Cari amici,
My professor (who is an Italian classicist) tells me that there are no special techniques for reading latin save spending more time with Latin texts. While I appreciate her point, and no doubt it is an important one, I continue to struggle with mentally ordering latin sentences. I am taking Latin 3 this semester and would like to capitalize on the opportunity to improve my ability to read the beautiful texts under consideration.
What are some systematic ways in which you approach the reading of Latin?
How do you accommodate/recognize the logic of latin sentences?
Thank you for your time.
N
I would have to disagree very strongly with your teacher. There are techniques, but teachers seem to have lost them. They have dis-invested in the pedagogy. It is not an interest that gets college profs tenure. They need to get published in a journal, many times over.
Here are some things to try:
1. Practice with the understanding of thousands and thousands of short and readily understandable PHRASES not just individual words (a certain number of which you have to do, I admit).
2. Practice variations on those phrases.
3. Work up to longer and longer units.
4. Read sentences by
understanding the phrases in sequence as they arise. If you have no idea in your head after the first intelligible word-grouping (3, 4, 5 words usually), you need to get that idea before you go on (if at all possible). Teachers usually do not teach people how to chunk the sentences. You need to learn to do this on your own, but some books are available that do this for you.
5. Double-translation. (Translate a literary passage into English; wait; translate back into Latin; compare with the original.)
6. Practice oral Latin and incorporate descriptions of sense-base realities (e.g., you learn the parts of a house, then you describe what each room is used for, going from concrete objects to descriptions of events and practices and uses).
7. Listen to speakers of Latin. (E.g., search for Bas Bommel on Youtube.)
8. Write something in Latin every day.
9.
Rehearse understanding of a passage. Don't just labor through it once or twice and think you are done. Can you understand it phrase by phrase in sequence smoothly and easily as you read it aloud?
It is true, certainly, that lots of time is necessary, but you have to be doing the right things. I spent
years copying vocabulary into a notebook and working through line by line of poetry. I got nowhere fast. I was the same at the end as at the beginning as far as I could tell, even with a knowledge of most of the vocabulary.
Another tip: learn to read prose well before you spend much time on poetry.
Many people learned to achieve great fluency in Latin over the centuries. We should be better by now...