Generally, there two modes of thought on how to learn Latin: grammar-heavy pedagogy and natural method pedagogy. You can skip this section if you just want to read how to learn Latin. This just gives a background and justification for the method proposed.
Grammar-heavy pedagogy focuses on teaching the grammar rules explicitly. Although there is nothing wrong with teach the grammar explicitly (in fact, it usually speeds up language acquisition), unfortunately, most books that use this method have fallen into the trap of teaching a specific form of grammar-heavy pedagogy which is called the grammar-translation method (At least books that have been written in the 20th and 21st centuries). This method emphasizes learning Latin in order to be able to translate it. It does not concern itself - or if it does, only at a superficial level- with cultivating a genuine understanding of the language. Grammar-translation method is what you find in most high schools and virtually every university. It creates people who after their fourth year of studying, still have to refer to a dictionary for every couple of lines. That is because most textbooks of this nature don't have anywhere near enough engagement with the language itself, forcing students to treat it as a puzzle to solve rather than a language to understand. Students of this method, when they hear or read the sentence "puella in villam intrat," translate it in their head, rather than understand the Latin itself. Of course, when you first start learning a language, you are going to rely on translating everything in your head, but genuine fluency in any language means that you eventually have to transition from mentally translating to understanding the language itself, just as naturally as you understand your native language.
Here's an example of what a 3-5 year Latin student, who's been taught by the grammar-translation method, does when reading a sentence:
What you're looking at is a student's "parse" of the sentence. They go through and find which words go together, which words set up subordinate clauses, which words are subjects, which direct objects, etc. What a student (especially those who've been studying for 3 years) should be able to do is read it straight and understand it - subjects, direct objects, the whole bit- without having to search around the sentence with a pen and mark the which and what, just as you would do in your native language.
Why do schools still use the grammar-translation pedagogy even though it produces terrible results? A mix of clinging onto and misunderstanding tradition. In the mid 1800s and before, when every educated man was expected to be proficient in Latin (Euler, Gauss, and Riemann wrote papers in Latin.), Latin teachers could expect to have 20+ hours a week with their students to teach them Latin. This allowed them to teach the grammar explicitly and inculcate the rules in the minds of their students with practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening. When Latin was no longer considered an essential part of the curriculum, the amount of time students spent with the language dropped, but teachers generally stuck to the old method of teaching the grammar explicitly and trying to inculcate it with practice. We can see that some teachers tried to adapt by writing simple Latin readers for their students (such as Ad Alpes or Puer Romanus). As these old teachers were replaced by their students, the amount of teachers who genuinely knew the Latin language started to drop (if not fluent, at least B2 level. I'm using the CEFR to give a reference point. Latin doesn't have such a system - perhaps because it would expose an unsaid, ugly truth about most Latinists if there were one.). To these new teachers, all it took to learn Latin was the ability to memorize grammar rules and apply them to sentences with a dictionary nearby. This eventually lead to the situation of Latin grammar-heavy pedagogy today.
The 'natural' method is learning the language through using the language. It provides a large amount of comprehensible input (in the form of reading and listening) to get the student comfortable with the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and general feel of the language. It also requires the student to produce their own comprehensible output (in the form of writing and speaking). This is a critical part of language learning because it makes the student change from being a passive consumer of the language to an active producer, which forces him to get comfortable with producing his own thoughts using this new the morphology, syntax, and pronunciation.
There is an extreme (and lazy) form of this latter method floating around that claims you can learn a language by only passive consumption
of media and imitation of
native speakers without ever cracking open a grammarbook. Indeed, passive engagement and imitation of natives are both extremely beneficial to language
acquisition, but this can only teach you so much of the language. At some point, you are going to have to memorize the declension of der, die, das if you
want to stop making basic mistakes whenever you speak or write. Proponents of this extreme method often cite babies to claim that since a baby can
learn a language without opening a grammarbook, so can adults.
A few responses:
1. You are not a baby.
2. Children don't exactly give eloquent orations. It's cute to listen to them speak and hear them make minor mistakes and jumble up idioms; it is not cute to listen to you.
Children have people who will patiently listen and talk to them throughout day in and day out.
3. Children are taught grammar explicitly in gradeschool, middleschool, and highschool.
4. Children learn the language in a 100% immersive environment with the greatest incentive in the world (survival).
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