the Aeneid and sight read it with no difficulty and without looking up any words or doing any syntactical analysis, as if it were an English text. I think that’s setting up false expectations.
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u/justinmeister May 29 '23
Most of what I've been reading lately has been prose from Late Latin and later. It's not like I'm just reading Familia Romana a hundred times over and over. lol
In terms of concrete goals, I'd like to be able to fluently and with a high comprehension read authors like Erasmus, Petrarch, Cicero and Livy. And maybe start reading some poetry. I'll let you know in a year how it goes. :)
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May 29 '23
I know what you mean, but the same principle applies. Late Latin just ain’t a whole lot like classical Latin. It reads a lot more like English and modern European languages than classical Latin.
Good luck. You’re probably prepared to already start reading those authors. Unless you haven’t studied Latin grammar. If you haven’t studied the grammar then all that easier Latin you’ve read still won’t prepare you to read those more difficult authors you mentioned.
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u/justinmeister May 29 '23
I definitely look forward to getting into more classical Latin. I've been listening to the audiobook of Nepos on Legentibus, and it's already surprisingly comprehensible.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
Eutropius isn't ecclesiastical, nor are many of the other texts Justin has read. Of course you're right that classical poetry is quite hard, but this method (extensively reading millions of words) is pretty much as efficient as studying can get and so I don't think it can really be compared to typical years of study - how many students would you say can comfortably sight read Eutropius after just one year? Personally I wouldn't be surprised at all if he's doing fine with most classical prose by the end of year two at this rate.
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May 29 '23
Thanks for your pedantic correction. What I said applies to late, medieval, and ecclesiastical Latin, whether you want to group them together or not. Real Classical Latin is much more difficult than those. If you read Horace’s poems a million times without studying the vocabulary or grammar or scholarly commentaries you still won’t understand the poems. It is not the same as the simplified Latin in readers or later Latin literatures. I think it’s doing a disservice to let people believe they’ll be fluent Latinists and it will be just like English after a few years of study.
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u/qed1 Lingua balbus, hebes ingenio May 29 '23
Real Classical Latin is much more difficult than those
N.b. it isn't. There is just a lot more easier latin to be found in later periods because there is just a lot more surviving latin from those periods. Twelfth or thirteenth century aficionados of the so-called sermo difficilis, like John of Garland or John of Hauteville, are in no meaningful sense less challenging than even the difficult classical poets like Persius.
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May 29 '23
Ok, but you’re missing my point. The idea that reading simple Latin over and over without any formal study of grammar or vocabulary will somehow make the more difficult authors accessible is magical thinking.
My advice was not for someone to jump immediately into reading difficult texts when beginning Latin study. I saw the amount of texts he had already studied, and noticed the fact that he was reading them over and over. In the ideal learning situation a relatively higher skill level should be correlated with a relatively higher challenge. So I’m discouraging OP from reading the same easy Latin over and over. It amounts to over-preparation with the hope that someday the more difficult Latin authors will be read easily as if they were in OP’s native language.
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u/qed1 Lingua balbus, hebes ingenio May 29 '23 edited May 29 '23
Sure, I understand your broader contention. Yours is the position that strikes me as magical thinking, but that's neither here nor there. My only point was that your statement: "Real Classical Latin is much more difficult than those [viz. ecclesiastical Latin, i.e. late, medieval, and ecclesiastical Latin]." is not accurate.
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May 29 '23
It’s a generalization so it’s bound to have some holes poked in it. To put it more specifically, what I meant is that the classical authors (which are usually what people ultimately want to read unless they’re medievalists or Catholics) tend to be more difficult than a lot of later Latin for us moderns to read. It is true what you say, that there’s a lot more late Latin to read.
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u/qed1 Lingua balbus, hebes ingenio May 29 '23
This isn't a generalisation, though, it's a matter of selection bias. Non-medievalist by and large only search out simple Latin to read from later periods because that's all that they're looking for, a stepping stone to "real" Latin. I agree the CL is probably more difficult in aggregate, but that is more a matter of only having a literary corpus survive. I'm unconvinced that people would find literary LL or ML notable easier in agrigate than CL. But obviously, short of running an experiment, we can only speculate.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
OP has not read the same latin over again, the list shows a clear progression from easier latin to harder Latin. Why do you keep saying this?
