TEACHING YOURSELF LATIN

Latin

Wheelock

So let me start with Latin. The epitome of grammar-first is Wheelock's Latin, by Frederick M. Wheelock, revised by Richard A. LaFleur, available since 2005 in its sixth edition and also now in a Kindle version. (As i write this in May, 2011, I see a seventh edition scheduled for availability in June.) Wheelock's Latin gives all the foundational elements of Latin grammar in forty compact chapters. Each chapter contains one or more elements of grammar plus a vocabulary list, example sentences, brief quotes from classical authors, and Latin-to-English etymological tidbits. The example sentences are not translated, but an appendix has self-tutorial exercises for each chapter and answer keys to these exercises. In this approach, you learn the grammar first, while staying motivated by the tidbits and quotes, then follow up with guided readings from Latin authors, for example, using Wheelock's Latin Reader. (There is also a Workbook for Wheelock's Latin, which I am not familiar with.)

The sixth edition of Wheelock explicitly caters to independent study as well as to the classroom. For Serious, I think it works fine, and being in its sixth edition, it clearly has worked for many others, not just Serious. In my quest to resurrect my Latin, I started with Wheelock.

Adler, Millner/LATINUM, Ørberg

However, for Intense, I soon became aware of the natural-language approach, which in my experience yields superior, I would say far superior, results, provided you have the patience. This approach is sometimes also referred to as the immersion method, as it is similar to the immersion methods often used in learning a contemporary language. The particular method I followed I dub "Adler + Millner + Ørberg." I got my direction here from Alex Sheremet's customer review of Wheelock's Latin on Amazon and an online essay Sheremet cites by Rutgers professor William Dowling, Latin by the Dowling Method. Dowling had me with his first sentence: "The problem about Latin is that you can study it for six years and still not be able to read a Latin sentence." As a one-time Ph.D. candidate who passed all his language exams with flying colors, this brought back the gnawing guilt I felt at the time that Latin seemed to me more like a puzzle to be solved than a "real" language.

Read Sheremet and Dowling. They explain the problem better than I could. The point is to learn Latin (and Greek) as a natural and living language, not as an exercise in grammar. For my part, let me describe what "Adler + Millner + Ørberg" is.

Adler refers to an 1858 Latin grammar by George J. Adler, available digitally and in print, called A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language: With Perpetual Exercises in Speaking and Writing (1858). Notice "perpetual." Notice "speaking." In ninety-seven chapters (remember, patience!), it covers grammar as thoroughly as any book I know, far beyond foundational. But you get there in parallel with graduated ("perpetual") exercises in speaking and writing "everyday" Latin, question and answer pairs to be translated into, and spoken aloud, in Latin. (Adler provided Latin translations for the exercise questions and answers in a separate volume, A Key to the Exercises Contained in Adler's Practical Grammar of the Latin Language.) "Have we any more hay?" "We have some more." Can you say "any more" in Latin? "Some more"? Without having to think about it? The point is to learn the language first, rather than leaping from grammar directly to the high art of a Vergil or Cicero or Horace, writers who, as my graduate school Latin professor put it, manipulated the language like a late Beethoven string quartet.

The Latin content in each Adler chapter includes forms and vocabulary that haven't been covered yet but whose meaning can be induced from the context and from knowledge of cognates and similar forms. This method of inductive learning is employed to one degree or another by all the natural-language or immersion approaches.

Speaking? Here's the cool part. Evan Millner has put all ninety-seven chapters of Adler in his LATINUM podcast: grammar exposition, grammar drills, exercise sentences (that is, their Latin translations from Adler's Key). It took me about a year to get through the ninety-seven chapters, reading each, listening to the podcast, frequently hitting the pause button to repeat the Latin out loud, but believe me, at the end of the year Latin for me was a living language, not a grammatical puzzle. Not to mention I could achieve this while on my exercise bike. Check out LATINUM for many other valuable resources, and if you believe in the humanities, make a donation.

As I worked through Adler + Millner, I read Ørberg. Ørberg refers to Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina. Lingua Latina comes in two halves: Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Pars I Familia Romana is the foundational Latin; Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Pars 2 Roma Aeterna is the reader. (English-speakers, you want the Focus edition of Lingua Latina, which you'll find on Amazon or directly from Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company.)

You will search in vain for any non-Latin word in Lingua Latina (except for the title page and back cover of the Focus edition). Immersion. There's no preface; you dive in with the first sentence of the first chapter of Familia Romana, "Roma in Italia est." On that simple linguistic, historical, and geographical foundation, there follows thirty-five chapters of delightful, often wry stories about a family from Tusculum in the second century CE, stories that in my opinion rise to the level of art. All-Latin marginal notes and illustrations (per se illustrata) greatly assist comprehension. At the end of each chapter is a Grammatica Latina section, in which all grammatical terms are likewise in Latin. (Focuspublishes various ancillary materials in the Ørberg Series, including a handy thirty-two page paperback all-Latin compendium of declensions and conjugations, Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Grammatica Latina. There are also CD's that are probably to be recommended, but I'm not familiar with them.)

