Learning Latin in a Year

Blogged by James Preece on 14th February 2013

Is it possible to go from knowing absolutely nothing about Latin to being ready to sit a GCSE exam in less than a year? I'm going with yes. But you have to really want to do it...

A friend told me he was really enjoying learning Latin and finding it both easier than expected and also more useful. That seemed unlikely. Still, he suggested a book called "So You Really Want to Learn Latin" and after reading some reviews about how it was a terrible, old fashioned book that puts latin teaching back in the 1950's I couldn't help but order a copy.

Which I duly left on the shelf until I was interested.

I'm not sure what latin teaching looked like before it was put back in the 1950's but this terrible old fashioned teaching consists of telling you things that you ought to know and then getting you to answer questions based on the knowledge you just acquired. Gasp. I know. It's awful.

Anyhow, to my suprise I discovered that it was nothing at all like learning a language at school and more like a sort of puzzle game which appealed to me because I'm a nerd. Somewhere around chapter three I realised I had been doing a chapter a week simply for fun and I thought to myself "hang on, if I keep doing a chapter a week then in thirty weeks I will have learned Latin!"

Yes, well... it didn't quite work out like that. Week thirty has just finished and I'm only on chapter twenty-six. Still, pretty good going and I have learned a lot. In fact, it's gone well enough that I have booked myself in for a GCSE Latin exam (actually, four one hour papers) in June this year.

It hasn't been all sunshine and giggles. The interesting fun puzzle feeling wore off pretty quickly and there were weeks when I just didn't want to do it at all, but I pushed on. Being a dad has been good training for doing things I don't want to do. Getting up in the night, changing a nappy, conjugating a verb. It's all the same really...

So there you go. It is possible to mostly learn GCSE Latin in a year...

But you do have to really want to.

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Mark Dobson said...

But most of the Amazon reviews are five-star.

Maybe I’ll have a stab at Latin after finishing with New Testament Greek. Next time, Gadget, next time.

Chrysostom said...

It is easy to show, in this impromptu note, that Latin, though no longer a sine qua non, can be useful . Some say that Latin is no longer spoken and so is dead but this is a non sequitur. Latin is interesting per se, and, nota bene, (N.B.) that Latin is still useful for many professions. Words such as “alibi” are straight Latin and can be misused without knowledge of Latin as a lingua franca. “Alibi” does not mean a mere excuse. It is a common credo among the best heads of the best schools that Latin should be somewhere on the curriculum of the school. Inter alia, many words used in the law, science, medicine and engineering - i.e (id est) most professions - are straight Latin e.g. (exemplum gratia) “post mortem”.
Ergo, ceteris paribus, it is good to learn this language even if only as a quid pro quo. All our coins have Latin inscriptions, and the only poet quoted on any British coin is not Shakespeare but Virgil, quoted in the original Latin on the edge of most pound coins: “Decus et tutamen” – “ a thing of beauty and a safeguard”. Mirabile dictu, the most modern professions still give a high regard to Latin. Therefore, both a priori and a posteriori reasoning show the necessity of Latin and I could go on ad infinitum. Stat.
Q.E. D. Quod erat demonstrandum

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St. Charles Lwanga and Companion Martyrs of Uganda who were martyred because they resisted the advances of an evil homosexual paedophile – pray for us.
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Mark Dobson said...

Via a story in Proz.com translation news:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2012/11/how-to-learn-a-language-in-less-than-24-hours/

http://www.memrise.com/courses/english/latin/

Kenny said...

If I remember correctly we were taught Latin with books called 'Ecce Romani'.

Christopher Wright said...

Someone I knew at school in the late 1950s went from zero to 80+% 'O' level (Oxford Board) in 3 months.

Christopher Wright said...

Sorry - I mean to to write "'O' level LATIN"

Mr E said...

What education has done in the past fifty years is realise that a variety of different learning styles work for different people.

It's great that you learn in the way that you do but don't spoil it by bashing an education system that also caters for visual, auditory, discursive, etc learners.

Unless of course the Pope has forbidden the use of diverse learning styles in which case CONTINUE.

Mark Dobson said...

"don't spoil it by bashing an education system that also caters for visual, auditory, discursive, etc learners."

I missed the part where he bashed another approach. This makes your last remark even more of a cheap shot than it would have been anyway.

James said...

Sorry if I caused offence.

