Thursday, January 12, 2006
(11:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Having Time
I find that, within certain limits, being pressed for time helps me to motivate myself to do things I might otherwise not have gotten done. If I "have all day" to do something, I will usually put it off indefinitely (either because I just don't want to do it or because I don't want to be deprived of having something to look forward to), but if I have a lot of demands on my time, I don't have that luxury.I've found that to be especially true this week with regard to beginning to study Latin -- knowing that I have a limited amount of time I can reasonably devote to it has helped me to study more intensely when I do, rather than getting up for a drink of water or checking my e-mail every ten minutes. (This might also be because I'm at the very beginning, which seems relatively easy to me because I'm already familiar with the concept of case endings and quasi-random word order from German. I have a feeling that German-Latin-Greek might be a good order to go, for those who wish to learn all three. Having French before German helps only marginally -- the most direct transferable knowledge I could find were some close analogies between the prepositions, which don't map out well with English in either language but do map out fairly well with each other.)
