Wow, this article really came at an interesting moment in my life; I just started learning a dead language myself.
Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic) was a language used in the Axumite Kingdom in the Horn of Africa. Even though it "died" a 1000 years ago or so, it lived on in the writings of the literate. Now it mostly survives as the liturgy language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is somewhat like Latin in that regard.
Your point about the need for a beginner-friendly reader is sorely felt. Smashing one's head against a grammar, a dictionary, and a text with little to show for it does get dull after a while. I sometimes wonder if, whenever I get good enough at it, I should work on a reader that incorporates modern pedagogy into the language.
I am lucky enough to speak a closely related language, though, so it is not all bad. I am sure it was much more difficult for the Europeans who tried to study it. I am encouraged by (and grateful for) the fact that not only did they succeed, they also wrote a bunch of very helpful grammars and dictionaries.
Glad to know that I've mastered the second hardest language on your list.
Hebrew is my best foreign language so I'm not the best judge. I'm close to conversationally fluent and can read everything from the Bible to modern novels (although Isaiah, Job and the works of Amos Oz require that I keep dictionary close at hand). A few things:
1) Modern Hebrew vs Ancient Hebrew: As a practical matter, a speaker of modern Hebrew can read the majority of the bible. To compare to English, some of it's like reading an 18th century novel, some like Shakespeare, some like Chaucer. Nothing's like Beowulf.
2) When you learn modern Hebrew in Israel, you learn without vowels. Which means you learn the patterns. I've met lots of folks learning Biblical Hebrew who rely on the vowels and never get the patterns
3) Unlike any language on your list, Hebrew offers full immersion opportunities that no Latin conventiculum can match.
3) for me, the challenges of Hebrew and Latin are exactly opposite.
After learning Hebrew, Latin vocabulary feels like a gimme. Hebrew to English cognates? You'll have to wait for the next Jubillee. (Mammon, meaning property as in "my stuff" is found in rabbinic hebrew, originally from Aramaic). Indeed, when I tried some ancient greek, I was like "wow, look at all these cognates"
Hebrew syntax is way, way simpler. Probably why the vulgate is a good intermediate text as Jerome mimics the the simpler sentence structure.
If I ever get to Greek, I may take a month in Greece just to get a feel for the language, noting that my first interests are more Koine (septuagint) than classical.
This reminds me of the time I saw an acquaintance wearing a t-shirt she'd bought in Athens and asked what some of the words said. She said "I don't know, I only know Ancient Greek!" Luckily she found a driver who also did.
Interesting. I guess the situation with Hebrew is unique in that the language did not evolve for two millennia until it was revived as a spoken language in the 19th Century, so it would make sense reading classical texts would be like an English speaker reading something from the 16-18th Centuries.
I wonder if a modern Greek speaker could easily read ancient Greek, and if not, how much or how little training they would need.
I argued with a Greek ethnocentrist crank on Usenet for a while who basically claimed that Ancient Greek is Modern Greek--it has been unchanged all this time because it is a perfect language. (He also argued that the US is a bunch of Greek-hating Turk lovers because Washington has never gifted Athens with a few thousand neutron bombs to retake Anatolia and the Balkans. Oddly, he was also a member of the Greek Communist Party. He was a spherical crank--equally crankish in all directions.) When he tried translating some classical Greek to beat us linguists all into submission with his brilliance, he made a total hash of it, so no, they're not that close. His efforts demonstrated that the grammar is quite different, and the nominal and verbal systems have changed enormously.
Please don't take my century estimates that literally.
There are multiple phases of Biblical Hebrew (for example, the books of Esther and Chronicles are distinctly late) and then of course it evolves into Rabbinic Hebrew during the second temple period--also noting that at one time folks thought that Aramaic had taken over as the common language, there's now for evidence of the continued use of Hebrew. This use, even in a limited way, continued even into the first few centuries of the common era. For example, we have letters about supplies in Hebrew from the Bar Kochba revolt.
And then, as with medieval latin, some changes continued.
It's my understanding that a year of Ancient Greek is a standard part of the high school curriculum in Greece.
There's a lot of vocabulary in modern Greek that's not directly descended from ancient Greek. Though one of the main sources of borrowings is Venetian, which had plenty of borrowings from Greek by way of Latin.
