Comment by leoc
4 days ago
If you want to improve your score, the blog author (Dr. Colin Gorrie) has just the thing: a book which will teach you Old English by means of a story about a talking bear. Here's how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZhlWdVvZfw . Your dream of learning Old English has never been closer: get Ōsweald Bera https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/ today.
co-sign this. Oswald the Bear is an amazing book and taught me how to read Old English remarkably quickly.
The first chapter is like a book for toddlers in Old English (with questions and loads of repeated vocab), and each chapter gets a bit harder. Half way in its like a Young Adults Novel level of difficulty. But each step up is relatively small.
The actual story is great too. Æthelstān Mūs is my spirit animal.
Man, I really needed this when I was studying OE. I was trying to do the Alice in Wonderland book and an Oxford textbook but it was really a lot of work compared to other language learning (even compared to Latin). This would have made it a lot more fun.
The link above mentions Ørberg who did something similar for Latin (Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, ebook and audiobook), which I've read through with good success. It's known as the immersive Ørberg method after him.
Yes. I could get over the 1300 hump and at least make general sense of everything past there because I have read about half of Ōsweald Bera
Shame that it only seems to be available in physical form and only from the US. The price is already quite high and with postage to the UK it adds up to be quite expensive.
My friend from the UK bought it and it got sent from somewhere locakly. I am in NZ and mine was sent from AU. So I think you should be covered.
The "locakly" typo is perfectly placed in the comment thread of this article!
The Ørberg method is great, I wish more languages had media utilizing it.
There are actually several similar books for modern European languages, available as PDFs (in the public domain and/or out of print): https://blog.nina.coffee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books....
Ørberg may be the best, though.