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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 49 of 50 01 June 2009 at 9:22pm | IP Logged |
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When I was taught Latin in school around 1970 (with a supplementary course around 1976) the method was grammar-translation in its most pure form, i.e. take a Latin text with a simple wordlist and translate it into Danish, study some grammar (with drills and examples), take a number of Danish sentences and translate them into Latin. Read Latin aloud, but don't try to speak it. That was the method (though I didn't know its name), and as soon as I stopped learning languages my knowledge of Latin melted away far quicker than with any other language. The reason was of of course that being a 100% passive language I only could train it by reading, and apart from a few tombstones and isolated quotes I never ever used the language.
So for years I went around believing that my Latin studies had been totally wasted and an expression of totally inefficient pedagogics. Wrong. When I started rereading my Latin the words and the grammar felt like good ole friends, and it didn't take long to get to thinking in Latin. So I had to concede that grammar-translation was an efficient method, but just not enough. To get an active language you need to produce language, and the safest and least tiring place to do that is inside your own head. Why? Because teachers demand perfection, and that is silly and unwarranted and counterproductive. The important thing is to get the language 'rolling' in your head, and when that has been achieved there is time to weed out the errors. Instead of aiming for perfect understanding of a few complicated original texts and perfect, but slow and unspontaneous translation of a minimal number of phrases, the teachers of Latin should have asked for errorridden, but spontaneous understanding of those sacrosanct texts and errorridden, but spontaneous fluent production of babble. So grammar-translation as such wasn't at fault, but it was used on idiotic premises and without the necessary complement of productive methods. Edited by Iversen on 10 July 2009 at 10:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 50 of 50 02 June 2009 at 4:15pm | IP Logged |
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Interesting commment about your experience with Latin, Iversen! It seems to me that Latin studies can probably never be wasted -- If nothing else, it will increase your skills in your own language because you'd be able to know a lot more "difficult" words that stem from Latin.
The British people I know who studied Latin in school are absolute aces at grammatical terms. I have studied many more languages than they have, and from an earlier age, but I can just about distinguish betwen the most basic forms of verbs and adjective. This kind of advanced grammar is really confusing! But the Latin learners always know this kind of stuff inside out. I suspect they spend a term just learning grammar! I don't really know why this is. I am pretty sure I have read or heard more than once that people who know the basics of Latin have an easier time learning other languages. So that's three big advantages from latin right there! It's interesting from the point of view of this thread because Latin was such a popular subject in the past. Saying that, I have decided not to tackle Latin - I still want to use a language mainly for communication with other (non-academic..) people. Edited by cordelia0507 on 02 June 2009 at 8:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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