Latin 2011 (1 Viewer)

aphorae

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There was an amusing lack of recent threads in this section, so I felt obliged to make one.

How's the course going? What's the size of your cohort?

...does anyone else around here actually do Latin :tongue2: ?
 

silentdreamer

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latin prelim student here!

we have about 17 people right now, and i think next year we'll have 15 for the continuers course and 6/7 doing extension. finding it okay for now, but the vocab is killing me :(

what's hsc latin like?
 

aphorae

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Hey there! Wow that's quite decent, we only have 6 for both continuers/ext... down from 8 last year :p Although apparently the two cohorts below us have ~15-20 as well...

Yeah, vocab is the worst :( Better now than later though!

I think HSC latin's quite different from prelim tbh... a lot harder in my opinion. In the textbook (we used oxford), the sentence structure etc. was quite straightforward compared to Cicero (it takes a while to get used to his very, very long/tedious sentences, and skipped/'assumed' words) and Virgil (debatably easier in comparison... but it's verse :S). It's alright once you get used to it, though, just intimidating at first :p Are you still on the textbook or have you started with 'real' excerpts?

Extension's not too bad... do you know what texts you're doing next year? We're doing Horace/Juvenal. Again, quite different from prelim but honestly I don't know why people would do continuers and not extension :p Our ex-students have always maintained that extension is easier than continuers... and it is arguably. I find it's much easier to translate the core texts... I guess it's just the sudden exposure to satire that's different? Much more fun than Virgil :p

Latin requires the most work though, out of all my subjects ._. + tedious and intense.

Amazing scaling though :D
 

silentdreamer

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we're one of the bigger cohorts the school's had in recent years, i think our teacher was pretty surprised with the turnout haha

we started on virgil this term, and it's pretty confronting, since the word order is so different from prose and the sentences are so long .______. and i think we're starting cupid and psyche as a prose text to prepare for the hsc texts.

not too sure what we're doing for extension next year, but i think we're doing horace as well. how is the extension course different to continuers? i always assumed it was pretty much the same thing, but with different texts.

and haha yeah, it's not often you can say you do a subject that sometimes scales higher than 4U maths :)
 

aphorae

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Ooh, Cupid and Psyche o3o ~ never did any of that.

Haha, wait til you get to Cicero! Cicero's structure is easier to see esp. when he uses tricolons/anaphora, but so tedious to translate; one sentence can go on for three, four, five+ lines of the text... and after a while it's kind of like, wait, wtf was he saying at the beginning of this sentence again... ._.

Yeah, I checked, same texts for ext :D You'll have fun (as much as is possible in Latin...)! It's all satire so it's actually pretty funny at times. Horace = light, self-deprecating humour, Juvenal = critical + dark humour.

Extension, the focus is more on analysis and commentary. You have that in Continuers too, but the latter has heaps of grammar... which I fail in ><

Also, in Continuers, for the translation you're mostly tested on accuracy, whereas in Extension you're tested on fluency and 'flair'. So when they distinguish between the top people in the state, they're looking for understanding and fluency in your unseens and set text. In a way it's harder because you don't know exactly how much liberty to take, but in a way it's easier because you actually have that liberty :p In continuers you'd try to keep to the tenses/exact words as much as you can (to the extent where it makes sense).

Sometimes in extension it's really hard to translate the unseen because sometimes they use a lot of cultural references or symbolism which would make no sense if you took it literally, and sometimes it's a lot harder to see the structure (whereas Cicero's structure is more straightforward)... but it's luck of the draw, I guess, since the set texts for ext. are probably 90% straightforward translations :p
 

Cagney

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Would you guys recommend that I do accelerated Latin in year 10 ?
Am ranking in the 1st-2nd in the last 2 years.
Thanks
 

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