Great article--thank you! I have started learning the Pawnee (Native American) language. There are no more L1 speakers of Pawnee, no more fluent speakers, and maybe 2-3 barely conversational speakers. Some classify it as a recently dead language. That said, our tribal linguists are doing their best to revive this beautiful language and I am a part of that. One of the challenges of learning Pawnee is that there are no old texts. The Pawnee people had no need of written language, their historians, priests and doctors were trained from childhood to remember. When these people were killed, however, we lost our library of knowledge. We have various recordings and notes of several missionaries/historians/sociologists, and the work of Dr. Douglas Parks who spent several decades documenting the Caddoan languages of the Great Plains peoples. Dr. Parks created a modern writing system for Pawnee (other white folks before him had their own ways of writing Pawnee), then put together a massive Pawnee dictionary. That dictionary and Dr. Parks' notes are our main resources along with his recordings of native speakers. Pawnee is a polysynthetic language--so very, very different from the languages I speak or am learning. One word holds many morphemes--the subject, verb, object, tense, and whether it is a positive or negative statement or a question and what kind of question. It is quite the linguistic adventure! I so enjoy reading your posts, and am always just a tad envious of the texts that are available in those ancient languages.
What are the odds of finding an article about dead languages, the day you decide Sanskrit in 2026. I think I have got the script sorted (native to India/learnt the nagari script) and well you classified it as easy, so onwards on the trail!! :)
I wonder if it’s easier to get proficiency in a language that is not spoken any more (or never) as there’s no pressure to build conversational skills. Eg I am starting to get proficient in reading Russian texts but I’m hopeless in real time comprehension or speaking. I think Ancient Greek or Biblical Hebrew might be appealing to me.
I had the same thought. Learning a dead language seems in fact easier than a living one. You don’t have to worry about developing listening skills, and you don’t have to worry about pronunciation.
Surprised Middle Egyptian and Babylonian aren''t on here! Loads of great resources for these and if you can learn devanagaris script, Egyptian hieroglyphs should be a doddle! Cuneiform...not so much.
Shameless plug: my partner got bitten by the Old English bug a few years ago, was frustrated by the resources available, and made this app for fun (free, no ads)
I haven't studied Old Chinese or Hebrew but I have some familiarity with all the other languages listed and would've ranked them more or less the same except perhaps placing Sanskrit in the S category. I've only gone over intensively over grammar-translation type books of Old Norse and Old English years ago and have forgotten most of what I had learnt but Old Norse did strike me as harder. I'll tackle Old English more seriously this year and Old Norse after that. Let's see how that goes.
Between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Greek felt much harder to me than the other two. Greek's use of article means that it's much easier to distinguish between the cases but the verbs and participles are all over the place and headache-inducing. You do get a feel for the language after reading more and more but its much more difficult. I read somewhere that Latin is harder to get into but easier to master and Greek easier to get into but harder to master which strikes pretty true to me. And that is speaking of only Attic prose. Poetry is a whole separate beast. Latin prose authors ( especially the golden age authors ) are more purple-y but definitely easier.
As for Sanskrit, its difficutly is extremely overestimated. Maybe because students either try to learn ṛgveda or kāvya where the authors deliberately try to be as obscure as possible to remind the reader how stupid he is for not understanding it that they find it extremely difficult but much of Sanskrit literature is written in a very easy style when compared to Latin or Greek. The style of the great epics is simple, even pedestrian at times. There's a dual in common use but the verbal system of the classical language is easier than that of Greek. Sandhi, too, is not that difficult once you get a hang of it and is nothing if not consistent.
Old Chinese is on the level of Middle English for a Chinese speaker or, I think, Koine for a modern Greek speaker. It's not *that* different, and the main problem is when words are taken in their modern sense.
I don't know anything about the Indian based languages so I haven't done Sanskrit yet except for the Chinese cultural commonplaces like individual Sanskrit words in the Heart Sutra, Amitabha Sutra etc. I learned Spanish before Latin.
I am not sure if this is relevant or if you have any experience, but (also for others)...Any thoughts on old Celtic languages such as Middle Welsh and Old Irish?
1) Having taught Latin for many years (with LLPSI:FR) and studied ancient Greek, I would say Greek is Latin's evil twin.
2) I'm halfway through Osweald Bera. If you ever do a revised edition, please consider adding margin notes as in LLPSI, charts in the back, and a Grammatica for the chapters. And indicate not just the chapter but also the line number for the words in the glossary at the end. These features are what make LLFR the best of its kind, and they would definitely help in OB. I'd like to know what's going on in the words and sentences, rather than just guessing, even though I'm guessing right, if my understanding of the story is any indication.
