Petteri,
Good to hear from you again. I'm really looking forward to having such a dedicated student involved in our course. You have a really interesting background, with all those languages that you've studied. I think that this will be a really interesting opportunity for you to build a foundation in Spanish, which will hold, to some extent, if you desire to check out other Romance languages.
My language studies have been limited to Spanish, Portuguese and Latin. I've browsed some German grammar books with lots of ambition yet little time. I hope to return to it in the future, as I still have an unwavering desire to read Husserl in German.
As you'll find with the Spanish language, the morphology is quite a bit simpler than, German say, or Latin, since there are no declensions. Notwithstanding, it is valuable (but not essential) to know the different cases of nouns, as it makes it easier to understand certain rules, in particular those which involve prepositions. If Im not mistaken, the preposition in Vulgar Latin was what eventually made the declensions of Classical obsolete.
In any case, as you familiarize yourself with out other students, you'll realize that there are few other students with the rich linguistic and methodological background that you have. I encourage you not to hesitate to ask technical questions, as these can always be explained in such a way that everyone understands. Plus, I think it's a good idea for everyone to learn a little linguistics, even if they don't think they need it in order to learn Spanish.
I'll be publishing a document about how to use our course this week, so keep your eyes open for that. And, as for the link to Perseus, maybe give it another shot. I was able to follow it from the forum and get to the page. Not sure what that is all about.
That's all for now. Thanks for your collaboration.
Saludos cordiales,
Joseph
