Time transcripts of FrankStory

[00:00:00:00]	Interviewer: Okay, so go ahead and tell us about yourself.

[00:00:03:26]	Frank: My name is Frank. I'm a fourth-year Classics major here

[00:00:08:06]	at The Ohio State University, [ clears throat ],

[00:00:11:02]	and I was born in 1990.

[00:00:14:21]	I: Okay, go ahead and tell us about your experience with the classics.

[00:00:21:03]	F: So I came into Ohio State as a Mathematics major 

[00:00:25:12]	and I was just taking Latin

[00:00:27:12]	as my foreign language. 

[00:00:31:21]	I'd...I had always been interested in ancient languages and cultures and such,

[00:00:39:14]	partially that is probably due to the video game series

[00:00:42:29]	"Age of Empires," and partially I'm not really sure where it came from.

[00:00:48:09]	But it's kind of always been there.

[00:00:51:15]	So yeah.

[00:00:52:23]	After a couple of quarters of, let's say,

[00:00:57:10]	 "less than stellar" performance in math,

[00:01:00:16]	I decided that I really just liked Latin better.

[00:01:04:24]	So I changed my major and started doing that. 

[00:01:09:03]	Umm...

[00:01:12:17]	I...I had finished, like, through...

[00:01:15:29]	So the introductory series, there were four courses in it 

[00:01:18:14]	and I had finished the first three by the time I changed.

[00:01:21:21]	So I guess my first REAL experience of Latin

[00:01:28:01]	outside of a textbook, uh... 

[00:01:31:07]	Not outside of a textbook, but outside of a "Teaching You Latin" textbook

[00:01:37:14]	was Virgil's "Aeneid." 

[00:01:40:16]	Like, that was the first Latin in the wild that I came across.

[00:01:44:24]	And I loved it.

[00:01:50:14]	It was very difficult.

[00:01:54:10]	I think... 

[00:01:59:07]	In any language, but especially in those you don't get to speak,

[00:02:03:07]	vocabulary is always going to be an issue, 

[00:02:07:16]	and especially at the beginning when you're first coming across, like...

[00:02:10:23]	Because Virgil's like the Shakespeare of Latin, 

[00:02:13:14]	like you're not reading, like... children's stories. 

[00:02:17:27]	You have to start at, like, the top

[00:02:20:14]	because that's pretty much all that's left, and it's left BECAUSE it was the top.

[00:02:25:07]	So people decided it was worth keeping.

[00:02:28:12]	So...it was definitely kind of a shock, 

[00:02:32:03]	like, how bad I was at it. 

[00:02:36:02]	I still don't think I'm GOOD at it, but I'm much better now.

[00:02:41:27]	So yes, that was...that was Latin. Just kind of a...

[00:02:45:26]	I didn't know what to expect, and I was very...

[00:02:52:02]	taken aback at what it was actually like. 

[00:02:57:25]	It's kind of sterile, let's say, Latin, as compared to Greek.

[00:03:04:14]	So Greek, [ chuckle ] I started in the beginning of my third year. 

[00:03:09:28]	In the introductory sequence, there were only three courses,

[00:03:13:09]	so I took all of those in a year, 

[00:03:15:08]	and the first Greek that I met in the wild was Plato's "Apology," and...

[00:03:26:09]	if Latin is difficult due to its sterility and

[00:03:30:22]	 [ clears throat ] 

[00:03:32:14]	the fact that it almost seems like it's...

[00:03:35:16]	I don't know about fake, or...

[00:03:37:17]	it seems like it's really constructed and...

[00:03:40:21]	uh...I don't know...

[00:03:47:03]	Constructed [ chuckling ], I guess, that's the only word I can think of.

[00:03:51:13]	Greek seems much more like a real [ chuckling ] language, I guess.

[00:04:01:22]	It's...

[00:04:04:08]	It was a little more difficult than Latin even, coming across it at first,

[00:04:08:04]	maybe only because I only had three quarters of introductory stuff instead of four, 

[00:04:12:07]	or maybe because it's harder, 

[00:04:15:07]	which [ chuckling ] I think the latter is probably the case.

[00:04:21:02]	But I like it better.