I've been wondering lately how people in ancient times managed to learn languages. Cleopatra is said to have spoken Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a whole lot of other languages. That's pretty amazing, considering she couldn't rely on YouTube, language-learning apps, or Anki decks like we do today.

By the way, back then, English didn't even exist. Greek was the lingua franca of much of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Latin was the second most important language. What has really, really piqued my curiosity is how a Roman or a Greek who really wanted to learn one of those languages actually did it. Everyone knows the ancients were very smart, so I did a little research.

Imagine you're a Greek named Spiros, for example, and you want to learn Latin because it's all the rage. You can afford a teacher (who's probably not even a native speaker), you have access to a massive papyrus dictionary that takes up an entire room, something to write with (as long as you dip it in an inkwell first), and your motivation. That's all, but there are still a few more surprises.

On day one, your teacher hands you a piece of text written on a stiff sheet of papyrus. It's a dialogue (you just don't know it yet), written in scriptio continua (see the picture below), and you freak out.

"Hey, what's this? There are no spaces between the words!" you say.

"That's Latin, little dimwit," your teacher replies.

"Really? How am I supposed to read this if I don't know where one word ends and the next one begins?"

"It's done this way to save space. Do you think papyrus grows on trees?"

So, you spend so many hours going back and forth between your desk and the dictionary that you end up exhausted on the very first day. But you're an ancient Greek, and you won't let that hold you back. You'll keep going over and over again until your Latin is good enough to decipher the dialogue, and then you'll do the same thing with the next one. A sort of "ancient spaced repetition". No Netflix between study sessions, no YouTube, no TikTok. Just you and your hard work.

In the end, the tools have changed. The hard work hasn't. No one's going to stop me. What about you?

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