My thinking is that the "So you really want to learn latin" books don't prescribe a particular way of learning at all. They provide information and pretty much leave the rest to the reader who is left on his own to decide whether he wants to chant "amo amas amat" over and over again or make flash cards or write a poem or a role play or whatever.

The problem I perceive with more modern books is that they do prescribe a particular method of learning and the information is buried amid roll plays, poems etc. I find I have to extract it from one method and translate it back in to something that works for me.

I find the 1950's style of book useful because it is clear and uncluttered and I can use it my way. I have no idea if I would appreciate a 1950's style teacher to go with it. I quite enjoy not being hit with a ruler.

Simon Platt said...

Our boys do very well with their parents' textbooks. (Really, I suppose, their mother's.) Much better than they would have done if we had to rely exclusively on the modern rubbish.

pattif said...

I had the great good fortune to study Latin as a middle-aged undergraduate with a nun who was a retired headmistress of the old school. She started us off with Ecce Romani, she made us chant declensions and conjugations like 10-year-olds, there was a test every week on the homework (and woe betide you if you hadn't done it). It was all done with that mixture of firmness and good humour that is the mark of great teachers, and we all thrived on it. We used to say she could teach Latin to a tree trunk.

Phil Atkinson said...

Latin's even easier once one studies it at A level - I got a good grade just by being able to find the right word in translation.

Michael said...

I never actually attempted to learn Latin as such, though I've often been tempted to...

...having sung Mass settings in Latin, I learned a lot by osmosis, and I think learning science (many of the terms are still in Latin and Greek) and any inflected modern foreign language (e.g. German, as I did) I learned much of it without aiming to...

...memorising Latin prayers helped too...

...and since I'm learning Lithuanian (which has rather a lot of cases etc. etc.) I feel probably Latin isn't actually that tough, though it's useful to help you think more about grammar.

Actually reasoning is something rather different than just knowing Latin, though. It's the old European language of scholarship, but it does not magically make you a better thinker; thinking and learning from good thinkers does that.

Neither does it make you holier, or more faithful; any more than speaking Hebrew would.

Mark Dobson said...

I’ve heard the idea that Latin somehow makes you better at thinking a few times now (from non-Catholic sources as well). It’s such a bizarre claim that I suppose there must at least be some well rehearsed arguments for it; I wonder what they are.

I’m picking up Latin even more indirectly, by having learnt Italian and singing in my Italian parish choir.

I’d like to learn Latin, but I’d learn Koine Greek first, which is in fact what I’m doing.

James said...

I think it might be more about the way Latin is taught, than something inherent about Latin itself. When learning Latin there is often quite a lot of emphasis on grammar and how to construct sentences that make sense which forces you to think about exactly what it is you mean in English before you can translate it in to Latin. Who is doing something? What are they doing? Is it in the past or future? Is it a command? A question?

When kids at school are made to think about that sort of stuff it I daresay it helps them to better understand philosophical arguments in which very specific things are being said or not said about particular things in particular ways. Hence the view that learning Latin aids thinking skills.

Without those skills most kids (and adults?) tend to have the same conversation over and over again, chucking out soundbytes they heard on the telly and falling back on tribal loyalties etc. Never thinking particularly deeply about what it is the words they are saying actually mean - I'm sure you know exactly what I am talking about :)

Compare all that with learning a language the modern way where we mostly memorise stock phrases "Hola!" "Que tal?" "Muy bien gracias!" "E tu?" (after ten years that may contain errors) and you can see how that way of learning doesn't set one up (at least in the early GCSE type stages) to think very carefully about what is being said. Not in the way the early stages of Latin the old fashioned way do.

I would say that to somebody like yourself who is already capable of looking at sentences in English, understanding what they mean and then constructing brand new ones to convey something you want to say... to somebody like that, learning Latin is not going to make you a better thinker.

But, the fact that you can already think, should help with learning Latin :)

Mark Dobson said...

If that’s it, it remains a bizarre claim, to my mind. As you say, those things aren’t exclusively Latin, and a particular teaching/learning style can’t give Latin itself a special status. I suppose it may instead be due to the sheer wealth of grammatical forms and structures that you have to learn.

For me, learning GCSE German was pretty significant in deepening my appreciation of English – though I’m pretty sure I would have found it interesting anyway. I reckon that learning a foreign language supplies for an inexplicable want in English language teaching. I’ve seen some Italian language textbooks that go into an intimidating level of grammatical detail: probably too far in the other direction. There’ll be a happy medium somewhere.