language-journeys

[language-journeys]

Day 1 - Welcome to Blogging

Today I decided to start a blog. I will be documenting my journey of learning various languages and stuff.  I don’t know how Tumblr works.

Literary Chinese - So, I’m using Rouzer’s “A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese” and I’m currently on lesson 3. I do not know any Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. The first 3 lessons introduce approximately 100 hanzi and a few multi-character words. I started by going sentence by sentence in the provided readings and doing basic translations. Then I practiced my handwriting by writing out the first 2 lessons in full, checking stroke order with zdic.net. This sentence structure here gave me a good bit of difficulty: 道之所在，天下歸之。The book translation is "Where the Way presides, the world gives allegiance there." That's about all I had energy for today, so I moved to...

Greek - of the ancient variety. I've just finished up an introductory Attic Greek course at university so I'll be reading the Batracomyomachia. An epic poem about a war between frogs and mice. It's written in the homeric dialect so I'm guessing it's a good choice because everything else will be simpler grammatically. My goal is to read around 20 lines every few days. The story begins with a dialogue between Physignathos (Puff-Cheek), king of the frogs, and Psicharpax (Crumb-Filcher), prince of the mice, meeting in a marsh. At the point I left off, they were flexing their royal pedigrees on each other.

French - No grammar prcatice today, just some basic chatting with folks online.