a couple of Latin-learning questions

[Halcyon]

This is a fascinating thread (which I realize I commented on a few months ago). My 4th grader has been plugging away with Henle 1. We are just about done with Units 1 and 2 and will dive into Unit 3 in a few weeks. He is one of those kids described above that "sees" the declension and makes connections easily. I, however, need a LOT of review and visual mind maps to remember things. We are definitely noticing that sometimes, when translating a sentence, that certain words and their definitions become more obvious based on context, and he is remembering more easily now the endings without going through the declension in his head. I think Henle provides a good amount of practice in this.. The English to Latin translations (challenging as they are) require us to be much more careful and to really KNOW our declensions.

[Classical Katharine]

I completely agree on the value of English-to-Latin translation. I think that nothing helps people learn to do Latin-to-English translation like producing correct Latin themselves. And besides, translating in both directions helps prepare for the study of modern foreign languages, where you're going to have to think in both directions! And besides besides, part of the fun of studying a foreign language is to say things in it, not just in English . . .

 

I appreciate it when a program doesn't skimp on this, and I like that about Henle.

 

Halcyon, may I have biceps like yours?

Edited February 17, 2012 by Classical Katharine

[Colleen in NS]

(1)I think that nothing helps people learn to do Latin-to-English translation like producing correct Latin themselves. (2)And besides, translating in both directions helps prepare for the study of modern foreign languages, where you're going to have to think in both directions! (3)And besides besides, part of the fun of studying a foreign language is to say things in it, not just in English . . .

 

You've just put to words what I couldn't, about why I kept my son writing out his English to Latin translations. I figured out that it was important to do so, but didn't know why. I hope you don't mind; I've taken the liberty to insert red numbers in your post, to make three different reasons stand out.

For high school, we do Wheelock's over two years and then spend two years (theoretically, she starts that part next year) on the good stuff.

 

I might take some exception to the idea that's there's absolutely no "good stuff", even early on in Wheelock. Sure, you need to put the work in, but consider this (adapted) Livy quote from Chapter 6 of Wheelock:

 

"Nec vitia nostra, nec remedia tolerare possumus".

 

This was written 2,000 years ago -- and it's worth at least an hour of dinner-table conversation.

The author of this article is a Latin scholar far, far, far beyond me in every measure of Latin knowledge.

 

He's far beyond me, too. Dum spiro, spero...

 

 

Yet, I do have a question about one aspect of his method.

 

I am not sure why we would want to avoid looking at the end of the sentence until we get there.

 

There's two main reasons. First, while word order in Latin is certainly more fluid than in English, Latin word order is not completely arbitrary. There are reasons the author wrote the words in that particular order, and they mean a lot to both his style and meaning. By jumping around, and first mapping the word order to English word order, you miss a lot of that. And, there's no guarantee that you'll get it right, especially in the tricky cases where a noun could be either nominative or accusative. In the quoted essay, read the section on the translation of the one sentence from Livy about the assassination of Tarquin.

 

The second reason, is that it slows down reading tremendously, as you are always stopping and backtracking. Perhaps the biggest problem with intermediate and advanced Latin students is the speed at which they read Latin. It is common for 3rd year students to spend an hour translating a single page of Caesar. While some find the "crossword puzzle" method of decoding a sentence a fun challenge, others are completely demoralized. More importantly, you lose the entire thrust of the work, if it takes a whole semester to "read" the same amount of text that a 3rd year student of a modern foreign language could read in a week. That is to say, if you are always jumping around, trying to put the words into an English word order, you aren't "reading", you are "translating", and that's always going to be much slower than reading. Consider how you read a modern foreign language -- after a couple of years, you aren't translating each sentence into English,you just read it. I don't think you can get there in Latin if you are always jumping around the page.

 

Now, I do not profess to be an expert. But I do know that the speed issue is a huge problem, and has been for a long time, and is very well known in the Latin community. The problem is perhaps made worse by the fact that some, very few, moderns can actually read Latin at a decent pace. Perhaps most famous was Edith Hamilton, who talks about this in her delightful introduction to "The Roman Way". There are several schools of thought on how to fix the problem. The folks who espouse the "reading method", as followed by Cambridge Latin Course, Lingua Latina, and others, believe that just reading a lot of native Latin, and trying to understand the Latin as Latin, without focusing on translation to English is the key. Others promote the traditional grammar-translation approach, perhaps with much more reading and translation than is usually done. I've heard of some university professors who assign 50 pages of reading a night, to force students to learn how to read more effectively. I like what Dr. Hale has to say here. I don't know myself that it is effective, but I'm trying to discipline myself to use it.

