Reply #23: Success is limited

[Squeegee]

Because I am a native English speaker, and also had already 6 years of German and a year of Danish language language classes prior, I was able to learn the basic vocabulary and grammar relatively quickly, maybe in about 3 months of studying on my own. Right now, I can probably read it at about an 5th grade level (assuming that a 5th grade actually existed in sixth century England).

Unfortunately, it is an ancient dead language that bears has very little similarity to modern English. There are practically no modern speakers to interact with making it nearly impossible to learn at a conversational level. Also, there is very little reading material for the beginner. Actually, there is very little reading material at all, only a couple hundred ancient texts, many of them incomplete, and written in prose or in a colloquial dialect, requiring a relatively advanced level of understanding to begin with, so there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem.

I don't really know why I started studying it. I guess after all those years of learning German and Danish, I wanted to understand more about where the language I speak came from.