[anvandare]

For reference: this book is obviously a (praiseworthy) ambition to have a Greek counterpart to the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata[1] by Hans Ørberg.

Ørberg's way of teaching Latin is, in my view, excellent because it is based on a natural view of learning a language: show something, say what its name is, use its name in simple sentences, work up from there. Each time introducing new words surrounded by already-known ones and letting the pupil figure it out. All in the target language itself, exactly how we acquired our mother tongues. Vocabulary is acquired through repetition, grammar is acquired through "getting a feel for what sounds right". Using the brain's own mechanisms for deducing meaning and deriving rules.

The book is definitely going to need illustrations, just like in LLPSI[2]. Hard to understand what 'πόλις' means per se, but not if I take you up a mountain and point at [3] while saying "πόλις".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg

[2] https://blog.nina.coffee/img/lingua-latina.png

[3] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f5/c3/10/f5c31074eeb418bc51e7...

[RheingoldRiver]

> 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.

[tgv]

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.

[svat]

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.

[_a_a_a_]

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'

[dwringer]

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.

[marginalia_nu]

Also worth pointing out that LLPSI is essentially Hans Ørberg's life's work. It's been adjusted and fine-tuned for decades, and it really shows.

While at a surface level it looks fairly simple, it is no small task to repeat the process with another language.

[082349872349872]

Giuseppi Peano tried to get people to learn an "unconjugated latin" by writing mathematics in it. eg https://archive.org/details/formulairedemat04peangoog/page/n... (mini rationale https://archive.org/details/formulairedemat04peangoog/page/n... )

Maybe set theory wasn't the best way of introducing a conlang, but I have to take my hat off for the weird flex.

[JoeyBananas]

I think Ørberg is too extreme. His approach would work better with just a little bit of english thrown in to explain things. Reading his books, I often found myself looking things up anyway.

[schoen]

Hans Ørberg was Danish, so it might have been Danish rather than English if he had decided to include a modern language!

Even though it's often claimed to be appropriate for self-study, I think Ørberg thought that the commonest way it would be used was with a teacher, who would either teach by immersion (I've met people who used it that way) or by speaking a modern language to the students. I'm sure one thing he saw as a benefit to the Latin-only texts is that they could potentially be used by people all over the world, regardless of their native language, without having to be translated or localized for different audiences.

[thom]

I used Jeanne Neumann’s companion text as a jumping off point into deeper stuff (and because at least a couple of times with just the original text, I spent several pages with the wrong idea for a word and felt embarrassed).