Really interesting and valuable article thank you! I agree that OB is delightful, I have read it to revise OE. Maybe I look at too many ‘dead’ languages to keep them all current.
It may depend on what you order you learn, I studied classical Greek quite carefully 30 years ago on my own, with the Reading Greek series (which do have graded, annotated readings) after a couple of years of Latin at school; subsequently Sanskrit was not difficult because of the similarity in grammar and its adherence to its own rules. Also mention Antonia Ruppel’s ‘Introductory Sanskrit Reader’ as being very judiciously annotated, and Bhagavad Gita in an edition originally by Winthrop Sergeant with every word parsed, I learned a lot from that. Old Norse I learned from the Jessie Byock ‘Viking Language’ volumes and really enjoyed his pedagogic approach. I agree with another poster who found OE among the more difficult languages I have learned. Old Occitan I have also found a long but rewarding process- I had thought that knowing French, Spanish and Portuguese to moderate or good level I could triangulate among them for Occitan- this was partly correct but Old Occitan has a large number of very short particles and verb forms that are similar or identical to 4 or 5 other meanings, so it’s not so straightforward. Reading some Old French helped quite a lot with this.
Now I am back to Latin again- Lucretius and Boethius helpfully avoid most of the decadent Roman history and narcissistic deities that I didn’t like years ago!
Your article makes Classical Chinese sound like a great challenge, although I did resolve not to learn any more…..
I wrestled for years with Classical Tibetan, which is not technically dead in the sense that (mostly religious) texts are still being written in it, but is far pretty removed from the modern spoken varieties. I'd put it in the C tier: hard but not insane. The alphabet is OK, pretty closely related to Nagari, with some complicated but regular pronunciation rules. Grammar is quite minimal, so there are not too many rules, but each grammatical "particle" has lots of contextual uses, making it quite ambiguous. You're also allowed to omit most grammar when it can be guessed from context (!). Word order is SOV, with lots of left-embedded clauses, so ideas flow in the opposite order that they would in English. And of course vocab is 100% foreign, largely made of monosyllables, about half of which are pronounced something like "che" despite their varying spellings.
My experience is different from yours. I struggle enormously with Old English - yes, still, even after making it through Osweald Beara, thank you very much, by the way. On the other hand, I really fell in love with Old Norse, using Byock's Vol I and II. Primarily, I believe, the reason why I cheerfully read Osweald Beara and love the Icelandic sagas, is A) for the fact that you mentioned, these deal with engaging stories. And I have zero interest in sermons and saints. Point B) may be an extension of point A. The "authorial voice" of the sagas is conversational. On the other hand, I feel like much of the authentic OE material was written to show off the level of education of the speaker/writer. The uh, pompous authorial voice, like some of the grad school required reading in theoretical linguistics that uses 6 pages to tell you what a single paragraph could/should. (Not that I've never in my life written anything pompous....) Either that, or I've just got a mental block. I'm an experienced second+ language learner. My easiest (not quite dead language) to learn was Classical Nahuatl. Old English is by far my most challenging foreign language to attempt, living or dead.
For Sanskrit, I'd like to recommend Antonia Ruppel's Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, which I used. Apart from being a really good and well-paced explanation of the language, there are Youtube videos and other on-line resources for each chapter. In addition, there are on-line learning groups, at a reasonable tuition cost, that go over the material on Zoom.
For Greek the great advantage for anyone who is Christian and has read the bible enough is the fact that the new testament Greek bible is the basis for the bible you know and love.
It doesn't always help, but the Gospels and Acts are excellent for this because you know what they say. Possibly even can quote the English translation. Now working back from that to classical Attic and then Homer etc. is not absolutely straightforward, but it is a lot simpler. An excellent thing to do if you attend a church that has a gospel reading every Sunday is to read it in Greek shortly after you heard the reading in English. I used to do it during the sermon, which somewhat irritated my father (who was generally the one preaching) but since he arranged my getting the Greek bible and suggested this course of action he found it hard to complain too much.
Perhaps as the author of a graded reader you could write a post (if you haven’t already?) on How To Write a Graded Reader. You might encourage someone to write the Familia Romana of their dead language.
Wow, this article really came at an interesting moment in my life; I just started learning a dead language myself.
Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic) was a language used in the Axumite Kingdom in the Horn of Africa. Even though it "died" a 1000 years ago or so, it lived on in the writings of the literate. Now it mostly survives as the liturgy language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is somewhat like Latin in that regard.
