Learning Latin

Learning Latin

by Alex Sheremet

"Wheelock's Latin" is perhaps the best conservative book of its type -- that is, it's the best of grammar-before-understanding Latin textbooks, and it shows. It thoroughly explains the grammar in ways most college textbooks don't, and it has plenty of selections from the original authors, which, if quickly understood, helps build enthusiasm: "Look, Mom! After 1/2 an hour of sweating, I finally understand these three sentences!" Moreover, there are additional readings in the back, in case you'd like to test (or brush up on) your knowledge of mechanical decoding.

But, that's where the fun ends. I used this book in a summer intensive course, and loved it. We finished most of in 8 weeks, and I, too, was pretty confident like the hypothetical student above. Soon, though, I noticed that learning Latin felt unnatural. After a semester of prose, we moved on to Ovid, and something became clear: I wasn't "reading," but decoding.. Wheelock and subsequent instruction trained me to do exactly that.

Decoding -- it's when a student looks at a sentence, and hunts: there's a noun, there's the adjective, but, they're in different cases; oh, the adjective probably goes with this noun, then. Verb, adverb, subject.. and, ECCE! Puzzle solved.

Is this reading? Why are students of German, or Russian (a more difficult language, by the way) able to build the kind of proficiency in 2 years that many 5-year students of Latin only daydream about? The difference is in the approach: German and Russian are taught as languages, while Latin is usually taught as a synthetic, mechanical puzzle. And, don't try to say that German and Russian are still spoken -- that's not an excuse, considering that it's possible to at least approximate Latin fluency by constructing artificial social situations: audio, continuous prose composition at very early levels and beyond, and exposure to low-level readings.

Wheelock does not help this problem. Instead, Wheelock does the following: he gives you a great grammatical introduction, and then throws sentences at you, which you either translate into English or into Latin. These exercises are graded by difficulty, but there's no continuous reading.. there's no introduction of "baby prose," of substantial narrative-nuggets that might get the student thinking in Latin, and thinking of Latin *as* Latin -- that is, as an individual language, one that should not be forced into an Anglicized word order, or puzzled out, piece by piece.

Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with the above if it's immediately followed by a different approach. But, Wheelock is not designed with an alternative in mind -- high schools and colleges start you with Wheelock, and then throw you into advanced prose or poetry. There is no side-step, or, even more helpful, a step back.

Students that are just starting out, like me, at one time, don't realize the following: they will never learn to read Latin properly with such an approach. Sure, they may learn to read Latin properly if they do something on their own *in conjunction* with typical formal instruction, but, I suspect the formal approach then becomes a burden, a distraction from the student's "real work."

Obviously, that's a problem.. the student never really gets used to Latin word order, among other things, because he's never around enough of it in quick, digestible chunks. Moreover, if he never practices generating Latin quickly and proficiently, there will always be a barrier between the original Latin text and his true abilities, especially in terms of reading speed. Although we have only a tiny portion of original Latin literature extant, it's pretty much inconceivable for a student to ever get through those works in his entire lifetime, if, that is, he never leaves the Wheelock approach.

Instead, I'd recommend Orberg's "Lingua Latina." It's an excellent book designed for Latin fluency, if used in conjunction with other materials. It's all written in Latin, as one continuous narrative broken into different scenes and chapters. Although it starts out very simple, it moves up to real sophistication, but slowly enough that, with a little patience and review, the student is reading the final chapters (which approximate unadapted Latin, by the way) at a respectable speed, and only sometimes hunting for objects, subjects, etc., in some of the more difficult or unclear sentences. At the end of the first chapter, you will have done several pages of solid reading, which might be more reading than in all of Wheelock's chapters combined. Interestingly, your reading speed, while it will decrease as you move on to the harder stuff, won't decrease significantly. And eventually, you can get it back, and move beyond your initial stages.

I'd also recommend Adler's "Practical Latin Grammar," which is out of print, but nonetheless available on Google Books. Adler's textbook is especially good as a supplement to "Lingua Latina," since it eventually covers every important point of grammar, including complex subordination. It's focused on *conversational* Latin, which forces the student to generate and verbalize good Latin sentences from the very beginning. The entire book has been rendered into audio on Evan Millner's "Latinum Podcast" site, which -- at least a few hundred hours worth, if not more -- is available for free. In this way, you're doing two things: you're practicing complex prose with proper reading skills with Orberg's book, and practicing listening and speaking Latin with Adler and Millner.

An article criticizing the typical Latin-teaching approaches mentioned something interesting and revealing: in the Renaissance, students were first taught conversational Latin for five or six years before ever cracking open some Caesar or Cicero. And only years later, perhaps, did they ever touch poetry. Doesn't this seem sensible? To truly understand a language, or even to simply be competent enough to read at a decent speed, from the start of a sentence to the end, without juggling endless case endings and objects in your mind, requires this kind of approach. Sure, if you're doing Latin academically, there may be no time -- you're expected to have decoded at least a couple of hundred of pages of Latin by the time you hit your Ph.D. stage, in some schools. But, if you're interested in doing well and improving every day, and visibly, for that matter, forget about Latin literature for as long as you can tolerate it, and start with the basics: easy reading, and conversation.

And it's not all bad: I'm glad I did Wheelock, because "Lingua Latina" was much easier for me, given the vocabulary and abstract grammatical knowledge I had. So, if you're completing Wheelock now, or about to start it, consider it preparation for what comes ahead.

For more information, read William Dowling's homepage -- a fluent reader of Latin, he first turned me on to this "natural method" of language acquisition. He doesn't accept e-mails, but you can write some snail mail to him, as I did:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/Latin.htm

by Alex Sheremet