How to learn Latin: “do one thing and not omit the other” Part 1 of 2

If we asked students and teachers the question “What is Latin?”, we would hear a myriad of adjectives associated with the word: living or (almost always) dead; useful or (mostly) useless; beautiful and ugly; ancient; interesting; boring; difficult; not to mention Catholic; elitist; fascist. These are only a few adjectives, and they show how difficult it is to provide a firm and impartial definition of Latin. After all, any attempt to choose an appropriate adjective often distracts attention from the main point — from the quid, as Cicero would say — namely, from the subject itself: Latin. In short, Latin is a language; it is the language of the Latin people, of the ancient inhabitants of latium (Latium), or, more precisely, of the Romans. All living languages change over time, and Latin is no exception. Already in antiquity — especially after the fall of the Roman Empire — Latin slowly changed and, over time, gave rise to the Neo-Latin, or Romance, languages. It is a well-known but often forgotten fact that during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Latin, although it had become a dead language (that is, one with no native speakers), continued to function as a language: it was spoken, heard, read, and written. Of course, by then Latin was learned from books, no longer at home, and students learned Latin not to go shopping, but to discuss academic subjects — about the trivium and the quadrivium, as they were called in the Middle Ages —; nevertheless, it was Latin, that is, it was still a language.

What is a language, after all?

But what is a language? A language is nothing more than a system of sounds (spoken words and sentences) associated with things (objects, actions, thoughts, emotions) that give those sounds meaning. The primary aspect of every language, therefore — in a sense above all chronological, but also logical — is oral. From the first people who lived thousands of years ago and did not know how to write, to illiterate people living today, to newborns, language is what people say using the tongue (the organ whose articulation serves to produce sounds). Obvious as this point may seem, it deserves attention, especially because, according to a common way of thinking, language is essentially written language, but it is not. Writing, in fact — which is nothing more than an attempt to give graphic form to the sounds we have just mentioned, and as such does not precede but follows orality — was invented only a few thousand years ago and, therefore, very recently in the span of human history. Human beings, then, learn to produce sounds on the basis of a shared code within a community — a language, precisely. Whether Latin, Portuguese, or any other language, what is important to emphasize here is that learning any language begins naturally and, that is, by the very nature of languages and people, begins with listening: people listen, and by listening they learn; they establish, that is, the connection — I should say the synolon, between the words they hear and the things those words mean. Through imitation and use, therefore, they gradually learn to reproduce sounds, and they learn the language: pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.

The natural pattern: from passive to active

From this initial stage of language learning, in which there is a first passive part, listening, followed by an active part, speaking, we then move to the written part, where likewise there is a first passive part, reading, and a subsequent active part, writing. We can illustrate what we have just said with the following outline:

1. From oral use: first we listen (passive skill) — then we speak (active skill).
2. For written use: first we read (passive skill) — then we write (active skill).

This brief introduction seemed necessary because, once we have clarified the objective of our teaching (the quid), which is the Latin language, I believe we can identify and trace the path, the method, that will lead us to achieve our objective.

Why we teach Latin in school

The main reason Latin is taught in school is conscious reading, and therefore a deep understanding of the classics. If that were not so, we could simply read everything in translation; but if reading classical authors in their original language has been promoted in schools for more than two millennia, there must be a good reason for it, as I will try to show below. The teacher’s task, therefore, is to teach the language, and Latin is a language — that is, a system of sounds, as we have already said. These are sounds that have been uttered, with some variations, from ancient times to the present day. Even we teachers are not accustomed to hearing Latin; nevertheless, most ancient literature (to stay within the narrow limits of school curricula, which unfortunately leave out all later literature, from late antiquity to the modern age) was intended to be experienced orally: most plays, lyric poetry and poetry in general, oratory itself. If, then, we want to teach Latin as the language it is, I maintain that we should follow the outline given above, adapting it to our goal, which is, once again, the conscious reading of the classics. At first glance, this may seem a strange idea, given our collective habit of treating Latin as a dead, written language, imbued with an aura of sacredness that makes us mechanically repeat certain structures as Roman priests did when they recited formulas that not even they understood, because they were ancient. On the other hand, I take care not to insist that Latin is a living language; nevertheless, I cannot avoid pointing out that it is still a language, and that it is in the nature of languages, as well as of human learning, to begin with orality and arrive at writing; to begin with passive skills and arrive at active ones. Not because the goal is to speak and write in Latin (although this was done for fifteen centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire), but in order to understand classical literature better.

Not because the goal is to speak and write in Latin, but in order to understand classical literature better. — Roberto Carfagni

