Chinese characters - Phonologic vs Logographic

[agewisdom]

8 hours ago, Shelley said:

Which one good reason I think Latin and Greek should be taught in schools as they used to be. I have a friend who did learn this at school and he has what I would consider a mastery of the english unlike anyone else I know. 

Learning Latin and Greek in schools? Do they still teach that in England, even as an elective?

[Zbigniew]

24 minutes ago, agewisdom said:

Learning Latin and Greek in schools? Do they still teach that in England, even as an elective?

Yes, though less commonly than in the past. I did A Level Latin and Greek at school.

[agewisdom]

2 hours ago, Zbigniew said:

Yes, though less commonly than in the past. I did A Level Latin and Greek at school.

 I see. Cool.

 

However do you speak Latin and Greek as well? Or is it more inclined towards reading?

[Flickserve]

I did Latin for nearly two years. It is still taught in schools but much less commonly.

[DavyJonesLocker]

Few articles in the telegraph and independent  over the years about Latin making a comeback in schools in the UK however there is a lot of resistance to it,  especially state schools as it's not seen as a "useful" subject. Many feel since classical studies is taught there is no need to teach Latin. 

I can see it both ways. 

[Shelley]

7 hours ago, agewisdom said:

However do you speak Latin and Greek as well?

You don't learn Latin or Greek with  view to speaking it, you learn them so you can understand English. You do speak out loud in class, my OH remembers sitting class chanting Amo, Amas, Amat etc.

 

You learn grammar and vocabulary so you know Television is half Greek and half Latin, an abomination as far as some people are concerned.

[anonymoose]

I learnt latin at school for two years. When asked what the utility was, the teachers' usual response was, "It makes it easier to understand/learn other modern languages, many of which are derived from latin". This is of course true, but does nothing to justify the time wasted on learning latin. I mean, sure, you may be able to learn French/Spanish/Italian faster if you know latin, but the time taken to learn latin first and then French/Spanish/Italian is still going to be much longer than if you directly learn French/Spanish/Italian. (And after you've learnt any one of them, the others will be much easier to learn even without knowing latin.)

 

It's like saying anyone who wants to learn Japanese should learn Chinese first, because then Japanese will be easier to learn.

 

 

[agewisdom]

 

52 minutes ago, Shelley said:

You don't learn Latin or Greek with  view to speaking it, you learn them so you can understand English. You do speak out loud in class, my OH remembers sitting class chanting Amo, Amas, Amat etc

 

I see. But were you speaking it with other students or totally focusing on the written language?

[imron]

I learnt all my latin from Asterix and Obelix.

[Zbigniew]

We did have to translate passages from English to Latin/Greek and read Latin/Greek texts out loud, but we weren't encouraged to use the languages for active communication. 

 

What's refreshing today is that with the emancipation of learning that has come with the Internet there seems to have been a bit of an upsurge in people wanting to speak Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek), not just read and compose in it. 

 

You do need to be realistic though and remember that Latin and Ancient Greek are actually dead languages, (or, to use a technical term that is less hurtful to Living Latin proponents, corpus languages), and the absolute non-existence of a population of native speakers who can function as reference points means you are never going to attain fluency in the same sense you can with a living language. 

 

I've never subscribed to the hardly satisfactory (for reasons set out by anonymoose) explanation that the primary justification for studying Latin and Greek is that doing so helps with understanding or learning modern languages. The primary justification for studying Classics, as far as I'm concerned, is to gain direct access to a rich seam of literature in its original language and obtain a more intimate insight (than can be had by studying texts in translation) into the human race's cultural evolution over thousands of years.

 

 

[Shelley]

No you don't speak it with other students, it really is just so you can learn about the english language and other romance languages. There were a few wags who went around talking in Latin thinking they were being smart and no one would understand what they said so it was like a bit of cliquey thing. They soon stopped that when one of the teachers understood what they said and they all got detention:)

 

Really don't think of it as learning the language for communicating, just to add to your knowledge of language in general. 

 

@imron Apparently it came from the common practice of the author substituting an asterix or other symbol for a character's name to save typing. How true this is I have no idea but its a fun thought. I still have all my Asterix and they do get reread regularly. Oh - have they been translated in to Chinese? Someone please say yes  ?

Wonder how that works??

[imron]

1 hour ago, Zbigniew said:

You do need to be realistic though and remember that Latin and Ancient Greek are actually dead languages

You might like the novel "The Far Arena" by Richard Ben Sapir.

 

1 hour ago, Shelley said:

and no one would understand what they said

They should've studied harder then.

[Shelley]

2 hours ago, imron said:

They should've studied harder then.

Not all students took Latin, I didn't because I was too young, by the time I got to the right age, I was on the wrong continent to be offered it.

[cnchsy]

In addition, when I see "木" I will associate it with woods as it is its usual meaning. But when I see "他很木", I will expect a adj to follow "他很" so that I will immediately associate it with "blunt".

 

However if it is "他很mu", that is a problem. I will read it first, then guess the meaning.