<p>I'm in my first year of college. I'm currently taking Italian and I love the language. But recently I've grown to love Latin and Greek a lot more and I'm desperate to learn those languages. I want to take 6-7 courses in each language, which might even fill up to be a major. Thing is, I'll have to drop Italian if I want to do both languages. I do not feel good about dropping a language; it feels like a waste of courses (2 courses so far). But I also do not want to keep going with Italian and realize much later that I should have stopped early and done Latin and Greek instead. I do not have any foundation in the classical languages and history though, so I'll have to start them from level 1. If I do take them, I'm worried I'll have to juggle 2 hard languages at the same time. Any advice?</p>
<p>By the way, those who have taken Latin and/or Greek, is it true that since I do not have to speak much (if not at all) for Latin and Greek, learning both at the same time might not be such a bad idea. I know speaking helps one to learn a language, but speaking is also the part that foreign language users mess up the most.</p>
<p>You might continue with Italian, start Latin, and then later add Greek. There are lots of summer intensive courses out there in Latin and Greek, those might be a way to jumpstart your Greek if you choose to wait a bit to start Greek. Doing Latin and Italian simultaneously shouldn't be confusing at all. I think trying to start Latin and Greek at the same time might be overwhelming and not a good strategy.</p>
<p>i read both languages and would strongly recommend against doing both latin and greek at the same time. there are several reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>latin has complex and very rigid linguistic structure that you may have a hard time grasping if you haven't previously learned an inflected language. its vocabulary is also quite large (i.e. there's only a small number of "lemmas" or common words, and those words make up only a small percentage of text), which makes intensive latin difficult.</p></li>
<li><p>by all accounts, greek is much harder than latin. it has many more discrete forms than latin and somewhat more constructions that need to be memorized by rote. however, greek will be much easier for you if you learn latin first (though it still won't be "easy" per se). </p></li>
<li><p>latin and greek have a large number of overlapping structures which are easy to confuse-- this is actually more of a danger with "constructed" texts because they purposefully use the simplest constructions, some of which are only partially common (this is difficult to explain)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>i would recommend taking latin alone, for now. the main reason i say this is that you may come to dislike classical languages or classics in general. if this happens, latin will be much more "useful" to you in terms of understanding the structure of other languages. greek is grammatically idiosyncratic and not particularly "useful" in that way. spend your time and credits on the item with the lesser risk attached. if you do enjoy latin as much as you think you will, summer classes or independent studies in greek are easy to come by. even an intensive class in greek will be relatively simple if you already have a strong grasp of latin.</p>
<p>I took Latin for four years in high school and I think that Latin is a difficult language to learn. The fact that it is not a spoken language makes the language somewhat awkward to learn...</p>