English Grammar For Students Of Latin Pdf

[Catrin Muzquiz]

Withthe advent of a Classical Conversations community to our western corner of the world, my students and I leaped, catapulted, surged, and hurtled mad-dashedly (you get the idea) into Challenge II. Yes, Challenge II was to be our first experience and introduction into Classical Conversations. Not Challenge A, B, or even Challenge I. No Foundations, and especially no Essentials. Yes, we were starting Challenge without Foundations or Essentials (cue the dramatic music).

By now I can hear most of you veterans of the Essentials program wagging your heads, but to convince you that the study of Henle Latin is very similar to the systematic study of the English grammar in Essentials, I will give you the most terrifying example of all: that of the nefarious pronoun.

Before I could even discuss the relative pronoun with my students, I had to invoke the relative clause. But what is a clause? It has a name, the name stands for the thing. But they had never learned, or had never learned for a duration, over time, those names. Not the way you learn them in Essentials.

But from my experience (forgive me, Dorothy) the opposite is even more relevant. The time spent in an Essentials program is not (though it may seem so at times) vain repetition. It is the quickest and easiest way to gain mastery over another language like Latin because it supplies the structure upon which any language is learned.

From expanding your English vocabulary and improving your critical thinking skills, to boosting your Scrabble game and even deepening your Harry Potter trivia, the Latin language has countless benefits to offer students today!

Much of the English language stems from Latin. These origins go beyond vocabulary and include grammatical rules, too. A firm foundation in Latin will help you learn new words while improving your English grammatical and structural knowledge. You'll likely find yourself speaking, writing, and reading with more confidence in your other classes as a result.

Beyond expanding your vocabulary, learning Latin can help you decipher new words quickly in the future. If you go on to study law or medicine, for example, you'll find it easier to identify complex phrases or words by their Latin roots.

Ever have that moment when you're struggling to find the perfect word to express a thought or feeling? You might be surprised to learn that learning Latin could be the cure. Studying this foundational language will help you understand the real meaning of words in a whole new way.

We can all admit that English grammar doesn't always make a whole lot of sense. Even if you're a native speaker, it can often be tricky to remember the irregular rules that make up our grammar and vocabulary. When you learn Latin, you'll have a handy set of tips and tricks that you can apply to your English writing and reading every day.

At Hun, our Latin classes go far beyond the semantics of the language. Our students are immersed in an engaging classics and civics lesson that transports them back in time. You'll learn about the history and politics that surround the Latin language, and how every component connects to the democratic structure we know today.

As a result, you'll discover how each small detail works together to form the bigger picture. This understanding can spill over to many other classes, from social studies and government to world geography.

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In my previous posts, I listed all the places you can learn introductory Latin online with teachers who speak the language, through both live classes and self-paced courses. The average cost of the live courses was about $1,500, while the average cost of a self-paced course (one with pre-recorded video lessons) was about $500. For many learners in the community, even the relatively cheaper options for learning Latin with a teacher may be out of their price range. That is why so many opt instead for teaching themselves Latin. By becoming autodidacts (self-teachers), they can save hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars.

But many Latin autodidacts are vulnerable to being deceived by well-intentioned language advice which tells them to work hard at meaningless things instead of focusing on truly communicative, meaningful, and beneficial activities. In this article, I will explain the difficulties facing autodidacts, debunk some language learning myths, define meaningful activites, outline five viable strategies for learning Latin, and even talk about how cults of celebrity propagate misinformation, and how to avoid being deceived by them.

As a high school Latin teacher in my sixth year of teaching, I have a professional responsibility to learn how people learn languages, and to let my practice be informed by genuine scholarship and not just heritage practices or hearsay.

Unfortunately, the classroom experience of language learning distorts public ideas of what learning a language ought to look like. This is unhelpful to an autodidact for two reasons. Firstly, they are no longer in a classroom. Secondly, the practices are not always the most effective for language acquisition: often even the language teachers who are the most on board with SLA research are forced to compromise between best practices for actually learning a language, and implementing a mixture of inherited practices that were fine-tuned for behaviour control and maximising test scores.

It is therefore no wonder that the public flocks to apps like Duolingo. They have grown to expect that language learning is an inherently unpleasant experience, filled with rote-learning, vocab tests, practicing verb conjugations, and translating isolated sentences into and out of the target language, or repeating boring stock answers to stock questions. If those unpleasant parts can be gamified to give you points and stars in an app (thus replacing the grade incentives that got you through school), then this app must have finally cracked the code for how to learn languages as adults.

I will not review Latin Duolingo here. But instead I want to encourage you all to look deeper into what it means to learn a language, and to investigate what is really important, and what is not. If you can understand the principles of language learning, and what a language fundamentally is, you will be able to develop sustainable, satisfying language learning practices which are adapted for your situation.

Interpreting and expressing meaning is fundamental to the nature of language and how we most effectively learn it. Our brains have been learning language through understanding input for (presumably) as long as we have had languages. People who grow up in multilingual parts of the world effectively learn multiple languages without considering it anything special, because they use the languages as languages: systems of communicating meaning.

If we want to take full advantage of the very part of the brain which is best suited to learning languages, we should be focusing most of our time on doing meaningful activity in the language: activities which require us to either interpret or express meaning, or both. This is the core of the communicative approach.

By contrast, meaningful activity is essential to language learning, because making form-meaning connections is the basis of learning a language. Any activity which does not genuinely engage with meaning is missing a crucial element. In order to associate all the various words, phrases, grammar, and syntax with their meaning, we need to encounter them many times in contexts where their meaning matters.

Songs aside, most of the activities I have listed as meaningless busy-work tend to be quite mechanical and dull, whereas the activities I listed as meaningful input activities find their sucess in the simple pleasure of understanding meaning in the language, and are tied to a meaningful context. This is a win-win for us language learners. It turns out that the most valuable activities you can do in a language are also the ones which are the most inherently enjoyable.

But it must be asked, what value does the language learner gain from producing output? There is longstanding debate among SLA researchers about the role which output should play in language learning, and this is worth considering. Positions vary from those who believe output is unnecessary, and who claim input alone is sufficient for developing a functional proficiency in the target language, to those who believe that output is necessary for a fully-rounded and more deeply inter-connected understanding of the language.

On the side of those claiming that input is sufficient for language development, there are notable cases of people who developed a sophisticated comprehension of their target language through years of purely input-based activities. Matt vs Japan learned Japanese to a very high level largely through watching entertainment media, and reported that he only needed a couple weeks of practice to activate his wide knowledge to speak Japanese to other people.

Have you noticed how intrigued and inspired young people get when they see living people speak a dead language? In an age where old content gets buried under mountains of new content every single day, people who produce Latin are making our language seen and heard, especially by the younger generations.

Communciative output activities require an audience that cares more about what you are saying than how well you are saying it. You can find sympathetic Latin speakers on the Latin subreddit, on the various Latin Discord servers (such as the general Latin Discord, and the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Discord), on the weekly Latin Zoom chats, and by writing a post in the Latin subreddit asking if there are any Latin speakers in your city or local area. Try contacting the nearest University that teaches Latin to ask if there is a local Latin club. You can even directly hire Latin speaking tutors on iTalki.

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