Your point about the need for a beginner-friendly reader is sorely felt. Smashing one's head against a grammar, a dictionary, and a text with little to show for it does get dull after a while. I sometimes wonder if, whenever I get good enough at it, I should work on a reader that incorporates modern pedagogy into the language.
I am lucky enough to speak a closely related language, though, so it is not all bad. I am sure it was much more difficult for the Europeans who tried to study it. I am encouraged by (and grateful for) the fact that not only did they succeed, they also wrote a bunch of very helpful grammars and dictionaries.
Glad to know that I've mastered the second hardest language on your list.
Hebrew is my best foreign language so I'm not the best judge. I'm close to conversationally fluent and can read everything from the Bible to modern novels (although Isaiah, Job and the works of Amos Oz require that I keep dictionary close at hand). A few things:
1) Modern Hebrew vs Ancient Hebrew: As a practical matter, a speaker of modern Hebrew can read the majority of the bible. To compare to English, some of it's like reading an 18th century novel, some like Shakespeare, some like Chaucer. Nothing's like Beowulf.
2) When you learn modern Hebrew in Israel, you learn without vowels. Which means you learn the patterns. I've met lots of folks learning Biblical Hebrew who rely on the vowels and never get the patterns
3) Unlike any language on your list, Hebrew offers full immersion opportunities that no Latin conventiculum can match.
3) for me, the challenges of Hebrew and Latin are exactly opposite.
After learning Hebrew, Latin vocabulary feels like a gimme. Hebrew to English cognates? You'll have to wait for the next Jubillee. (Mammon, meaning property as in "my stuff" is found in rabbinic hebrew, originally from Aramaic). Indeed, when I tried some ancient greek, I was like "wow, look at all these cognates"
Hebrew syntax is way, way simpler. Probably why the vulgate is a good intermediate text as Jerome mimics the the simpler sentence structure.
If I ever get to Greek, I may take a month in Greece just to get a feel for the language, noting that my first interests are more Koine (septuagint) than classical.
This reminds me of the time I saw an acquaintance wearing a t-shirt she'd bought in Athens and asked what some of the words said. She said "I don't know, I only know Ancient Greek!" Luckily she found a driver who also did.
Interesting. I guess the situation with Hebrew is unique in that the language did not evolve for two millennia until it was revived as a spoken language in the 19th Century, so it would make sense reading classical texts would be like an English speaker reading something from the 16-18th Centuries.
I wonder if a modern Greek speaker could easily read ancient Greek, and if not, how much or how little training they would need.
I argued with a Greek ethnocentrist crank on Usenet for a while who basically claimed that Ancient Greek is Modern Greek--it has been unchanged all this time because it is a perfect language. (He also argued that the US is a bunch of Greek-hating Turk lovers because Washington has never gifted Athens with a few thousand neutron bombs to retake Anatolia and the Balkans. Oddly, he was also a member of the Greek Communist Party. He was a spherical crank--equally crankish in all directions.) When he tried translating some classical Greek to beat us linguists all into submission with his brilliance, he made a total hash of it, so no, they're not that close. His efforts demonstrated that the grammar is quite different, and the nominal and verbal systems have changed enormously.
Please don't take my century estimates that literally.
There are multiple phases of Biblical Hebrew (for example, the books of Esther and Chronicles are distinctly late) and then of course it evolves into Rabbinic Hebrew during the second temple period--also noting that at one time folks thought that Aramaic had taken over as the common language, there's now for evidence of the continued use of Hebrew. This use, even in a limited way, continued even into the first few centuries of the common era. For example, we have letters about supplies in Hebrew from the Bar Kochba revolt.
And then, as with medieval latin, some changes continued.
It's my understanding that a year of Ancient Greek is a standard part of the high school curriculum in Greece.
There's a lot of vocabulary in modern Greek that's not directly descended from ancient Greek. Though one of the main sources of borrowings is Venetian, which had plenty of borrowings from Greek by way of Latin.
