too romantic

As somone who studyed latin at school for five years, here are my tips for all of you who want to teach themselfes how to speak latin:

Forget everything you know about learning a new language. Latin and Greek are different in structure from any laguage you might know. It doesn´t work like English or French or German. The translating is much more mathematical.

Grab a vocabulary book.

Study every vocab in there (it should be about 2.5k).

Realize that there is no word for yes or no but about ten related to killing and dying

Take a look at the grammar. All of it.

Study it until it´s stuck in your brain. You´ll have to remember every little piece of it. Except for maybe the NcI. I never needed that.

At this point you will probably notice that it is almost impossible to learn how to actually speak Latin. Give up that dream. Not even my Latin teacher was able to do that.

Grab any Text from Ovid or Ceasar.

Never just translate from the start to the end of a sentence. Always look for the predicate first and build your sentence up on that. Expect very, very long sentences.

Now you will realize that even translating is a ton lot more difficult than yout thought and you will probbably fail, even if you know all the vocabs and grammar. Again, learning Latin doesn´t work like lerning French. You have to analyse every letter because one small “e” instead of an “a” could change the whole translation.

Hopefully you have now noticed that teaching Latin to yourself within a few months won´t work and believing so was naive.

You could probably learn it with a proper teacher and lots of time, but then it won´t be fun anymore and you will suffer just like all of us students did learning it at school.

Forget about the idea.

Hi everyone! Now that I’ve (almost) finished my masters and have thus been a history student for four years, I thought this would be the best time to make a post with four tips about how to study history. I studied in the UK, but hopefully these tips will be helpful wherever you are in the world!

1. Do. Your. Damn. Readings.

97% of the work for a history degree is individual. If you ask me to describe my degree in one sentence, it would be “me, alone in a room, reading”. If you study history (but I think this goes for most humanities subjects), you need to do your reading, cause otherwise, you will literally do no work at all. Whether it’s for an essay that’s worth 80% of your final grade or for an optional seminar, always, always do the reading- there have been countless moments when I’ve either been the only person in the seminar who kind of knew what was going on, or when I’ve gotten extra marks during an exam because I knew a random fun fact from some extra reading I had done. So please, please do your reading.

2. Go to all your classes, you won’t have many!

Over the past four years, I’ve had anywhere between 8 and 3 hours of class a week. If you decide not to show up to the few hours you do have to be at uni for, not only will you be extremely unpopular with your lecturers, but it’ll also be such a waste of the time, effort, and money you’re putting into uni. I always calculated at the beginning of the year how much I was paying per hour of class. Trust me, it’s a lot harder to skip when you know you’re wasting £100 every hour you don’t go!

3. Pick essay topics you genuinely like (even if the lecturers hate it)

I vividly remember a lecturer telling the class we shouldn’t write essays about witches because he had read so many that he absolutely despised the topic now. Me being me, I listened to him, and it took me four years to, eventually, write an essay on the topic. Which I loved. If it hadn’t been for that guy, I would’ve discovered this interest so much earlier, and I now wish I’d just trusted my gut and gone with the topic that spoke to me the most. Always pick an essay topic you like, otherwise writing the essay will feel more like a punishment than fun, which is what it should be. This is the time to let your personality shine! I’ve written two essays on Pocahontas because I LOVE the Disney movie and, let me tell you, I enjoyed those way more than when I listened to what the lecturers wanted. You do you boo!

4. Have some fun!

I’m notorious for making up the weirdest essay (sub)titles and/or introductions. The first essay I ever turned in (on the economy of marriage in Pride and Prejudice) contained the lyrics “girls don’t like boys, girls like cars and money” from a song by Good Charlotte. And, to be honest, my jokes haven’t improved much in four years, as is evidenced by the fact all the subtitles in my essay about pirates were quotes from Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Do I love thinking of those things? YES. Do I care whether others (lecturers/students) judge me for it? NO. Again: show your personality! My undergrad dissertation had chapter titles all taken from the song Lady Marmalade (the thesis was about prostitution), and guess what, my supervisor loved it. More importantly, so did I!

“ All the lonely people “  (Eleanor Rigby / The Beatles)

Cztery struny skrzypiec, 1914.

“Four Strings of the Violin"

Edward Okuń (Polish, 1872–1945)