 

I'd like to know what others think about this.

Edited February 17, 2012 by GGardner

[Classical Katharine]

Originally posted by GGardner There are reasons the author wrote the words in that particular order, and they mean a lot to both his style and meaning. By jumping around, and first mapping the word order to English word order, you miss a lot of that.

There's a lot I like about the "from the beginning approach," and you make a good point about the author's intent in arranging the words in a certain order. To fully appreciate what the author wrote, the beauty of the chosen arrangement must be a factor. Still, if he was writing, he was arranging his words in, well, writing, and Romans had as much liberty to "read ahead" mentally as we do . . . if they did it, are we not allowed to? When they would do it, they weren't mapping the word order to English word order . . . they were just making use of the liberties that reading permits and hearing does not. I'm not sure/convinced that that's equivalent to "first mapping the word order to English word order." I hope I don't sound snarky. No snark intended. I appreciate GG's comments.

 

I do agree that something is wrong when it takes an hour to read a page of Caesar. Or at any rate, that something hasn't happened yet. When I studied Russian, with native Russian speakers as my first teachers, at an Ivy League university, using a grammar-translation approach, we were in a similar position by our third year--taking a good long while to make it through a page or two of Tolstoy or (simplified) Dostoyevsky. Then our fourth year we were handed complete novels and told go. And we did go. (Not Dostoyevsky, though!) Whether we would have gotten there faster or better using a Cambridge-type method is the great question oft debated. I don't think that I would have gotten there faster using an exclusively reading method. That probably would have led to my secretly teaching myself on the side using a g-t method as a supplement so I could understand what was going on from every angle. I'd have wanted the background to the changes in word form. (In fact I know of quite a few situations in which a parent chooses to supplement a reading program with a grammar-translation program, or to precede a reading program with a grammar-translation program.) But a hybrid method? Maybe that would have worked as well or better. That's an experiment I'd like to see fleshed out. Latin for the New Millenium keeps on calling to me because it appears to be a program you can use either way: as a grammar-translation program, or as a reading program, or, for that matter, in hybrid fashion.

 

I will say though that the tortoise, grammar-translation approach to Russian (and I keep using Russian as an example because I actually studied it later and longer than I did Latin, but it's very similar in its degree of inflection and other grammatical complexities--plus you're supposed to end up speaking it . . . )--that tortoise approach left me in this position after graduation: I met a Russian speaker at the grocery store, befriended her, and her verdict on my Russian was this: "You do not know so many words, but your grammar is very good. If you went to Russia you would learn fast and do well." She was right that I needed to learn more words. But she thought I had a good foundation, and I felt comfortable with my foundation as well. I'd much sooner have more words to learn than be at sea in the grammar, trying to acquire that through exposure.

 

But, I respect the proponents of reading method courses. And if students are forever treating each sentence as a logic puzzle, I do believe there is something wrong. But I'm not convinced that that "puzzle" approach results as much from inherent limitations of the grammar-translation method, as from failure to master certain basics that could be mastered from within a grammar-translation method--where this thread began, really: failing to master vocabulary, failing to master endings.

 

I also think that g-t programs can be structured to feature more or less translation, and that more is better, especially if it goes in both directions. But, I am biased in favor of syntax. I think using language is more fun and valuable than getting ready to use language. Back to tradeoffs and program priorities again.

 

Thanks, GG, for the thoughts!

Edited February 17, 2012 by Classical Katharine
add citation to make easier to follow discussion

[Bluegoat]

GGardner,

 

Thank you for this link--I've come across this paper before but don't think I had it bookmarked. It is a fascinating read.

 

I particularly appreciate his point that the Roman boy didn't try to conclude the meaning of a given word until he had enough other sentence information to make its meaning certain.

