Language – Latin

4 Responses to “What language is more difficult in your experience: Ancient Greek or Latin?”

1. Joshua Says:
   September 27th, 2009 at 4:03 am

   I spent years and years studying both.

   I found Greek more difficult. I started learning it at age 13, but I’ve kept on studying it, and now use it to read whole works. The Greek alphabet, vocabulary and word formation is just a bit stranger to someone who’s studied Spanish, French or any other Romance language. Since we’ve borrowed so many French words into English, Latin also looks a bit less foreign to English speakers.

   Sure, Latin has one more case (the ablative), but noun declensions and their uses are very similar in both. So are verbs and sentence structure. In fact, the grammar of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit is all surprisingly similar.

2. huggzz_n_kisses Says:
   September 27th, 2009 at 4:03 am

   I studied both and I also found that Latin was a little more difficult. There are many declensions of words in Latin and are hard to get if you are not a natural learner. If you are the type of person that has to try hard to get something then Latin is probably not the language for you to try and learn.

3. Zara-Jade Says:
   September 27th, 2009 at 4:03 am

   I admit to never having tried to learn Ancient Greek, but I did learn Latin. I didn’t do amazingly well (probably because I didn’t try hard -_-) but I imagine Latin to be easier because it at least uses the Roman alphabet, whereas Ancient Greek has it’s own alphabet.

4. GibsonEssGee Says:
   September 27th, 2009 at 4:03 am

   The obvious difference is you have to learn the Greek alphabet first. There are some strange myths and legends about learning Latin such as the one I had at school which was you have to learn Latin before you can learn German which now I can see was a ploy to mask the fact they were short of German teachers. My sister graduated with a degree in "Latin with minor Greek". It was unclear what the emphasis was, perhaps due more to the amount of literature rather than the amount of difficulty of learning the language. Having had Latin lessons at school (to exam level) I’d say don’t waste your time and learn a modern language instead unless you are going into teaching or theology.