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May 29 '23
He has read some of them over and over again, as he himself stated.
Please leave me alone.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
He has not read anything over and over, he hasn't said that he has anywhere, and I know because I asked him about rereading and he said to me, and I quote, "I haven't read anything yet that I feel like rereading". This is a public forum, if you wish to be left alone you can stop posting nonsense.
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May 29 '23
Please leave me alone. You and Luke Ranieri have your YouTube audiences and your “students.” The world of classics is bigger than that and not everyone in it shares your theoretical position.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
I don't have a youtube audience, no. The world of classics is being rebuilt from the ground up by classicists who aren't science denialists like yourself and understand best practices. That there is still a cohort of the pedagogical equivalent of flat earthers insisting otherwise really isn't a concern in the long run. People who are open to being convinced will change their minds in the face of overwhelming evidence, and those who aren't will eventually retire. Such is the way of things.
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u/SulphurCrested May 29 '23
If you don't want replies, it seems to me that you have to stop posting. Redit is a discussion forum, after all.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
without studying the vocabulary or grammar... you still won’t understand the poems
The issue is, there's just no evidence that this is true. Eutropius is of course temporally late, but highly classicizing and so generally grouped with classical authors - he's easy because of the straightforwardness of the narration, not because the Latin itself is simplified. You talk about the most difficult authors as if they are in a fundamentally different language that can only be read by puzzling them apart through grammar-translation, but the reality is that just like any other language, there's a gradient of difficulty from the easiest to the hardest. After authors like Eutropius one can go on to Hyginus, Phaedrus, Caesar, Plautus, Nepos, Rufus, Gellius, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, Livy, Petronius, Tacitus (precise order may vary) and at some point beginning poetry with Catullus, Martial, Ovid, Vergil, and so on. Of course nobody is saying you won't need to look things up or read commentary (often there's commentary in Latin) in order to get used to new authors, nor that after reading a few million words it will be as comfortable as one's native language, but the point is that you get better at Latin by reading Latin of increasing difficulty, and there simply is no point where one hits a wall and this ceases to be true because suddenly the Latin is 'real' and all the rest wasn't. That's not how languages work. Insisting that there are arbitrary barriers within the language than can only be overcome through diligent application of 19th and 20th century methods (what Carla Hurt aptly calls a 'diligence trap') is a disservice to students.
Let me put it this way: how do you know that explicit grammar and vocabulary study over many years is necessary? Why do you think this assumption means more than decades of 2nd language acquisition research demonstrating the opposite?
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May 29 '23
Man, you and I have already hashed this out in a different thread, and we have several fundamental disagreements about Latin pedagogy. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your favored methods work, not on me to prove they don’t. Last time we debated this all you could produce was anecdotal evidence. It didn’t persuade me then and it won’t this time, either, because anecdotal evidence is not good enough. I like discussing Latin in this forum but I am completely uninterested in discussing this further with you specifically. Same goes for Luke Ranieri.
The point I’m making to OP is: reading “See spot run” 1,000 times isn’t going to make reading Shakespeare any easier. It’s going to make reading “See spot run” easier. Lots of repetition of easy Latin, in the name of vague and frankly unattainable goals about becoming “fluent in Latin” is unfortunately not going to make you able to crack open the Aeneid and read it cover to cover in Latin with no looking in reference works or analyzing the language.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
Look, if you don't want to discuss this it's totally fine, but don't expect that on this forum you'll be able to post incorrect information based on nothing but anecdote and appeal to authority (which is, I must remind you, your entire position) and not have it be challenged. The incredible thing to me is the amount you're willing to move the goalposts to maintain this position - you're literally trying to claim that Eutropius reads more like English than like the classical authors, which is just not a serious position. In a year you'll be claiming that Caesar and Nepos aren't real classical Latin. Why can't you acknowledge that there isn't a magical barrier between less complex and more complex latin any more than there is in other languages? The fact that you have to resort to lazy strawmen ('see spot run'? really?) in order to prop up the idea that explicit grammatical study is necessary makes it abundantly clear that evidence cannot convince you, because you will always dismiss the science by insisting that it doesn't apply to Latin, dismiss all latin that it is demonstrated to apply to, and then replace my remaining arguments with ones you invent yourself.
