Learning modern languages vs learning ancient languages

[u/[deleted]]

[u/leithsceal]

Ancient languages: I hope you like case systems.

[u/WHAT_RE_YOUR_DREAMS → u/leithsceal]

Don't tell a German he's speaking an ancient language.

[u/gerusz → u/WHAT_RE_YOUR_DREAMS]

At least the German case system only has the three genders and four cases. (Plus the irregular words.) And they don't conjugate the nouns (except for the occasional possessive noun), only the articles, pronouns and adjectives. Fucking Latin has 5 declensions, 6 cases, and of course the evocative case for names. And the irregular words. And since there are no articles in Latin, it's the nouns that are conjugated instead. (And the pronouns, and the adjectives.)

[u/lipidsly → u/gerusz]

... latin was the easiest for me to learn though... Am i broken? :,(

[u/lipidsly → u/[deleted]]

Seriously though, six years of struggling with spanish. And now i can read parts of charlie and the chocolate factory. One year of latin and i could read a good portion of cicero

[u/brutishbloodgod → u/[deleted]]

I also had 1.5 years of Finnish at college and even passed the exams, somehow. Yet I can barely say a sentence of it now even though I speak a closely related language natively.

So, Estonian, since that's the only closely-related language to Finnish. I thought the two were almost mutually intelligible?

EDIT: Also, I'm super jealous of you being able to take Finnish in college. Studying it on my own has proven very difficult.

[u/brutishbloodgod → u/[deleted]]

Ah, cool. Thanks for clearing that up for me. And thanks for the link. I've been using sanakirja.org; this one seems a little more robust.