 

The author of this article is a Latin scholar far, far, far beyond me in every measure of Latin knowledge. Yet, I do have a question about one aspect of his method. GG, if you have heard anything on this, I'd love to know. Confession, first: I have only skimmed what he wrote. I have to go do something else right now . . . I am being lazy and hoping GG knows this article inside and out and would like to comment on it. (No problem if you don't.) Here's my question based on skimming:

 

The author seems to assume that the same method should be followed whether hearing or reading. I understand that in hearing a sentence, we do exactly what he describes in this piece: we hold in our minds all the possible significances of each element, as it unfolds to our ears, until we reach the end of the sentence and all becomes certain. But in reading--and I have noticed this in English, just trying to pay attention to what my eyes do--we have an additional advantage that hearers don't have: our peripheral vision. With it we know things about the end of the sentence even before we train our eyes on it directly. I'm convinced that this is so, because how else could we ever read anything out loud with correct intonation? Our eyes take in the end of the sentence even before we "get" there and we import what we learn there into our understanding of the beginning of the sentence. Come to think of it, we don't even have to confine ourselves to our peripheral vision. We can look.

 

Maybe, maybe, this just counts as doing really, really fast exactly what the article describes. I am not sure. But in any case, in a word-by-word analysis of a written Latin sentence, I am not sure why we would want to avoid looking at the end of the sentence until we get there. I can understand not making a rule to always begin with the verb, for example. I can understand not leaping to conclusions about the rest of the sentence based on looking at the end of the sentence. But it does seem a little artificial to me to preclude consulting the end of the sentence until one gets there. (Then again, I don't always read a book from the beginning--so don't listen to me!)

 

Maybe the article didn't say that . . . but I have certainly encountered that point of view elsewhere, to the point of the advice to cover all the words you haven't yet reached and only to reveal them one at a time.

 

In Russian, another highly inflected language I studied--tortuous in ways similar to Latin--we weren't required to adopt quite as rigid a method as is outlined in this article. (And we did study using a grammar-translation program, not an inductive program, so it wasn't an inductive bias.)

 

However, I love the way the author has students learn to ask themselves what do we suppose at this point, what possibilities still remain open, which have been eliminated, etc. He was deeply knowledgeable, he was a superb Latinist, and I can see why his article is still a classic of its kind. Thank you, GG, for posting it for us.

 

My immediate thought would be that once someone was reading fluently in Latin, it would work just as you suggest, unconsciously, as it does when we read in English.

 

But before getting to that point, it might require approaching the text with some discipline in order to avoid making the mistake or trying to assign meaning prematurely.

[Bluegoat]

He's far beyond me, too. Dum spiro, spero...

 

 

 

There's two main reasons. First, while word order in Latin is certainly more fluid than in English, Latin word order is not completely arbitrary. There are reasons the author wrote the words in that particular order, and they mean a lot to both his style and meaning. By jumping around, and first mapping the word order to English word order, you miss a lot of that. And, there's no guarantee that you'll get it right, especially in the tricky cases where a noun could be either nominative or accusative. In the quoted essay, read the section on the translation of the one sentence from Livy about the assassination of Tarquin.

 

The second reason, is that it slows down reading tremendously, as you are always stopping and backtracking. Perhaps the biggest problem with intermediate and advanced Latin students is the speed at which they read Latin. It is common for 3rd year students to spend an hour translating a single page of Caesar. While some find the "crossword puzzle" method of decoding a sentence a fun challenge, others are completely demoralized. More importantly, you lose the entire thrust of the work, if it takes a whole semester to "read" the same amount of text that a 3rd year student of a modern foreign language could read in a week. That is to say, if you are always jumping around, trying to put the words into an English word order, you aren't "reading", you are "translating", and that's always going to be much slower than reading. Consider how you read a modern foreign language -- after a couple of years, you aren't translating each sentence into English,you just read it. I don't think you can get there in Latin if you are always jumping around the page.

 

Now, I do not profess to be an expert. But I do know that the speed issue is a huge problem, and has been for a long time, and is very well known in the Latin community. The problem is perhaps made worse by the fact that some, very few, moderns can actually read Latin at a decent pace. Perhaps most famous was Edith Hamilton, who talks about this in her delightful introduction to "The Roman Way". There are several schools of thought on how to fix the problem. The folks who espouse the "reading method", as followed by Cambridge Latin Course, Lingua Latina, and others, believe that just reading a lot of native Latin, and trying to understand the Latin as Latin, without focusing on translation to English is the key. Others promote the traditional grammar-translation approach, perhaps with much more reading and translation than is usually done. I've heard of some university professors who assign 50 pages of reading a night, to force students to learn how to read more effectively. I like what Dr. Hale has to say here. I don't know myself that it is effective, but I'm trying to discipline myself to use it.

 

I'd like to know what others think about this.

