Ancient and Modern Languages (updated)

 

I have updated 3 previous posts. I may update a post more than once because it's more efficient.🙂

Latin. To recap: Prior to my Philosophy BA, I had already done a last year BA degree module in Latin as a stand-alone module which ended at the same time as my BA Philosophy started, except for the Latin exam, which overlapped with the first month of my Philosophy degree. So after completing that Latin course, I left that university 😪 and I didn't take the (Latin) exam 😪 because I'd be on 2 different degree courses simultaneously which you can't do 😪 and because I didn't want to start gaining credits in 2 different degrees and at 2 universities. Messy! I enjoyed the Latin degree module 👍 and was getting really high marks (1st class) for my assignments but at the time I was recovering from sports injuries so wasn't going to return to the tennis tour until the autumn at the earliest. 😪 So I decided to use the time to study at university. 👍 As I've already mentioned, it was a long distance module but included regular meet-ups for a lecture/seminar at a central London uni (LSE). Meeting the other students was very helpful because you gained knowledge about the course/degree from the perspective of a student. It's also great to meet in-person and chat! 👍🙂The lecturer/tutor was friendly and relaxed. 👍Something that was evident when shortly after I began the module I had to cope with a bereavement * which I found extremely distressing. My tutor/lecturer (who lectured, led seminars and marked all assignments) immediately jumped into action and let me know what the college bereavement procedure was and how I can keep going with the course to make sure I wasn't under pressure. And to let her know how things were, if there was anything I needed to make things go even more smoothly. So she created a terrific learning environment.👍 But the end of the module she was putting in a plug for Ancient Greek which I had done years back.

I'm a language fanatic. I collect languages. I first started at a very young age when I played a game with my mother. We listened to a tape (yes a tape 📼) and I had to match the word to a card on which the word was written. On one side of the cards were French words on the other Spanish words. Same went for the tape. 📼 My mother focused on the French and rewound the tape rather than play the Spanish side. She didn't want to confuse me. However, what she didn't know was that I had already turned the cards and seen the words! So in the end we did both. 

I took French and Spanish at A Level because I had done them the longest, was fluent in both and it was easier to find an exam centre for them. Unlike school students, I had to do the exam-only option and didn't have the benefit of coursework or a school teacher telling the examiner what a wunderkind I was! It meant the exam was much harder. I wanted to take A Level German but there was no course running at evening classes and exam centres were a needle in a haystack. I did French because my mother is good at it. But I often wonder why schools don't teach Dutch or German which are more closely related to English. 

One of the advantages of being home-educated ** is that you can follow your own interests and so put your own mark on your education. For instance, pre-GCSEs, I wanted to research a woman in the Middle Ages so I did! Another time, I wanted to learn more about Indigenous peoples and their art. So we went to one of my mother's previous colleges and used their library. I would wander around the library and find the books myself, then organise my own research project and write it up. When I'd finished, my mother would go through it with me, make suggestions, praise it, give me reward stickers e.g. Good Job!👍🙂 and recommend further reading. The research projects were my own choice and work but still an extension of something we were working on together as part of the syllabus ie the National Curriculum, which she also developed further.

I was to do this on many occasions including when later studying for A Levels. So when I went to uni I had already spent time in a university library. 

Out of the blue, when I was 8 years old, I decided I wanted to learn Japanese. We were studying Japan together in Geography, learning about its culture, people and religion. (I learnt world religions as part of Geography, and not just the main ones. It would include whatever religion or spirituality a particular country or indigenous people believed in. I didn't do R.E ie religion as a subject in its own right although I did learn all the stories of the Old Testament and drew pictures based on them. Religion only came up as part of Geography not as part of any other subject.) We liked the idea of daughter day that they celebrate in Japan so we adopted it. I also had Japanese friends in my tennis class so I wanted to speak to them in their language. My mother didn't have a clue about Japanese so she bought a tape and off we went. It was fun. 😅 There was no pressure to become a whizz-kid at it. It was purely because I wanted to. The upside is I can sing in Japanese. 🎶🎵But don't ask me to have a clever conversation! 

Modern Hebrew happened much the same way. We bought a tape and off we went. My mother already  knew Biblical Hebrew so she knew how to read the language and pronounce the words.

Not that long ago I put myself down for Frisian. I just thought it would be a fun thing to do! It's the closest foreign language to Old English.  

I grade my languages and also like learning families of languages e.g. Slav, Romance, Germanic, Some I want to be fluent in, some advanced and some I just want to 'have a go'  e.g. Croatian (I played a tournament there found the groundsman understood me when I spoke Czech so I bought a Croatian dictionary!) I'm even learning a spot of Russian off Svetlana Kuznetsova, the tennis player. She writes and speaks in Russian nearly all the time on Instagram so I'm getting used to it!

I enjoy learning languages but, apart from Czech, no language particularly takes precedence. I think people in philosophy have the mistaken notion that I'm attached to French from either my teens or a very young age ie under 5 years old and think that somehow I still am. I'm not sure where they got that idea from🤔 - I'm not and never have been. I've always been keen on Spanish! 👶 Maybe because I feel I discovered it for myself when a child playing a card game with my mother!😅😅 If I'm attached to any language, it's Czech because I've heard it from birth and I speak the language with my mother. 🙂

* I mentioned this bereavement I suffered April 2009 in my reply to Simon Hewitt when letting him know I wouldn't be attending his New Year Party (2009-10). 

** Being home-educated wasn't planned and certainly wasn't for any religious/political/educational/health reasons or any other reason. It was purely my father's off-the-wall idea. At the time my mother was busy teaching at a comprehensive school and I was loving being at school. I had the most gentle, kind, warm, loving, young teacher assistant and we all adored her! Playtime was fun but if you preferred you could sit and draw which I did but then I still ran out to hang over the garden fence with friends and spook 👻 each other out about the people who lived in the house across the way. After school, while waiting for my mother to collect me I'd walk around the gardens chatting to the headmistress as she checked that all the kids had left the premises. For me, school was a happy place! I have only great memories. 

Home-education was great too. I had the opportunity to do things I wouldn't otherwise have time or energy for, e.g. Theatre school, tennis classes, music classes at a music conservatoire, field trips, and more. I led a busy life, meeting children and later teenagers and adults from all backgrounds. Lessons at home were fun and I could have my own input into what we studied even though there was a set timetable. It was more like working together than teacher/pupil relationship. My mother managed to wear two hats, teacher and mother, very successfully moving between them seamlessly.