My greatest weakness is that I don't like the solitary memorization of the forms. My greatest strength is that I keep plodding away. I think of this as my substitute for building model ships in bottles, whittling, and the other pastimes that geezers adopt. But nobody knows how long he'll be in the world, so I don't worry about that. I'm retired, with security, so I have plenty of time, as measured in hours and days, though of course as measured in years the time horizon seems closer. Since I started on Latin in 2009, and more recently Greek, I've not read a line of either literature in company with another person. But I've always had an amateur interest in the classics. So, I took up Latin, and then Greek, in old age, the initial motive being to have intellectual work to block worries about the health issues that come with old age, the thoughts about losing old friends and relations to death, and so on. Hello Chad, I had two years of Latin in high school (graduated 1956), and forgot everything, except first declension nouns (rosa, rosae) and the present active indicative of amo. After I did much more reading, including repeated readings of 'Un coeur simple', I can now 'just pick it up and read' it now, about thirty years later.

It was like hitting a wall, even though I'd had about three years of formal instruction. I can recall many years ago in French lit class encountering a Flaubert story. I was afraid that a repeated pass might be dispiriting, but it's not there is much satisfaction in solving problems that I don't recall solving during the first pass. I am now wondering if a third reading, or even more, of the Apology would be productive. I wonder if other autodidacts can report repeated readings of a particular text. Perhaps I was too quickly satisfied that I understood the sentence and its grammar. On the first pass, I thought I was studying carefully, but maybe I was self-deceived. This was prompted by learning from a trial that, after the first pass, I could not 'just pick up and read' a random page of the text. The second pass through this text is going well.

Plato's apology of socrates audio