I always wondered this. Thanks for confirming
Great article--thank you! I have started learning the Pawnee (Native American) language. There are no more L1 speakers of Pawnee, no more fluent speakers, and maybe 2-3 barely conversational speakers. Some classify it as a recently dead language. That said, our tribal linguists are doing their best to revive this beautiful language and I am a part of that. One of the challenges of learning Pawnee is that there are no old texts. The Pawnee people had no need of written language, their historians, priests and doctors were trained from childhood to remember. When these people were killed, however, we lost our library of knowledge. We have various recordings and notes of several missionaries/historians/sociologists, and the work of Dr. Douglas Parks who spent several decades documenting the Caddoan languages of the Great Plains peoples. Dr. Parks created a modern writing system for Pawnee (other white folks before him had their own ways of writing Pawnee), then put together a massive Pawnee dictionary. That dictionary and Dr. Parks' notes are our main resources along with his recordings of native speakers. Pawnee is a polysynthetic language--so very, very different from the languages I speak or am learning. One word holds many morphemes--the subject, verb, object, tense, and whether it is a positive or negative statement or a question and what kind of question. It is quite the linguistic adventure! I so enjoy reading your posts, and am always just a tad envious of the texts that are available in those ancient languages.
What are the odds of finding an article about dead languages, the day you decide Sanskrit in 2026. I think I have got the script sorted (native to India/learnt the nagari script) and well you classified it as easy, so onwards on the trail!! :)
I wonder if it’s easier to get proficiency in a language that is not spoken any more (or never) as there’s no pressure to build conversational skills. Eg I am starting to get proficient in reading Russian texts but I’m hopeless in real time comprehension or speaking. I think Ancient Greek or Biblical Hebrew might be appealing to me.
I had the same thought. Learning a dead language seems in fact easier than a living one. You don’t have to worry about developing listening skills, and you don’t have to worry about pronunciation.
Surprised Middle Egyptian and Babylonian aren''t on here! Loads of great resources for these and if you can learn devanagaris script, Egyptian hieroglyphs should be a doddle! Cuneiform...not so much.
+1 for Middle Egyptian! The bar for success is fairly low and drawing birds is fun! The grammar though… it’s *there* but I wish there was more of it.
Shameless plug: my partner got bitten by the Old English bug a few years ago, was frustrated by the resources available, and made this app for fun (free, no ads)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mdln.englisc
Great article !
I haven't studied Old Chinese or Hebrew but I have some familiarity with all the other languages listed and would've ranked them more or less the same except perhaps placing Sanskrit in the S category. I've only gone over intensively over grammar-translation type books of Old Norse and Old English years ago and have forgotten most of what I had learnt but Old Norse did strike me as harder. I'll tackle Old English more seriously this year and Old Norse after that. Let's see how that goes.
Between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Greek felt much harder to me than the other two. Greek's use of article means that it's much easier to distinguish between the cases but the verbs and participles are all over the place and headache-inducing. You do get a feel for the language after reading more and more but its much more difficult. I read somewhere that Latin is harder to get into but easier to master and Greek easier to get into but harder to master which strikes pretty true to me. And that is speaking of only Attic prose. Poetry is a whole separate beast. Latin prose authors ( especially the golden age authors ) are more purple-y but definitely easier.
As for Sanskrit, its difficutly is extremely overestimated. Maybe because students either try to learn ṛgveda or kāvya where the authors deliberately try to be as obscure as possible to remind the reader how stupid he is for not understanding it that they find it extremely difficult but much of Sanskrit literature is written in a very easy style when compared to Latin or Greek. The style of the great epics is simple, even pedestrian at times. There's a dual in common use but the verbal system of the classical language is easier than that of Greek. Sandhi, too, is not that difficult once you get a hang of it and is nothing if not consistent.
Old Chinese is on the level of Middle English for a Chinese speaker or, I think, Koine for a modern Greek speaker. It's not *that* different, and the main problem is when words are taken in their modern sense.
I don't know anything about the Indian based languages so I haven't done Sanskrit yet except for the Chinese cultural commonplaces like individual Sanskrit words in the Heart Sutra, Amitabha Sutra etc. I learned Spanish before Latin.
Speaking of taking words in their modern sense: https://x.com/i/status/1944497582291763213
Thank you so much for this!
I am not sure if this is relevant or if you have any experience, but (also for others)...Any thoughts on old Celtic languages such as Middle Welsh and Old Irish?
And Classical Arabic or Syriac?
My family and I speak Modern Irish and I find Old Irish far harder than Sanskrit.
1) Having taught Latin for many years (with LLPSI:FR) and studied ancient Greek, I would say Greek is Latin's evil twin.
2) I'm halfway through Osweald Bera. If you ever do a revised edition, please consider adding margin notes as in LLPSI, charts in the back, and a Grammatica for the chapters. And indicate not just the chapter but also the line number for the words in the glossary at the end. These features are what make LLFR the best of its kind, and they would definitely help in OB. I'd like to know what's going on in the words and sentences, rather than just guessing, even though I'm guessing right, if my understanding of the story is any indication.
