🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm going to reply do Kendra partly because the original thread is off
my server by now, and partly to associate myself with her usual good
sense.

One of my professors in my undergraduate career used to talk of Mischa
Ehlmann (I think I have the spelling right), and how he practiced a new
piece for violin.  He would go through the music laboriously, playing
each bar 1000 times.  When he got to the end, he would start over,
playing each line 1000 times.  At the end, restart, now playing each
page 1000 times.  Then again, playing the entire piece 1000 times.  By
this time, he knew the music.

So when I returned to the Classics after 5 years in the Air Force, I
found that the best way for me to study Greek or Latin was to sit down
each evening and write out a laborious "trot" putting each word on a
separate line, and then giving for each the lexical entry, part of
speech, and translation.  It took hours.  Then, before bed, I would go
back over the trot.  When I arose, I took a quick breakfast and headed
for campus where I went over the trot again in the Classics seminar
room.  Then to class, where we all went over the assigned passage. 
After class, I went over the trot again.  By this time, I had been
through the assignment 5 times, and had a pretty good grip on it.

Again, I had a Vergil course in which we met once a week, and had a
separate book assigned for each meeting.  We met on Monday afternoon, so
naturally I started Book 1 Friday night, and by late Sunday night, I was
done.  Book 12 I started at 7:00 PM on that last Saturday, and finished
it by bedtime -- no dictionary, no grammar, just Vergil.  Eleven weeks
of torture paid off in true satisfaction.

There is no substitute for hard, repetitive work.  As has been said to
you before: READ, READ, READ.  And write too.

Best of luck with this.  You will find the effort repaid over and over,
for you will find after all the work is done that you now ENJOY reading
the Classics.