 

This reminds me of something I told Colleen about the other day, regarding CS Lewis. He talks about how he went to a private tutor for, I think, about a year to get him ready for university. The tutor really gave him a ton of Greek to do and just pushed him through it at tremendous speed, not looking for a lot of finesse in the translations. Lewis says that what he was trying to do was to get him to read Greek fluently rather than the crossword puzzle method you mention, And once the student has that fluency, finesse can follow. He seemed to be very supportive of that approach and I think he was quite a fluent reader.

 

My Latin was never great and is now mostly gone, but that kind of resonates with me - to me real fluency is the goal, and too much fiddling with exercises and stuff will become counter-productive at some point.

 

But I'm not sure what that would really mean practically in terms of teaching my own kids, who won't be starting probably until the year after next.

Still, if he was writing, he was arranging his words in, well, writing, and Romans had as much liberty to "read ahead" mentally as we do . . . if they did it, are we not allowed to?

 

Note that, as far as we know, silent reading was very rare, if not unknown, in antiquity. All written texts were read outloud, even when reading to oneself. Classical orthography made it very difficult to read ahead.

 

Also, I'm leery of the term "fluent", as that has a lot of implications. I prefer the term "fluidly", meaning that maybe you aren't reading as a native would, but at least you aren't stopping to translate every construction.

Edited February 17, 2012 by GGardner

[Classical Katharine]

The point about orthography is a fascinating one. If they were reading out loud to themselves they would have the opportunity we have to scan ahead, as I know I do when reading out loud, but it certainly is true that the harder the "font," the harder that is to do. We've all had the experience of trying to decipher someone else's difficult handwriting and being reduced to a word-at-a-time experience as a result. However we now get to read Latin in comfortable fonts . . .

 

As, sort of, an aside, I do sometimes notice that in discussions of "how best to do" Latin teaching, the discussion--and I don't mean this one--sometimes becomes polarized, as if one way works best for everyone. One way may work better for most or for more people, and that's certainly worth knowing and even worth promoting, if we want to see the most people benefit. But what if your child, or you, aren't part of the most or the more? Knowing when to use which methods and why for whom . . .

[Colleen in NS]

:lurk5: really enjoying the learning I'm experiencing in this thread...

[Ester Maria]

The second reason, is that it slows down reading tremendously, as you are always stopping and backtracking. Perhaps the biggest problem with intermediate and advanced Latin students is the speed at which they read Latin. It is common for 3rd year students to spend an hour translating a single page of Caesar. While some find the "crossword puzzle" method of decoding a sentence a fun challenge, others are completely demoralized. More importantly, you lose the entire thrust of the work, if it takes a whole semester to "read" the same amount of text that a 3rd year student of a modern foreign language could read in a week. That is to say, if you are always jumping around, trying to put the words into an English word order, you aren't "reading", you are "translating", and that's always going to be much slower than reading. Consider how you read a modern foreign language -- after a couple of years, you aren't translating each sentence into English,you just read it. I don't think you can get there in Latin if you are always jumping around the page.

I have not found this to be true. Students of modern languages struggle just as much to decode syntactically or lexically complex literature. "Decoding" of Latin *stops* at some point, one gets into the flow - the reason why students continue to translate as an exercise is because the art of translation in and of itself is one of the objectives of the study, not because they 'need' it to figure out the text. At some point, you get the text, but you still experiment with ways of rendering it artistically and as faithfully as possible in another language.

 

True, Latin lacks an active component, but with modern foreign languages it is not significantly easier if you tackle older / classical literature and attempt to translate it or understand it linguistically on its own terms. It is often very far removed from modern colloquial language which you learn for practical purposes.

[Classical Katharine]

Students of modern languages struggle just as much to decode syntactically or lexically complex literature. "Decoding" of Latin *stops* at some point, one gets into the flow - the reason why students continue to translate as an exercise is because the art of translation in and of itself is one of the objectives of the study, not because they 'need' it to figure out the text. At some point, you get the text, but you still experiment with ways of rendering it artistically and as faithfully as possible in another language.

 

Excellent point: reading is one goal, translation another, and translation isn't always inferior as a goal. It depends on what your purposes for interacting with a given foreign language text are. Where would we be if Bible translators didn't spend hours, days, as long as it takes, on a single verse, when need be? Or if translators of epic poetry didn't similarly wrestle over the nuance of every word?

