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Latin Update 2

2 min read

I'm pretty proud of myself for being able to memorize the declensions and conjugations for this crazy maze of grammar that is Latin. The ablative noun case was the most difficult for me in terms of application because it doesn't translate very well in English and it forced me to learn some English grammar as well. 

I see why learning Latin was and is still seen as an "elite" language. Partly because it's a Western language and we live in a Western society, but it's also a complex language that's quite difficult to master. It would be extremely difficult for me to learn a language like Chinese because it doesn't use the same alphabet as English and the pronunciation is very different.

The fact that this is a dead language really took the pressure off to learn everything perfectly because it didn't feel like I had the eyes of the native speakers on me in a sense. With Spanish, I often feel guilty for mispronouncing words or not knowing some things because I know that a lot of Spanish speakers in the US have learned English. It seems a little unfair that native English speakers have it fairly easy since much of the world teaches English as a second language. Oops, that was a tangent, but anyway... tomorrow's update will be on how vocab learning has gone.