Language learning progress

[regshoe]

I'm now at the point with Greek where I can be writing a blog post and think how much better I could express such-and-such a point if only I could use this particular Greek construction with no exact English equivalent. I'm taking this as an encouraging sign of progress. (It was μέν/δέ. So useful! So concise! I don't know how we do without it).

This is still the early stages, and I obviously still have plenty of grammatical complications and a lot of vocab learning ahead of me, but it is satisfying to be able to read a (fairly straightforward) Greek sentence and just get the meaning the way I do in English, without having to puzzle out the tense/case/gender etc. of each word one at a time. I mean, one of the reasons I decided to learn ancient Greek was the fun of solving the grammar of written sentences like a logic puzzle, which comes much easier to me than speaking and listening do, but another reason was the things I'll be able to read in it, and this gives me hope for that!

Anyway, I'm currently trying to get my head around the different tenses of the participle, another intricate and versatile feature that's quite different to how English uses participles, and it's very interesting.