Sanskrit
Jeong and Patrick have some thoughts in response to my thought experiment about the revelatory Superbeing. I have a draft follow-up, but no time to put it up until this evening. I do think that there are a lot of questions bound together here, and Jeong hits upon one of them: how we understand personal continuity in humans.
In other news, Sanskrit looks like it will be an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience. From my limited perspective, the language seems to be a cross-breeding of Hebrew (vowels are represented with small markings when they follow consonants) and Greek (the declined grammar is supposedly similar). I’ve pulled out my Vis-Ed flashcards and will be using a whiteboard again, like I did with both of those languages. I use blank cards because 1) Vis-Ed doesn’t make Sanskrit and 2) I learn by writing just as much as by “flashing.”
The key (for me) was to spend any free moment flipping through flash cards, both ways. Just recognizing words wasn’t enough, I needed to be able to go from the English to the Greek/Hebrew. And being able to both “sing” and write the paradigms quickly was helped by a small dry-erase board which I could write, erase, write and erase, etc. It was more fun than doing the same with paper and pencil.
Anyone else have language-learning tips to share?