How to learn Latin

[HeadlessMermaid]

I recently stumbled upon this Cambridge Latin Course (http://www.cambridgescp.com/Upage.php?p=clc^oa_intro^intro), and decided to give it a try. I'm now in the second book. I read the texts, and do the exercises, and I'm having a blast. :smallbiggrin: But I suspect I'm doing it "wrong", or at least not as intended.

Basically, I'm ignoring grammar rules. I mean, I don't attempt to learn them by heart, I just look up the things I don't get (and hope I'll learn them by practice). This doesn't seem to affect text comprehension or test results. Mostly, I wing it, and it seems to work. Mistakes happen, but not often.

At the same time, I started reading Julius Caesar. I have the Gallic War text on one tab, the English translation on another, and Wiktionary on a third. I alternate among these tabs as necessary. It also seems to work...

...SO FAR. But it's so very early. When tenses and moods start piling up, it could be a different matter. I don't know if I should keep doing what I'm doing, or if I should start over with a more traditional method. Study grammar rules and conjugation and all that. That tedious (but is it necessary?) procedure where you recite ego sum/tu es/is est and so on until kingdom come.

So what do you think? Is a formal method necessary? And if so, where do I start? :smalleek: Or would a text comprehension approach (read a lot, and look up things you don't understand/are curious about) work for my purpose*?

Also feel free to share any experiences/thoughts on:

1) learning Latin
2) learning a language online/by yourself
3) learning a language without formally learning its grammar rules

Thanks in advance. :smallsmile:

*My purpose (other than enjoying the procedure) is to learn to read Latin. Not write or teach it. Strictly speaking, I don't need to know that the dative case is called "dative", only what it does and what it looks like. And I don't need to remember, out of the blue, what's the second person, singular number, perfect tense, indicative mood of the verb "paro" - I just need to recognize it when I see it in context. :)

[Bulldog Psion]

In my late teens, I started teaching myself Latin for a while. I went for the more formal type, and as soon as I got kind of a grasp on it, I started translating the Lord of the Rings into Latin, while still doing the lessons.

It was slow going, but it did add a lot to the fun, and I picked up how to use the language better, I believe.

Then I started working, and time to learn Latin vanished. So not in this lifetime, unfortunately. :smallfrown:

However, maybe that's something to try -- learn for a while and then start translating a favorite book or story or even webcomic into the language, though you need a good Latin dictionary and will likely need to make up words (e.g. there is no Latin word for Mordor, or hamburger, or motorcycle, or starship).

Just an idea. :smallsmile:

[Razanir]

Wheelock. All of the Latin (that I've formally learned) comes from Wheelock. The textbook's only $20 and is pervasive enough that I can guarantee you can find multiple syllabi for it. Also, the memorization isn't that bad. A lot of the endings are repeated or follow similar patterns.

[rs2excelsior]

I'd recommend doing at least some "formal" work on cases, endings, and such. I did about six and a half years of Latin in Middle/High School/College, and the sentences get very long and involved. Sometimes they take a lot of work to pick apart, and being able to immediately recognize cases or tense/mood/number for verbs can be immensely helpful--you can focus on figuring out how the case is used, rather than what it is.

That said, wiktionary is a wonderful resource, especially for Latin-English translations, given that you can put in a Latin form and it'll give you both the word it's from and what cases it could be. It does miss a few words/forms every now and then, though, so having an understanding of how the forms look is still useful.

[Dragonrider]

My opinion is that case and tense is super super important for picking up subtlety of meaning. But then I am a grammar nut. I am actually sitting here remembering my Latin (I want to learn more so thanks for the link) and trying to figure out how it is even possible to do any translation work without knowing the grammar. But then, my Latin teacher required exact, direct translations with as little word order variance as possible, to show that we understood grammar and weren't just guessing based on word meaning.

[Plerumque]

I'm only on my third year of Latin, but it does seem like it would be a lot easier to read Latin without a solid grasp of the grammar rules than it would be to write it. If you're interested in composition, I'd think that all the shades of meaning represented by case, tense etc. would be a lot more important.

[Aedilred]

Caesar is a relatively challenging writer, especially if you're fairly early in your Latin-learning career. He has a very dry style and a tendency to make the inflections do most of the work for him, with relatively little regard for sentence structure (also avoid Livy, for the same reason, except moreso). I found Cicero and Pliny (the Younger) rather easier to get to grips with, as they tend to write with more discrete clauses and a slightly more structured word order.

