OMG. Am suddenly feeling a great affinity with the Small Child who is still rote learning his times tables as I try to rote learn Latin verb conjugations, noun declensions and wrack my brains to remember what case, voice, tense, mood, gender and number various Latin words are. Having my life rapidly and even insidiously invaded by long forgotten elements of grammar, and many more elements of grammar that simply don’t have any place in English is proving far more challenging than I was anticipating.
My brain is overflowing with 1st declension, feminine, accusative, present, active, indicative nouns… or 2nd declension masculine, nominative, past tense, passive subjunctive nouns… or 3rd person plural, active pluperfect verbs! And after three weeks of this – it is entirely possible that NONE of what I just wrote makes any sense at all! I am trying to stuff tables of information into my head and hope it sticks for I have a progress exam next week… oh joy of joys.
amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant is about the only thing I can reliable regurgitate and that I have to admit is entirely due to having watched Eddie Izzard’s Unrepeatable way too many times and nothing to do with it being the simplest and first verb they try to smash into a poor little first year’s head!
PS – Eddie Izzard was right… Latin is a dead language for a reason – it’s fucked! :S