Or, how I learned to trust Latin through reading.

I spent some time late last week and today getting ready for Son1's next two lessons in the long out-of-print 1930s textbook Latin Book One and doing a little background study. Last week I read through the LBO lessons. Yesterday I read slowly and carefully an explanation of the Dowling method for Latin (learn the grammar forms; memorize the Latin declensions, conjugations, etc; and once that's done, read, read, read Latin, especially Lingua Latina).

Today I worked through the Latin to English translation exercises and reread the reading for the lesson he'll do first this week. Finally, going a step further, I read Wheelock's Latin for the grammatical concepts Latin Book One has introduced so far (lessons I through X). By the way, Wheelock's covers nearly all of the LBO concepts plus a bunch more in four intense chapters with four or five times the vocabulary, all to be memorized. I'm really glad we're not working in Wheelock's!

As I was working my way through the Wheelock's descriptions of ablative of place, predicate nominative, and other grammatical terms, a little light bulb (compact fluorescent, of course!) went on over my head:  Aha!

The grammatical terms got between me and the Latin.

NOW I can begin to see why I found foreign language study much more helpful for my grammar understanding than my high school English instruction. And why immersion/reading approaches (especially but not only Lingua Latina) work just fine to teach the grammar -- the structure -- of the language without labelling the grammar action in English.

As Son1 and I work through the LBO reading at the beginning of each lesson, we refer to the new vocabulary but not yet the grammar instruction. That is a little of the Lingua Latina type of Latin study. We figure out what each word is doing from what we're reading BEFORE getting to the English explanation of what's going on.

Put another way,

- learning how Latin works by reading it, without the grammar labels

reminds me of

- beginning to read by memorizing and using the letter sounds, without the letter names (I learned the alphabet by letter sounds first)

and of

- learning to play the piano by learning which notes on the written staff go with which notes on the piano, without learning the names of the notes (ABCDEFG) (I taught myself from a beginner's book for a year at age 12 before getting a teacher).

For music, a better example still might be learning which musical notes that one hears go with which notes on the written staff, and then how to produce them with your instrument. That is a lot more like my choral experience (the voice is the instrument) from grammar school to beyond college).

Hmmm. It makes sense to me now that you can do just fine learning Latin without memorizing the finely detailed grammatical terms. You will of course learn the grammar -- but the super-detailed English labels are not so necessary. In fact, I think I've run across a book of Latin grammar in Latin, used by centuries of schoolchildren learning Latin, as I understand it. Could be interesting.

Now I understand that Latin through reading and some explanation works just fine (and it's much more interesting and fun than the firehose approach of Wheelock's). I am very happy with Latin Book One, and I am eager to try Minimus with Son2 soon, and Lingua Latina with Son1 this summer.

Wheee!