The CLC is a good course, but because it introduces you to the grammar in a step-by-step manner, a lot of the more complex stuff that tends to crop up in the literature remains inaccessible for quite a while, most notably the passive voice, gerunds and gerundives, and pretty much the whole of the subjunctive. It really is worth learning the noun and verb declensions if you can, though, as those don't stop being useful the more you read and before long recognising the endings and knowing the declensions is if anything more important than knowing the vocabulary, if you have a dictionary to hand. I would recommend learning the grammar as the CLC introduces you to it. Eventually you might have to rethink your noun declension tables, as some of the cases don't appear for a while iirc, but that's relatively easy to get the hang of once the principles are down.

Personally, while I find languages fairly easy to pick up to a basic level with minimal tuition, I really struggle to get to grips with them if I have no tuition at all and try to teach myself. I think that might be a study habit thing at least as much as anything else, though.

[Lentrax]

I sadly was never able to progress into college level since a primarily ag oriented school feels it has no need of Latin. Despite the college of nursing, pre med, and pre law students on campus. Whatever.

Anyway, I still hold a record that has to be exceeded by a first year student on the national Latin Profienency Test. Which is to score a perfect score. It has stood for twenty some years, and no one has come close to the time.

So, uh.... Yay me! Good at setting unreasonably high standards!

[Jeff the Green]

The thing is that Latin's grammar is so funky compared to modern European languages that you're going to have a very hard time figuring out what sentences mean (and how you get from the Latin to the English translation) unless you know conjugation, declension, and prepositions. (Basically, there's almost no real rules for word order and all the information that's encoded in word order in Germanic and Romance languages is in endings.) And those are hard to learn just from reading and looking in a dictionary.

Once you've got a handle on the basic grammar I'd recommend Sallust's Catiline Conspiracy. It's at least passably interesting, has fairly simple vocabulary, and isn't as bad about inconstant word order as Caesar.

Or I've heard good things about the Harry Potter translation.

[Bulldog Psion]

Wheelock. All of the Latin (that I've formally learned) comes from Wheelock. The textbook's only $20 and is pervasive enough that I can guarantee you can find multiple syllabi for it. Also, the memorization isn't that bad. A lot of the endings are repeated or follow similar patterns.

Wheelock -- that's what I used, now that you remind me of the title. Yes, that's definitely the wellspring to go to.

[Eldariel]

Basically, I'm ignoring grammar rules. I mean, I don't attempt to learn them by heart, I just look up the things I don't get (and hope I'll learn them by practice). This doesn't seem to affect text comprehension or test results. Mostly, I wing it, and it seems to work. Mistakes happen, but not often.

In my opinion, this is the optimal way to learn a language. Strict grammar doesn't really matter until you begin to try and perfect the language. As long as you understand (and are understood where relevant), you're doing it fine. Building up the vocabulary and language sense first enables you to later acquire the grammar with tremendous ease. This is, I think, a big problem in how language is taught in schools: pupils are taught linguistics first, not the language. As a linguist I can certainly appreciate the value and benefit of learning linguistics, but it should happen in your mother tongue first and only optionally; as a pedagog I find it appalling that the focus in language acquisition education is not on, y'know, language acquisition first and foremost.

So, at least one linguist thinks your approach is superior to the one used in schools. Construction grammar supports this view: you don't need to know why a word appears in certain form at a certain point to use that construction correctly, nor do you need to learn declensions by heart. After using the language enough, you'll naturally learn the regularities and the irregularities and at that point, it can be worthwhile to learn why. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with referring to grammar when you don't understand a clause because of a form not familiar to you, but I'd say focus on the language first and the grammar second.

Part of the problem with learning grammar early is that provided you don't speak another language with a case system closely resembling that of Latin, many of the criteria for using certain forms will not open up to you without in-depth linguistic studies in the field of semantics and pragmatics. For instance, dative doesn't occur because of syntax but because of semantics: it primarily codes the receiver in a sentence*. It takes needlessly much study to learn when to use dative and when to use accusative, it's inconvenient to have to start to think about the criteria while producing the language anyways, and there are exceptions** anyways so regardless, you'd have to learn the cases verbs generally take their complements in by heart***.

* This is why "servio", "to serve", gets a dative complement, where-as something like "neco", "to kill", receives an accusative complement.
** I'd assume this is due to etymology, but I haven't studied Latin in-depth so I can't say for sure.
*** Or even better, learning them naturally through language use so you never need to cognitively acquire the information but can just use them correctly.

[SirKazum]

I'll have to say I agree with Eldariel. What you (OP) describe is what I know of as "instrumental language learning". AFAIK it's how we all learn our very first language, and that usually turns out rather well :smallbiggrin: I don't know a lot about Latin (having studied only a little bit of it, including with the CLC), but I do know a lot about learning language, having seriously studied 7 languages (not including my native Portuguese) to varied degrees, and dabbled in many others.

