Latin Tandem Partner

Feliculus
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Latin Tandem Partner

Postby Feliculus » 2016-05-08, 16:22

Salvete soldales glottophiloi,

I have thought about a special idea for quite a long time now and wanted to present it to you.
I studied, inter alia, Historical Indoeuropean linguistics and I am a lover of languages both living and "dead".
The fascination exerted by languages does not, in my opinion, depend on their being dead (and thus somehow "mystical") or their being spoken (and thus sounding beautiful). Indeed, the interesting thing about "dead" languages is the very fact that they were alive and used in every day situations as much as any living language, they were not "mystical" at the time they were spoken and they sounded as beautiful as today's language sound. For this reason, I am very sad that active language competence is not covered by Latin and Greek lessons in our time. It goes without saying that a language's structure cannot be sufficiently understood but by the one who actively knows to employ its rules. Now as for myself, I learned much more latin vocabulary trying to express things in Latin myself than by translation from ancient sources. And everyone of you who will surely agree that you have only understood those grammatical details and lexical subtleties fully that you are aware of when you speak a foreign language and it is those grammatical details and particular words that you will remember best. Now again as for myself, I have effectively improved my knowledge of several languages through language tandems. For those of you who might not know what I am referring to: You have a partner whose mother tongue is the language you learn and who also learns the language that is your mother tongue. In this way you have a partner you can talk to using the language you learn and who can help you. Of course, there isn't any native speaker of Latin available now, but the idea I'd like to propose remains the same: Two people - preferably living in different countries - talk to each via Skype or WhatsApp or whatsoever trying to have their conversation in Latin. In case one of the two is not aware of vocab or grammar necessary to build the sentence he wants to, they can profit from each other's experience. I do have a few tandem partners in Italy, Iran or Egypt but I'd like to have a tandem partner for Latin. It will be fun talking about your every day life, interests and studies, believe me!

Best regards,

Feliculus

vijayjohn
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Re: Latin Tandem Partner

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-11, 0:41

This sounds to me like something that Niels Iversen and Judith Meyer might do.


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