I'm also an Osweald Bera reader, and I like the format. It really makes me engage with the text, and for me this is a more efficient way to learn.
Really interesting and valuable article thank you! I agree that OB is delightful, I have read it to revise OE. Maybe I look at too many ‘dead’ languages to keep them all current.
It may depend on what you order you learn, I studied classical Greek quite carefully 30 years ago on my own, with the Reading Greek series (which do have graded, annotated readings) after a couple of years of Latin at school; subsequently Sanskrit was not difficult because of the similarity in grammar and its adherence to its own rules. Also mention Antonia Ruppel’s ‘Introductory Sanskrit Reader’ as being very judiciously annotated, and Bhagavad Gita in an edition originally by Winthrop Sergeant with every word parsed, I learned a lot from that. Old Norse I learned from the Jessie Byock ‘Viking Language’ volumes and really enjoyed his pedagogic approach. I agree with another poster who found OE among the more difficult languages I have learned. Old Occitan I have also found a long but rewarding process- I had thought that knowing French, Spanish and Portuguese to moderate or good level I could triangulate among them for Occitan- this was partly correct but Old Occitan has a large number of very short particles and verb forms that are similar or identical to 4 or 5 other meanings, so it’s not so straightforward. Reading some Old French helped quite a lot with this.
Now I am back to Latin again- Lucretius and Boethius helpfully avoid most of the decadent Roman history and narcissistic deities that I didn’t like years ago!
Your article makes Classical Chinese sound like a great challenge, although I did resolve not to learn any more…..
I wrestled for years with Classical Tibetan, which is not technically dead in the sense that (mostly religious) texts are still being written in it, but is far pretty removed from the modern spoken varieties. I'd put it in the C tier: hard but not insane. The alphabet is OK, pretty closely related to Nagari, with some complicated but regular pronunciation rules. Grammar is quite minimal, so there are not too many rules, but each grammatical "particle" has lots of contextual uses, making it quite ambiguous. You're also allowed to omit most grammar when it can be guessed from context (!). Word order is SOV, with lots of left-embedded clauses, so ideas flow in the opposite order that they would in English. And of course vocab is 100% foreign, largely made of monosyllables, about half of which are pronounced something like "che" despite their varying spellings.
That sounds remarkably like Japanese TBH. Especially "allowed to omit most grammar when it can be guessed from context"
My experience is different from yours. I struggle enormously with Old English - yes, still, even after making it through Osweald Beara, thank you very much, by the way. On the other hand, I really fell in love with Old Norse, using Byock's Vol I and II. Primarily, I believe, the reason why I cheerfully read Osweald Beara and love the Icelandic sagas, is A) for the fact that you mentioned, these deal with engaging stories. And I have zero interest in sermons and saints. Point B) may be an extension of point A. The "authorial voice" of the sagas is conversational. On the other hand, I feel like much of the authentic OE material was written to show off the level of education of the speaker/writer. The uh, pompous authorial voice, like some of the grad school required reading in theoretical linguistics that uses 6 pages to tell you what a single paragraph could/should. (Not that I've never in my life written anything pompous....) Either that, or I've just got a mental block. I'm an experienced second+ language learner. My easiest (not quite dead language) to learn was Classical Nahuatl. Old English is by far my most challenging foreign language to attempt, living or dead.
For Sanskrit, I'd like to recommend Antonia Ruppel's Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, which I used. Apart from being a really good and well-paced explanation of the language, there are Youtube videos and other on-line resources for each chapter. In addition, there are on-line learning groups, at a reasonable tuition cost, that go over the material on Zoom.
For Greek the great advantage for anyone who is Christian and has read the bible enough is the fact that the new testament Greek bible is the basis for the bible you know and love.
It doesn't always help, but the Gospels and Acts are excellent for this because you know what they say. Possibly even can quote the English translation. Now working back from that to classical Attic and then Homer etc. is not absolutely straightforward, but it is a lot simpler. An excellent thing to do if you attend a church that has a gospel reading every Sunday is to read it in Greek shortly after you heard the reading in English. I used to do it during the sermon, which somewhat irritated my father (who was generally the one preaching) but since he arranged my getting the Greek bible and suggested this course of action he found it hard to complain too much.
Perhaps as the author of a graded reader you could write a post (if you haven’t already?) on How To Write a Graded Reader. You might encourage someone to write the Familia Romana of their dead language.