In fact, as for English, in which I think I'm pretty much completely fluent, I've learned most of it through instrumental methods, by picking up books and trying to understand them, with help from various sources (dad, dictionary etc). A lot of that comes from D&D books :smalltongue: I did study English at school for several years, but most of that time I was just going over stuff I'd already learned by myself at home, and I think that helped a lot. I never cared much about studying grammar or other formal aspects, though, I just focused on practicing and understanding what I was reading. As a result, while I do utilize correct grammar pretty much all of the time (feel free to correct me at any point :smallwink:) I don't really know what things are called, and I'd have a hard time knowing what the precise rules of many grammatical interactions are, even though I use said rules all the time.

For example - my ex-wife was studying English at a college professor level, which involved a lot of grammar, and she'd always turn to me for help with that, my English being so good and all. And most of the time I had no friggin' idea what the hell she was talking about... even though I used it perfectly in practice. "Can you help me figure out the present continuous tense?" "Lady, I don't have the slightest idea what 'present continuous' means." And yet, when she came at me with example phrases, I'd have no problem at all getting them right. "I'm learning collocations, can you help me with that?" "Nope, never heard of these 'collocations' before." And yet I used them all the time, (usually) the right way. And so on.

My advice to you would be to keep up what you're doing. Go ahead, practice with real Latin texts, try understanding them. I defer to the other people in this thread as to which texts are good for studying. It's good to do some grammar studying as well, but I'd put that at a lower priority than reading practice - and, most importantly, study grammar after you've already practiced a lot with text.

The thing is, grammar rules are highly arbitrary. If you study grammar with no solid reference as to what those rules mean, it's all a bunch of arbitrary rules that have to be memorized. Same thing with endings and stuff - you'll have to force them into your head through rote memorization if you've never seen them before, and that sucks. On the other hand, if you're already familiar with the language in practice, you'll study grammar and go like "aaah, that's what '-ibus' means". There will be patterns and behaviors you already know, and now are being explained in a way that makes sense. The grammar will mean something, it will refer to things you've seen before, and will make sense rather than being something arbitrary.

In other words, study grammar after you've already learned whatever it is you're studying about through practice. And don't bother with repetitive grammar exercises, drills, memorizing things like endings and conjugations, whatever. Read your grammar once, so you get to know it, and simply move on. I think your time is much better spent practising by reading or otherwise working with the language in a practical way. Trust me, you'll have a much easier time remembering stuff if you see it used in practice a few times than if you do rote memorization.

[Aedilred]

While I would normally agree with Eldariel's advice I'm not sure it's as applicable when learning a language which you're in all likelihood not going to write and almost certainly never going to speak. When you're learning to speak a language then learning phrases and bits and pieces and learning how they fit together afterwards is sensible, because it gives you a bunch of stock tools to work with and help make yourself understood. With Latin though all you really need to know is what what's being presented to you means, and to prise meaning from a sentence the grammar is often very important, where a single difference or misidentification grammar-wise can quite radically change the meaning of a whole sentence.

Latin is also a language which is much more heavily inflected than, say, English (where trying to learn any of the grammar first is largely a waste of time) or any other Romance language, to the point where it's almost impossible to distinguish subject, object and indeed quite often even what the verb in question is let alone what tense or person it's in, without having at least a basic knowledge of some of the declensions, espeically considering word order often isn't going to bail you out.

Of course, you don't need all of the declensions to start with, nor all the cases or tenses. But it is a good idea, imo, to learn the grammar as you go, because otherwise you'll find it impossibly slow-going. Moreover, if you want to read actual Latin rather than Latin that's written specifically for people learning to read it, knowing your way at least around the regular declensions is almost essential if you want to make any sense of it at all.

[Murk]

Just chiming in to - I think - mostly repeat what others have said already: grammar is very important and funky and stuff - but for the poetic, epic stories, poems and tales. If you just want to read Caesar ("and then we went on to whack some more Gauls untill we got whacked by the Britons"), a good dictionary is the only thing you need.

I did Latin in high school for six years. It was my best class, and I'm ashamed to say I never bothered with learning grammar. If you got a feeling for language, the meaning of a sentence can be deduced by three or four key words, and the nuanced subtle differences you can look up.

It all depends on your intentions, then. If you are interested in mythology, catholic scripts or general history/stories, keep on going. The grammar will follow after you get a lot of proficiency with simple translating.
However, if you want to go translate LotR to Latin (that's an awesome project, btw!), try to speak it or are really into linguistic/poetic structures, I would advise forgetting everything you've learned untill now and start with a strong grammatical fundament (as they taught Latin two decades ago: learn all grammar from head, and then we'll tell you what it actually is).