Shadi Bartsch: evaluation

Transcript context

…But say you were doing it now, I mean. Would you get online and have Zoom calls with monks or not? [laughter] I would not because there’s not much value for most Latinists in spoken Latin or spoken ancient Greek because that’s not how they’re taught. There are a few people who teach them as spoken languages. I think they’re still spoken on some occasions in the Vatican. But who would I speak Latin to? There’s nobody around. We’re only taught it as a written, unspoken language, which is why it’s so effective to do it with a textbook, and you don’t need an app on your iPhone to do it. I did take eight years of Mandarin, and there, I would say, do not try to learn Mandarin using a textbook. You absolutely must be in a classroom with a native Chinese speaker, or what comes out of your mouth will not be Mandarin. It will be something that nobody will understand. Or worst-case scenario, it’ll actually mean something but the wrong thing, and that happened to me many times. Before I started classes, and I was just teaching myself by reading, one of the expressions I thought I had learned was “excuse me.” When I said it in China, people would jump and look at me suspiciously. It turned out, I found out later, that I wasn’t saying, “excuse me.” I was saying, “Please smell me.” That’s the kind of mistake that’s possible. From reading the Romans, what might we learn about the psychology of power that we don’t already know?…

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