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< Ancient language scholarship
I recently found a book entitled "Coptic in 20 lessons", looks tempting. Right now I've been reading about the development of ideas in Alexandria, so there's Greek everywhere! The Corpus Hermeticum is yet another reason to learn Greek.
What resources have you found for Classical Chinese?
I thought you'd never ask. There's a surprising wealth of resources for CC in English, actually.
And that's about it, the best books you'll find on the matter. I'll leave you to check them yourself, available for illegal download through the usual media. There are also a couple books on Buddhist Chinese if you're interested in *that* part of the language.
what's your preferred method for memorizing vocabulary?
I don't have any. I don't even make that much of an effort to memorize, really. At best I keep lists of the new words to which I refer back often, but it's not a very good method. I think the best method is to read a lot. But one has to find a good amount of graded readers, and ones that are not boring at that. It's a struggle.
Thanks very much for the suggestions on Classical Chinese! I’ll start perusing.
I have “Coptic in 20 Lessons,” as well as Lambdin’s “Introduction to Sahidic Coptic.” I’ve spent more time with the latter, but haven’t decided which (if either) I actually prefer. I’ve long been fascinated by Gnosticism, which was my motivation for starting it. I haven’t gotten very far, though, as there aren’t as many resources for graded reading as there are for e.g. the New Testament.
My approach to vocabulary mirrors your own, although I’m not as good about making vocabulary lists as I should be. For reading the NT, my go-to is the Bible Web App’s reader:
https://biblewebapp.com/reader/
Even though it’s not using the best Greek text of the NT (which I would argue is the UBS 5th edition), there’s a lot to recommend it. You can set it to have words be in different colors based on their part of speech, for example. But most importantly for me is that you can mouse over a word and get a (general) definition. I prefer this because it helps me not break the flow of reading; something that’s especially important with my iffy working memory (thanks, ADHD). If the definition doesn’t seem to fit, then it’s time to head to my paper dictionary (Bauer’s Lexicon, which is *the* dictionary for New Testament/early Christian Greek).
Bible Web App is open source, and I keep meaning to see if I can feed the UBS 5th into it, but I think it requires a *very* specific text to handle grammatical parsing and the like.
Beyond the New Testament itself, there’s a lot out there, but it can be harder to find (and harder still to read). I have a paper copy of The Apostolic Fathers, but run into the problem of my flow being broken when I have to look up words, which happens a great deal. At one point I was going through one of Origen of Alexandria’s letters, which I started translating because that was the best way I found to parse it. His Greek is *tough*: very long sentences with lots of clauses (which is not uncommon) and a very different word order to what we intuitively expect as English-speakers. His theology was really interesting, though, and can differ significantly from what’s mainstream in Christianity now.
For languages with which I’m more comfortable, reading on my iPad is by far the best way. Apple Books has various built-in dictionaries, so I can look up a word without having to change task and then keep reading. It makes things far less taxing mentally. From my time in language classes (e.g. in college, or even since then), learning phrases in context is definitely easier and tends to stick. This bothers the grammarian in me, who wants to understand the rules, but try as I might learning words in isolation simply does not work. Meanwhile, I still remember a few phrases from the two months of Arabic I took with a tutor at the start of COVID lockdown.
As far as finding a tutor, the problem there is deciding which (modern) language I want to focus on!