I’m not seeing a category for Anglo-Saxon (Old English) discussion, so let’s start one! Post about OE adventures here!
This course based off a blog, was my main learning course but it’s been brought to my attention that his (the blogger’s, not riffing on the course creator yet) word-choice and grammar is questionable at best, eg minor infractions like using “in” as a translation for “in” even though “on” was more common, to completely ignoring cases: Ic ga to se tun… is directly from the course, I believe it would be “…to þæm tune…”, and he uses “wudu” (wood, the material) to mean “holt” (wood, the place) eg. Ic libbe in tun ac ðu ne leofast in tun and he leofaþ in þæm (oh now you start using cases) wuda.
(now’s the part why I wrote yet) Also it’s not well designed as a Memrise course. Some OE verbs as you may know have two possible conjugations in the þu and he/heo/hit forms, eg habban can be either ðu hæfst, he/heo/hit hæfð or þu hafast, he/heo/hit hafaþ. They’re both presented with the same string of text in English on Memrise quizzes: eg þu hæfst and ðu hafast are both presented as “you have/hold (sg)” and you’ve gotta guess. This means that these two are guaranteed on the “hard words” list even though it’s not hard to remember. Also there are several pairs of verbs like fon/gefon which both basically mean the same thing; the two are separate “words” and the English string doesn’t say “to catch”/“to catch (ge-)” or anything to distinguish fon/gefon, nope! They’re both “to catch”.
Overall course is a 5/10, it’s only saved from being a 3/10 because the vocabulary section seems accurate (minus wudu and his treating of collective nouns as singular [Dene doesn’t mean “Dane” it means “the Danes”, for example]) and the examples from Ælfric’s Colloquy are of course helpful to see some proper OE text right from the get-go (just next time don’t write OE unless you’re certain you’re doing cases right, and don’t do a memrise course until you’re certain that there will be no confusing doublets.)
inb4 “wow ur such a nerd”. We’re on memrise discussing old English. We’re all nerds.
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Ya I’ve seen that a lot of the OE courses are sub par in actually helping to learn the language (though this vocabulary course is pretty good (though it doesnt tell you what class/declension the verbs/nouns belong to)). So ive started my own course in hopes of obtaining a more complete and working fundamental knowledge of the language. Ive based it off of Smith’s Old English Grammar, which of the dozen or so grammar books I’ve gone through, I found to be the most helpful for an elementary knowledge of OE. You can find my work-in-progress sundaily-updated course here. If anyone creates/finds a course that is good, let me know!!!
Here are some discords that are about Old English. The first one is a old/endangered languages hub that has a section for Old English, and the second is my own OE server.
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