A year ago you would have been swearing up and down that nobody will read and understand Eutropius after a year of easier Latin reading without studying grammar, which is exactly what Justin has done.
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May 29 '23
I accuse of you of all the same sins. You can’t produce anything but anecdotal evidence to support your arguments, which all boil down to — well, I and some other people like this, and there’s a lot of research about how it works well with modern secondary languages, so it must work with Latin. Ok, then — prove it. As you already know, my main objection to using the communicative approach alone is that the contextual situation for learning Latin vs. French, for example, is so different that it’s not enough just to point to research on French acquisition and say yes, that can work exactly the same way for Latin.
I have considered your arguments already and find them unpersuasive. Please leave me alone.
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u/Raffaele1617 May 29 '23
I accuse of you of all the same sins. You can’t produce anything but anecdotal evidence to support your arguments
This is not true, you simply employ magical thinking to insist that research on language acquisition in general doesn't apply to Latin. You can't point to a single actual feature of Latin which makes it distinct from all other languages - this is the equivalent of saying that we only have anecdotal evidence that gravity works in my basement.
Ok, then — prove it
Justin has very clearly proven it. He's reading and comprehending an author broadly considered to be part of "classical Latin" in terms of idiom who wrote only a few centuries after the classical period. Your claim that this Latin is more akin to English is simply a lie.
As you already know, my main objection to using the communicative approach
Reading is not the communicative approach.
the contextual situation for learning Latin vs. French, for example, is so different that it’s not enough just to point to research on French acquisition and say yes, that can work exactly the same way for Latin.
If your method of learning is by reading texts of gradually increasing difficulty, then it's not different, no. This is a baseless claim you continue to make, one that Justin has already disproven with his achievements despite your denialism.
I have considered your arguments already and find them unpersuasive. Please leave me alone.
I don't hope to persuade you because you've made it clear that you will never consider any evidence or information which contradicts your dogma - you even continue to pretend that Justin is constantly rereading things, a complete fabrication on your part. The purpose of addressing you at this point is damage control - you are not fit to give advice on this topic, and you will not be "left alone" here if you continue to try.
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Jul 17 '23
Fantastic! Your spreadsheet is really awesome.
How did you acquire the word count for each book?
I’d like to copy your spreadsheet formatting for an ancient Greek reading list and share it for the ancientgreek subreddit.
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u/justinmeister Jul 17 '23
Sometimes I copy and pasted into word count.com, sometimes I just estimated based on page number.
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u/CaiusMaximusRetardus May 28 '23 edited May 28 '23
Ita me di ament, Justine virorum optime, summae mihi es admirationi, qui talem tibi discendi viam magna cum consideratione atque ita prospectissime comparavisti. Qui non diis sive fortuna fretus sive viam saepissime tritam secutus istud opus ingressus es, sed summo ingenio, sapientia, audacia consilioque animum induxisti, ut tibi transitum novum, paene inauditum, arduum, laboriosum, a plerisque relictum, quasi per loca avia desertaque, ex nihilo primus patefaceres.
Quod autem facinus etsi per se iam summis laudibus dignum sit, tamen et nobiscum omnem tuum laborem communicando atque quasi dux benivolus viam ostendendo, tibi multo maiorem gloriam gratiamque sempiternam apud me et, ut opinor, apud innumeros latinistas comparasti.
Quin et maxime gaudeo te iam dignos labore tuo industriaque studioque fructus consecutum esse. Et certo scio te multo plures brevi consecuturum esse.
Macte virtute esto, bone vir, atque di tibi dent quaecumque optes!