 

Ester Maria hinted at this just now, but I do think there's often an inapt comparison between the fluency students achieve in something like French or Spanish, and how long it takes to get there, vs. the ponderous pace of progress in Latin. A debate over how to improve outcomes is a worthwhile one, but at the end of the day a large factor is how complex Latin itself is compared to many spoken languages. I was more fluent in French at the end of high school than I was in Russian at the end of college, and the main difference was the greater complexity of Russian--the pedagogical approach was similar and the student was very, very similar!

[Bluegoat]

Excellent point: reading is one goal, translation another, and translation isn't always inferior as a goal. It depends on what your purposes for interacting with a given foreign language text are. Where would we be if Bible translators didn't spend hours, days, as long as it takes, on a single verse, when need be? Or if translators of epic poetry didn't similarly wrestle over the nuance of every word?

 

 

I'm not sure that I see a division here. I think that to translate and really know any text you have to read it as a reader as well as actually translating. And to translate a particular text well you have to have read many other texts primarily as a reader.

[Halcyon]

Halcyon, may I have biceps like yours?

 

 

Where are you seeing my biceps??? :confused::tongue_smilie:

[Classical Katharine]

Bluegoat, I agree with you that both skills are desirable and that there is interplay and overlap between them. Certainly I started out in life "translating" and ended up reading, and there wasn't a moment in time when I just threw one overboard and started the other . . . I doubt there is for most people.

 

So I didn't mean to insist on an ironclad, all one or all the other distinction. But I do think there are times one is doing more one than the other. And some advocates of the method known technically as the "reading method" positively dislike and distrust "translation"; they find it intrinsically inferior as a thing to do and believe it positively interferes with acquisition of the skill called "reading." I don't agree with that position. To the extent that they are different, I think translation specifically has its time and place. And to the extent that they are different, I think that "translation" can lay a foundation for "reading." But I think you're right--the skills don't belong in boxes that don't communicate with one another. Thanks for that observation!

[Classical Katharine]

Where are you seeing my biceps??? :confused::tongue_smilie:

 

Your avatar, and I can tell you, they look a lot better there than the skinny things I drag off to the gym. You'd think lifting bags of groceries would make us look like the Riveter, but it hasn't worked for me.

 

My challenge is more not hurting myself at the gym while I try to become more capable of lifting grocery bags . . . thus becoming less capable.

 

(Not that I have any specific incidents in mind, you understand.)

"Decoding" of Latin *stops* at some point, one gets into the flow

 

I think that for many students, it doesn't stop, or at least the student stops studying before they get to that point. I've read variations of the same quote all the time: "I studied Latin for five years, and I never got past the crossword puzzle phase".

 

I'm not sure that I see a division here. I think that to translate and really know any text you have to read it as a reader as well as actually translating.

 

I humbly disagree. One of the most satisfying milestones for me in studying a language is completely understanding some phrase or sentence, but not not to be able to immediately translate it back into English. And accurate translation is very, very hard. It is very easy to lose nuance and precise meaning.

[Ester Maria]

I think that for many students, it doesn't stop, or at least the student stops studying before they get to that point. I've read variations of the same quote all the time: "I studied Latin for five years, and I never got past the crossword puzzle phase".

Oh, absolutely, but it is not only about the *subject* - it is about the *student*, too. People end up with less than stellar knowledge of Latin after having studied it for a while for same reasons why they end up with less than stellar knowledge of math, chemistry or art history - not everyone "clicks" with some fields, not everyone "clicks" with the dominant methods of teaching them, etc.

 

Also, to reach a stage at which you read fluently and automatically texts which are lexically and syntactically complex takes a lot of time and sustained effort in any language. Most people after having studied French for the same amount of time cannot just open Maupassant and read with perfect comfort. It took my daughter a full year and a half of fairly intense study to be able to comfortably read French literature in original and to be able to switch to schooling in French, and she is a native Italian speaker with a lot of childhood exposure to French (which means she got an 80-90% "discount" when studying French). It simply does not happen overnight and if you duly put in an hour a day over a few years in high school, you will certainly end up with some knowledge, with good knowledge, but people tend to pose double standards when it comes to Latin and expect a level of comfort you would not expect in modern languages. And then you get complaints that Latin is abnormally difficult, that grammar-translation method "does not work" (sure it does, but it takes time, like any other sustained intellectual effort - no "shortcuts"), and alike. It is not abnormally difficult, but it is a subject studied for purposes of general education in high school, and expectations must be in line with that. Unless one has a particular interest in it, but then we are stepping out of the framework of "Latin for purposes of general education".