I figure I'll start making logs documenting my progress in Latin and other goals, solely so I can go back to them someday and say "oh yeah, that's what my progress was like!"
So, latin log #1 -- I have been at it for around two weeks. I know about 80 words -- I have 97 flashcards, but 17 of them I just added today. I keep getting it confused with Esperanto. Take the English phrase, "I am tired". In Latin, it's "Ego fessa sum." In Esperanto, "mi estas laca". I'm doing latin on Duolingo and suddenly I start typing "mi estas fessa". Huh?
I made a couple of purchases related to my learning of Latin. I don't want to use solely the internet, because I feel that if I rely just on websites and free PDFs it will be much more difficult. I prefer to have actual textbooks. So, I bought a USB on etsy where someone's selling 150 public domain textbooks, and a textbook called Wheelock's Latin. I'm most excited for the USB, but it is shipping from England and won't be here until the end of June or early July. (No tracking, either.) Wheelock's Latin was partially a purchase I made just because I don't want to go so long without a textbook.
I figure the 150 books on USB aren't going to be bad, because even if they were all written before 1928, the subject (Latin) hasn't changed for 1200 years. Maybe the English will be a bit dated if the books were written in the 1800s... but surely if there's $150 *at least one* will be useful. For $17, it's cheaper than a singular modern textbook is.
I don't yet have the grammar down. I know that it's often subject-object-verb. I know that to assign properties to a noun one uses "est" for one, "sunt" for multiple, and "sum" for oneself. "Non" comes before what it negates, not after. I don't quite get "es". If a sentence uses words that I know I can piece together what it means, but I don't know the cases of each noun. If you pointed to a noun and told me to give an ablative or genetive or whatever case, I would not be able to do it. So that's the next step for me, is memorizing all the cases of the nouns and getting a feel for the patterns.
Someone on Reddit wrote that they took all their notes in Latin. I thought that sounded like a really neat idea. Once i get the grammar down, I want to try my hand at taking all my school notes in Latin, writing outlines, I think that would simultaneously be very cool and also a way to get proficient at the language, as I would have to continually expand my vocabulary to encompass concepts that I am trying to write in my notes. Maybe if I get ambitious I can try translating my blog posts into Latin.
Really, I can't wait to read Ovid in Latin.
Apparently Minecraft also lets you change the language of the game (name of every item, all in-game text, subtitles, etcetera) to Latin. I might play a little Minecraft just for immersive learning.
All this talk about languages makes me want to revisit Yskarr, my extremely unfinished conlang. I need to finish the grammar and work on the lexicon. But, whenever I sit down to do it, I just get paralyzed. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I feel like it's such a huge project to make a conlang, and I'm not smart enough, and I don't know enough about grammar, and real conlangers are going to judge me, and blah blah blah. I need to just sit down for like six hours and hash out the grammar and lexicon. I just need to force myself to do it. But... the pressure!! Gaaaah!