Jonathan Walther wrote:
When I learned to read English as a lad, I did just that; I steadily
read my way backwards from Alice in Wonderland, to Howard Pyle, to
Shakespeare, to Chaucer. Beyond Chaucer I could not go; Beowulfe feels
very familiar, but is gibberish as far as comprehension goes. My
English is a conglomerate of all the variations and developements from
the past thousand years. Would it be a bad thing to understand ancient
Hebrew or koine Greek in the same way?
There is a major difference. You were not learning to speak English from these sources. Also, you were cognizant of the different periods you were reading (at least, that's the way you paint the picture above). ...
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Incidentally, I would be curious along the lines of this thread to know what people think about the notion that a person ought to learn Modern Israeli Hebrew or spoken Arabic first, before learning ancient Semitic languages. ...
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