Latin is easy?

kutya   Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:34 pm GMT
which is more inflected when compared to Italian, has cases, etc).

Inflection is not only noun and adjective declention, but also verb conjugation. What about the subjective mood in Some latin languages. Both Latin and Romance languages have it! Slavic languages have lots of cases 6-7 but their verbal system is generally more simplified than the romance one, except Bulgarian perhaps. As for the verbs, the only difficult feature in slavic languages is the verbal aspect. I learned Russian and I can say that russian verbs, on the whole, are light years easier than the portuguese ones, for instance.
Guest   Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:45 pm GMT
Yo lo maté : SOV
jella   Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:50 pm GMT
Spanish
yo LO maté = acusativo
yo LE di el libro = dativo
EL cantò = nominativo

Italian
io la vedo accusative
io gli parlo dative
egli canta nominative


The romance languages still have pronouns declention
Francois   Sat Jan 31, 2009 4:26 pm GMT
xyxyiz Sat Jan 31, 2009 12:10 pm GMT
For me, Latin was pretty easy.

I had the best of both worlds when starting Latin, since I natively spoke Italian and Croatian - so in one hand, I had the vantage of lexical similarity (thanks to Italian) and in the other hand, the vantage of structural similarity (thanks to Croatian, which is more inflected when compared to Italian, has cases, etc).
I think that the main difficulty with Latin is syntax (for example, remember those lengthy sentences from Cicero where it took you a while to decipher which sentence is the main one and how are the others related to it?) and not morphology.

@ Guest: Romance languages usually use SVO structure, not SOV as Latin, consider these:
Latin: (Ego) puellam video.
Italian: (Io) vedo una ragazza.
French: Je vois une fille.




So you read and can speak Latin fluently now?
Guest   Sat Jan 31, 2009 5:01 pm GMT
Romance languages don't have rigid word order, you can find OVS, SVO, or SOV, it depends on the part you want to stress or if the object is a pronounc or not. In this case word order is almost always SOV like in Latin.
Alessandro   Sat Jan 31, 2009 5:37 pm GMT
Latin: (Ego) puellam video.
Sardinian: pizzìnna vidu.
szep   Sat Jan 31, 2009 6:31 pm GMT
a lanyot làtom = puellam video in hungarian
xyxyiz   Sun Feb 01, 2009 1:11 am GMT
"So you read and can speak Latin fluently now?"

Never interested me to that level + I wasn't really taught to use it, the approach to learning classical languages was different than to learning living ones (naturally).
What we learned at school (in tiresome analytical manner), and what I saw on tests and competitions, was enough for me and never particularly hard (it was an easy A, in other words). Greek was worse. The difficulty of Latin I found overrated completely.

Guest - Italian is my native language, I don't think analytically about it; of course that if you nitpick you can find SOV as well and that languages are never strict in behaving in only one manner. But in normal speech, and save for acc./dat. pronouns and combinations, standard Italian is SVO.
Francois   Sun Feb 01, 2009 11:26 am GMT
xyxyiz Sun Feb 01, 2009 1:11 am GMT
"So you read and can speak Latin fluently now?"

Never interested me to that level + I wasn't really taught to use it, the approach to learning classical languages was different than to learning living ones (naturally).
What we learned at school (in tiresome analytical manner), and what I saw on tests and competitions, was enough for me and never particularly hard (it was an easy A, in other words). Greek was worse. The difficulty of Latin I found overrated completely.


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You say that you, as an Italian native speaker, found Latin "never particularly hard (it was an easy A, in other words). Greek was worse. The difficulty of Latin I found overrated completely." On the other hand you write that you "learned [Latin] at school in tiresome analytical manner" and that you never reached a level of reading and speaking Latin fluently.

Isn´t there some incoherence?