Since the pandemic started, I’m brushing up on French with Duolingo, and dipping my toe into Italian, Spanish, German and Russian. I really enjoy it.
Just a pointless quibble, but Shakespeare was written in Early Modern English. Chaucer was Middle English and Beowulf was Old English.
Right, for comparison, this is Middle English:
You can recognize most of the words, and if you really strain at it, you can piece together what they mean, but you can’t just read it.
And here’s Old English (AKA Anglo-Saxon):
You probably don’t even know all of those letters, and as for the words… well, “we” at least means “we”, but I couldn’t tell you much more than that (you might be able to puzzle out more if you know one of the Low Germanic languages).
I had a lot of fun reading “Huckleberry Finn” and “A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” in fifth grade.
You probably didnt actually read A Connecticut Yankee. The book goes on and becomes very grim dark.
Yes, I did - till the end. It was a Romanian translation for a children collection.
One can easily notice that the word “Connecticut” in the title is left out:
Yes, right, The kiddie version is bowdlerized. But I cant blame them. The book starts out as a light hearted comedy and at the end turns extremely grimdark.
A few years back I went through all of Shakespeare (even King John) and this is a good suggestion. However by the third or fourth play it became much easier to read, and halfway through I was dreaming in blank verse.
I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye. I’ve never read War and Peace. I did read Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov for English in high school and am not interested in plowing through another Russian novel.
I made it through Ulysses but I don’t think I have long enough to live to do Finnegan’s Wake.
I was homeschooled from age 6 to 17. Technically attended a long-distance high school but never graduated. So I really completed no formal education from kindergarten up until college/grad school, where I got 2 degrees.
I have only seen little bits of Disney movies like Aladdin, the Lion King, etc., never the whole thing.
I have not read the vast majority of literary classics like Moby Dick, War and Peace, none of that.
somehow never learned trigonometry but did learn geometry and calculus is high school.
I was really into computers as a kid and then I hit high school. With band and Spanish taking up most of my electives, I didn’t have room for computer classes except for the required computers for dummies class which also including typing and a few other things. It sucked that my high school didn’t let you take summer school to get ahead or for enrichment, they had previously and that is how the band nerds used to squeeze in more academics.
College, pretty much the same, doing a double major in 4 years pretty much eliminated any cool electives.
I took a basic HTML class one summer that work paid for but aside from that, I am far more ignorant than the 8th grade version of me would have thought
My cars guts are a complete mystery to me. It would have been nice to have taken an auto shop class so I would know how to change my oil at least.
Gosh, I’m ignorant of so many subjects it’s hard to choose, but I think my most embarrassing gaps are in history and geography. It seemed as though every year in history class, we’d spend a couple of months talking about the Mesopotamians, and then zoom through the rest of the material, often not finishing the textbook (which only went up to about 1960 anyway). And I didn’t fill in the gaps on my own, so that’s on me.
I can change the oil…but that’s about it. I would add I also wish I knew more about how to fix things around the house.
And I don’t think I’ve traveled enough. I’d love to see Alaska and more of the New England area (I’ve been to Boston). Outside the US, I’d like to see Iceland, Switzerland, Japan…too many to list.
It was the same recommendation my father gave me because he says that all famous sayings in Spanish come from it
I’ve bought and read world history books; the problem is I forget everything. Last year I went on a World War I kick, listening to podcasts, watching documentaries, and now I couldn’t tell you much about it. I have just the vaguest recollection of what I learned.
Strangely, for a man with a BS in Computer Science and a MS in Information Technology and Management, my science education was somewhat lacking, I feel.
I mean, I took all the requisite courses to graduate from high school and college, but I somehow managed to sort of skate out of some of the harder courses. I mean, after all that, I managed to take 1 year of high school chemistry and 1 year of high school non-calculus physics. Meanwhile, I took a ton of biology, physical geology, historical geology and astronomy.
I kinda feel like the chemistry in particular is something of a gap. I mean, I’ve sort of absorbed a fair amount in the course of the other sciences I studied, but nothing comprehensive.
At least you tried!
Same here. My small rural town education did not even mention the words “economics” or “finance”, etc. We were being raised to be farmers and factory workers and cannon fodder, not business owners or managers. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I was even aware of the subjects. I feel that I missed out on some fundamental concepts that would be useful to teach to children. Consequently, I have a layman’s interest in the subjects now.
I had consumer economics in high school. It was an excellent course, covering things like why credit card interest can be devastating, giving a rough sketch of how the stock market works, how to prepare your taxes, how mortgages break down with points, amortization, etc, how to balance a checkbook, etc.
I later had a macroeconomics class in college, but the professor was terrible. He’d go off on tangents and never finish. More and more I wish we had some of that in public schools so that when candidates for office say they plan to do such and so, more of us would have an intelligent grasp of how that’s likely to impact us.
On the other hand…