Today we are interviewing Basil-Anne, our Greek and Latin tutor. We talked about starting a language from scratch at Reed, the GLAM department, and studying abroad as a speaker of ancient languages!
Leilani: Would you like to talk a bit about your background, why you chose to study Greek and Latin?
Basil-Anne: Sure! I have studied Latin for a very, very long time. I started officially in fourth grade, but I think my first real Latin class was in seventh grade. So I’ve been taking it for a really long time. And I came into Reed undecided but I was very strongly either going to be a GLAM [Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies] major or be in the Sociology department. I went to the GLAM open house during O-week and fell in love and was like, “This is where I want to be.” So I dropped Intro Sociology and switched into another GLAM class and have not looked back.
L: You mentioned taking Latin prior to Reed. Did you have the same experience with Greek, or did you start with Intro Greek?
B: I started with Intro Greek, and Greek was a lot harder than Latin because I was starting from scratch. But it’s a very cool language. My favorite thing about just Greek and Latin in general, and I don’t know if this is true for all language learners, is the kind of peak you hit where you’re thinking of every single thing and all of a sudden, you’re just not thinking of every single grammar thing anymore. That’s a really fun moment for me. It corresponds with the course load, like you switch from language classes to literature classes, and that’s just such a fun transition for me, of being able to be like, “OK, I know what I’m doing, and now I actually get to talk about literature.” Which is why language is so fun. So with Greek, I really got to see that process condensed from freshman year to now, senior year. It was great.
L: Have there been resources that have been particularly helpful for language learning?
B: For Greek, I used drop-in tutoring all the time, and that was so helpful. Even when I didn’t necessarily have a specific concept that I didn’t understand, even when I was like, “I technically understand everything.” I remember when I was an intermediate student, I used to come in and just be like, “Can I do my homework here?” and then ask when I hit problems. And that was just such a nice space for asking for help before I necessarily was sure that I needed it, so that I could always get the help that I wanted. That was helpful. And also, we pay for so many different resources. We pay for Oxford Scholarly Editions, we pay for Logeion, we pay for the TLG [Thesaurus Linguae Graecae]. So if people aren’t using those things, they should, because those are wonderful resources that Reed pays for.
LangLabbie note: These GLAM resources and many more can be found here from the Reed Library GLAM LibGuide!
L: Have there been any people at Reed who have helped you with language learning?
B: Yeah! I really like the GLAM department because we’ve got a very close-knit community. All of the students in years above me were both people I were friends with and people I got help from. The professors are awesome, I spent so much time in office hours. The thing I would say for Greek and Latin specifically is that every single person you can think of who could help you wants to help you. So just get comfortable asking for help. I ask for help all the time. It’s a very supportive department.
L: Sonia Sabnis was my advisor during my freshman year. She almost convinced me to take Latin.
B: You should have! It’s wonderful.
L: Maybe! So do you have any favorite experiences with Greek and Latin?
B: I did study abroad, and it was actually really cool because I went to Cyprus for the archaeological field school that Reed has a stake in for a month the summer before I studied abroad. Then I traveled around Europe for a month and then I was in Greece for three months. That was a really awesome experience. And it was weird because Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are different languages. They’re similar languages, but they’re different. So I took a semester off of Ancient Greek and I switched into Modern Greek. I was in Accelerated Modern Greek, which is like an introductory Modern Greek course for people who have already taken Ancient Greek. It was such a strange experience. There were so many vocab words that I recognized, but then I would say them, and the teacher would say, “You sound so silly saying that word like that,” because I was using Ancient pronunciations for Modern words.
L: Did you have any funny experiences like that, talking to local people in Greece?
B: Yeah, the crazy thing was vowels and stresses. The vowels are pronounced entirely different in Ancient Greek, and the stresses are different. So there were lots of words I was saying wrong and they meant different things. Like the word for “table” and the word for “bank” are the same spelling, they just have a different stress. And so I was saying “bank” every time I said “table” for a while. Stuff like that was just little mistakes, but I probably sounded like a crazy person to a native speaker because I knew all the vocab but I was just saying it all wrong.
L: That’s really interesting! I’ve seen YouTube videos of a guy who speaks Latin to Italian locals, and it’s really cool.
B: It’s a strange, strange dissonance.
LangLabbie note: Here’s the link to the YouTube video!
L: Last question, do you have a favorite word, expression, book, or story in Greek or Latin?
B: I really liked my Advanced class last year for Latin was Apuleius. We did The Golden Ass, that was really funny.