Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all!
Nice article.
It goes something like “I need to learn X; let me take a course on that, surely this will do it.” But then two things happen: the feeling that, by taking the course, you are doing what needs to be done in order to learn, you get lazy and sit back and expect it to happen passively. It won’t. Second, your teacher might not actually be very good, which is fine (most of us have no idea what constitutes “good teaching” in any repeatable way) and might give you lessons and assignments that may be more of a waste of time than anything else.
My point is: if you want to learn something, just go and do it. Odds are you are probably doing better than if you were in a course. If you are doing a course, then consider it as “time slot allocated to X” and try to be as independent and proactive as you can; it is much better than relying on a teacher.
There is also the issue of approach: learning the grammar of a foreign tongue before the rest is tedious and will bring kids very little. If, however, you learn my immersion and naturally, then you are sure to be hooked. That's how I learned English anyway, on my own.
It is a "natural method" book, which means it teaches you the language using the language itself. This may seem hard and counter-intuitive, but it starts off really easily, with sentences that just about anyone could understand, and there are images to help you visualize things. The advantage of this method is that it teaches you an intuitive understanding of the language, as if you were learning by immersion. That is how humans generally learn languages: we don't think of grammar when we read or speak, we just do it.
That isn't to say you won't learn grammar, but rather, it means that grammar will be a complement, not your main focus. For grammar-related queries, Allen & Greenough's dictionary is a really good one. You can find it hosted online by the Dickinson College.
As a dictionary, there are the Latinitium ones, which are really good, and serve Latin to English as well as the contrary. For support and to see what other Latinistas are up to, there is the Latin & Ancient Greek discord server (sorry, I don't have the link on me right now), and from there you can join the LLPSI one.
What I did was to read a bit every day of either LLPSI I & II or some more advanced books when I was able to for about a year and a half. Now, I can read a lot by Cicero and some other authors. It's well worth it :)
Happy learning!
sware - "to answer"
sweger - "mother in law"
sweor - "father in law"
There are many. Often the native word coexists with the borrowed Norse cognate, as in yard / garden or shirt / skirt.
give is, I believe, subject to some debate. Without Norse influence, it would be pronounced yiv. People argue over whether it should be thought of as a borrowing from Norse or as a reversion of the pronunciation of the English word in a Norse-heavy environment. (etymonline has the second of those theories; wiktionary has the first.)
No, Old Norse is Old Norse.
"Germanic" (i guess you mean Proto-Germanic) and Old Norse are both indo-european languages.
They come from Indo-European roots and are older than Old Norse or Old English. Cognates are also found in Slavic and Roman languages:
sware - свара - sermone
sweor/sweger - свекор/свекровь - suocero/suoceraIndeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.
Snake, snare, and snack also come to mind.
He writes, he is a writer. I sleepe, I be a sleeper. For truth, there is Anglish, but the end speakes akin to a Scotch pirater. My setmoot wishtongue has a lilt like Swedish chef.
Read Chaucer aloude and he singes.
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