A practical example: Ambulo

Let me now provide some practical examples so that we can better understand how to apply, methodically, the principles set out above. Imagine that it is the first day of class and our students have never studied Latin. At a certain point, the teacher stands up and, while walking around the classroom, says: Ambulo. The teacher repeats the word (because repetita iuvant): Ambulo. It may seem childish, but it is not, because without going through translation we are creating in the students a mental association between words and things. At this point, the teacher turns to a student and, adding gestures to the words, says: Ambula! Again, the teacher repeats: Tu, discipule, ambula! Now both are walking around the room. The others watch with curiosity, but above all they listen. The teacher then says (with the help of gestures and appropriate intonation): (Ego) ambulo, (tu) ambulas, (ille) — pointing to a third student — non ambulat. Ambulo, ambulas, non ambulat. Tu et ego, nos, ambulamus, ille non ambulat. Quis ambulat? Magister ambulat. Antonius (the name of the student who is walking) quoque ambulat, Marcus (the other student) autem non ambulat. The teacher asks: Quis non ambulat? Then, turning to the students and pointing to Marcus, the teacher invites them to answer by saying: Marcus. If necessary, the teacher repeats the words or phrases together with the students. Turning to Marcus and always with the help of gestures, the teacher says: Tu quoque, Marce, ambula! At this point, the student begins to walk, and the teacher says: Marcus quoque ambulat. Antonius et Marcus ambulant, vos (pointing to the rest of the class) non ambulatis. Nos ambulamus, vos non ambulatis. Vos quoque, discipuli, ambulate! It is very important for the teacher to articulate the words clearly, slowly, with correct intonation and to accompany them with gestures and actions; and to avoid the temptation to translate as soon as students show any hesitation. If necessary, the teacher should repeat the same method several times. Later, the teacher moves on to the other three conjugations — taking care to choose regular verbs: for example, videre, audire, surgere, considere and perhaps sedere, to allow students to perceive the difference between the static sedere and the movement of considere. After having practiced the language orally, the teacher can read with the students a text containing the words and forms they heard in the first part of the lesson and, finally, can formalize the grammar, which in these examples is the present indicative and the imperative. At that point, to complete the path we have traced, the teacher will give the students some written exercises that include the use of the words, forms, and grammatical constructions that have just been explained.

“Active grammar”

This path, together with what I like to call “active grammar”, may at first seem easy and childish, but in reality it requires a rigorous method, not only to advance wisely and evenly from the concrete to the abstract, from what is more important to what is less important, from more common things to less common ones, but also to avoid improper use of the language by the teacher, who often receives no specific training. On the other hand, our final goal is not to speak Latin, much less to speak about our everyday life in Latin, but to teach the language — pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar — in an organic way, in order to achieve an authentic understanding of the texts, without the need to pass through the act of translation. By following the order we have described, we need not sacrifice any part of language study; on the contrary, because, on the one hand, we immerse students in the language and, on the other, make them aware of what they are learning, thanks to the precise formulation of words and grammatical concepts that are no longer abstract and devoid of communicative content, but connected to present and living reality, which is not only that of the classroom but also — and above all — that of classical texts.

The case of Josiah

Personally, I maintain that most Latin grammar can be explained in this oral and inductive way, and then formalized and deepened in the traditionally known manner. To confirm this, allow me a brief anecdote: about ten years ago, an eleven-year-old boy named Josiah, who was completely unknown to me, wrote to me about his desire to learn Latin actively over the internet. What surprised me most was not, as you might imagine, the fact that he had found me, but the proposal: to study over the internet. Despite Josiah’s young age, I was curious and wanted to try. I think I can confirm that, if a tree is judged by its fruits, this undertaking had an excellent result, since Josiah became the first American high school student to win a certamen in Italy, namely the Ovidianum in 2016. As far as I am concerned, what I learned from this experience, from which a friendship later grew, is the power of the spoken word — in Latin! — in language teaching. Josiah is a talented young man, but his excellent preparation is due in part to the method of study we used, as he himself acknowledges: from the very first day I began teaching him Latin, I accompanied the sounds not so much with actions (which is easier in a classroom), but with drawings and images that represented those sounds. In this way, we gradually reached fluent reading of classical texts, but also the composition of some poems in Latin, which earned him further recognition in his own country. It is important to repeat that the goal was not and is not to produce writers in Latin; but if, from the first day, Latin is studied for what it is — a language — at a certain point it becomes almost natural, I would not say to write verse, but rather to write a little good prose. There are also excellent examples of Italian students doing the same.

The challenge to teachers

Therefore, I want to challenge teachers to imagine how they might explain Latin grammar, morphology, and syntax first in an active, oral, inductive way, and then formalize them in a solid and traditional manner. Cases, the comparative and superlative, active and passive voice, verb tenses, indirect questions, the use of the cum and the subjunctive, etc., are all structures that can be illustrated in the way we showed above using forms of the present indicative and the imperative, provided you use your imagination and, most importantly, a coherent method in accordance with our goal, which is not to learn Latin as a living language or as a second language, but rather to learn it as a language in which more than two millennia of literature have been written.

From the humanist tradition to Rouse

On the other hand, the Humanists had already had this intuition regarding methods of teaching Latin: the authors of many of the colloquia scholastica; or Comenius, with his Orbis pictus; and in the 1920s W. H. D. Rouse, who applied the direct method used in teaching living languages to the classical languages. In this regard, the following words seem significant to me (Rouse and Appleton, Latin on the direct method, 1925, p. 2; emphasis is mine):

When applied to language teaching, the Direct Method means that the sounds of the foreign language are associated directly with a thing, or an act, or a thought, without the intervention of an English word, and these associations are grouped by a method so as to make the learning of the language as easy and rapid as possible, and are not introduced at random, as happens when children learn their own language in the nursery. It follows that speech precedes writing, and that the sentence (not the word) is the unit. The method is largely oral, but not wholly so: on the contrary, all the practices of indirect methods are used, but not at the same time, nor in the same proportion. Language is an art, and we proceed from art to science, from idiom to accuracy; idiom, the feeling for a language, is easily taught this way, and accuracy can wait. To begin with an attempt at exactness is to make the language always difficult and, with average minds, impossible to attain in the end. We shall see that four senses are used to make the impression: hearing first, then speech, then touch (when the new matter is written), and lastly sight. We may even include taste on certain occasions. The simpler the vocabulary, the easier it is to practice pronunciation and syntax: one thing is done at a time. The process is: first imitation, then imitation with a difference, and finally the use of what has thus been learned. — W. H. D. Rouse & R. B. Appleton, Latin on the direct method, 1925