The sophistication of the Latin and your Latin reading skill progressively build as you work your way through the fictional stories about Julius, Aemilia, and their family. The only quotes from classical authors are brief selections from Ovid and Catullus, recited in a later chapter by family and guests at a family-hosted convivium. The chapters present related vocabulary about a given subject (farming, animals, army life, the Roman calendar, etc.) together, in connected prose. This is far more effective than vocabulary lists of unrelated words as a means of building your lexicon. Your vocabulary at the end of Familia Romanais much richer than at the end of, for example, Wheelock's Latin.

In sum, obviously you need to learn Latin grammar in order to read Latin. You can learn grammar first, as an exercise largely unto itself, or in the process of learning to speak and read the everyday language. Dowling points out the danger in the grammar-first approach - not the inevitability, but the danger - i.e., that at the end you still can't comfortably read a sentence of Latin! I guess the danger of the natural-language approach is, you're itching to read Cicero and Ovid and you lose patience.

Latin, Intermediate Level

One way or the other, you'll learn the grammar and want to begin reading the ancient authors. And one way or the other, you'll need to go through an intermediate stage before confronting Latin in its full nakedness, say in a Teubner or Oxford Classical Text edition. Of course there are numerous contemporary textbooks for doing this, not to mention the proliferation of reprints of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century student editions. I read Ørberg's Roma Aeterna and Wheelock's Latin Reader in their entirety and recommend both.

Roma Aeterna provides the dual benefits of solidifying your Latin while teaching you Roman history. The first chapter is Ørberg's walking tour of the ancient buildings and monuments of the eternal city through the reign of Antoninus Pius. The remaining chapters are slightly adapted selections from Vergil, Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and others that cover the history in chronological order from the mythical foundations through the fall of the Republic. (The Vergil is mostly prose versions of the verse.) Each chapter concludes with all-Latin, mostly fill-in-the-blank exercises to reinforce specific points of grammar. I am not aware of any keys to the exercises, but they are pretty easy, and if you're not able to answer them with confidence, you've probably gotten too far ahead of yourself. To beat the immersion metaphor to death, by the end of Familia Romana and Roma Aeterna, you're swimming in the deep end of the pool.

(For some reason Roma Aeterna, unlike Familia Romana, doesn't contain an index to the vocabulary. You'll want to get from Focus Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Indices, which indexes the vocabulary for both volumes.)

Hans Ørberg passed away in February, 2010, almost to the day when I began Familia Romana. I am very sad I cannot email my eternal gratitude to this great and warmhearted humanist.

Wheelock's Latin Reader contains mostly unadapted selections from Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Pliny the Younger, and, what I especially like, some Vulgate and Medieval Latin. It is in the format of Latin on the right page, concise English-language guidance on the left. It would have been nice if the Vocabulary in the back was indexed to at least the first occurrence of each word. And one pet peeve I have is the asterisking of words in the Vocabulary that occur "five or more times in the book" because such words "should be memorized." Doesn't memorize mean learn? So I shouldn't learn, for example, oleum(olive oil) or operor (to work, labor), and not have to look them up again and again? There is no shortcut to learning a language. Can we please not dumb it down.

Latin Dictionaries and Reference Grammars

Though in theory not necessary while working through the introductory and intermediate texts, which have their own vocabularies, you'll probably want a dictionary. Cassell's Latin Dictionary: Latin-English English-Latin is excellent and reasonably priced. Save the $300-ish Oxford Latin Dictionary for when you are both rich and Intense Intense (Oxford Latin Dictionary replaces Lewis and Short for classical era Latin, if you go back in the day)!

Similarly, the appendices in any introductory text provide templates for all the declensions and conjugations, but eventually, if you're somewhere between Serious and Intense, you'll want a full reference grammar that covers the nuances of syntax much more comprehensively than an introductory text. Adler, while not a reference grammar, is excellent for this. In addition, many of the early twentieth-century reference grammar classics are, well, classics, and available in a number of reprints. The most thorough Latin reference grammar I know is Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar (1898/1903). I also use Charles E. Bennett's more concise New Latin Grammar (1895/1908/1918). (One advantage of having these is that many of the reprinted late nineteenth and early twentieth century student editions cite them. Except for Adler, I'm not providing links to the reprints, because there are many of them and I don't want to vouch for their quality.)