This is a great statement of the "mixed method" of language instruction, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The natural method (usually) has the right end in mind, which is essential, viz. reading Latin texts. It also supplies the essential fuel for language acquisition: comprehensible input.
But immersion sans grammatical instruction is only an efficient method if it's full immersion, or at least close to it. For example, learning Thai by living in Thailand with a Thai family. By contrast, going to class a couple hours a week and speaking in Latin isn't even close to full immersion, and proponents of the natural method do themselves and their students a disservice by withholding explicit grammatical instruction in such cases.
You can even defend grammatical instruction from within a CI-framework. For example, a very simple and concise explanation of the grammar in a sentence from a teacher can transform that sentence from incomprehensible to comprehensible input. So, like you say, grammatical instruction and natural method/immersion/CI are in fact allies. They just need to play their respective parts and be properly ordered.
Yes, and the appropriate balance of the different parts is going to vary based on the student’s age, previous language experience, etc etc. The real, secret reason to learn Latin is that it’s good mental preparation for Greek!
Two things from my own experience of classical language pedagogy that seem relevant:
1) A possible secret, third thing for classical language learning was Gareth Morgan's *Lexis* morphological approach, as taught in the University of Texas's Intensive Summer Greek program (and now available as a self-study textbook and some other tools): https://jamesfpatterson.com/gml/
It sought to teach the roots and basic morphological rules that led to the complex grammatical tables through examples of slightly-simplified real prose, which were gradually ramped up to real Greek as you went. I found it extremely congenial and went from not even being able to sound-out the Greek Alphabet to reading *Philoctetes* in the original (albeit, poorly, but I blame me more than the instruction for that) over the course of a summer. Compared to poetry, it was *very* effective at learning to read prose, like Herodotus (but it did okay with Homer, which I could read decently back in the day).
2) Another benefit of the Grammar-Translation approach: songs as mnemonics! My high school Latin teacher taught us the first declension table to the tune of "Cielito Lindo," and the second declension to the tune of "The Mickey Mouse Club." I can still recite those from memory at 40, but the third declension (alas, with no song), I have to squint and struggle and guess at. Just like how literate English speakers don't break into the "ABC" song to figure out what weird glyphs they're looking at, but might still call it up when trying to alphabetize something, such formal mnemonics are sometimes helpful, and are made easier by more structured approaches.
Cheers, and good luck with "CLT, but structured better,"
"Just like how literate English speakers don't break into the "ABC" song to figure out what weird glyphs they're looking at, but might still call it up when trying to alphabetize something"
I have sometimes wondered if I am the only one who does that, or at least still needs to do it. Glad to know I am not alone :D
> This doesn’t matter so much for simple stories, since you can probably figure it out from context
At this point my brain was screaming "whole language method!" I'm happy that point came up later.
There's a little book called Gwynne's Latin, which one should imagine read by someone in perfect RP English while wearing a chalk dusten tweed jacket. He first throws a diatribe against the "modern method" that makes me think he would do well on Twitter, then there's the tables and brief examples that anyone using the 1st edition CLC could consult alongside their textbook and gain an instant unfair advantage over the rest of their class.
Reading this blog has started to cost me quite a bit in purchases of books that are not available at the library. I'm so glad this review will be "free." :-D
I started Latin with Horn, Gummere, and Forbes' Using Latin I (1961 edition), which taught grammar at a rapid pace and had interesting readings from pretty much the beginning, as well as good little snippets of culture in every unit. (Instead of Caecilius, what I think of as my first Latin, though it's actually the third or fourth text, is "Roma magnas cloacas habet," Rome has large sewers. In French class you have to wait till you read Les Misérables to get to the sewers!) It was the ideal textbook for middle-schooler me. (I was self-taught; I placed out of regular Latin in college but took medieval Latin for my medieval studies degree.)
ok first to indulge in some pedantry: one would remember "Caecilii" because verbs of remembering and forgetting take a genitive object.
now for real: this is one of the most interesting articles I have read in a long time. As a Latin educator it gave me a lot to think about. I enjoy the Cambridge Latin curriculum for its stories, but I have never taught or learned with it (I just collect Latin textbooks for fun) so I was frankly unaware of the history and the many vices of the project. I do know some very excellent teachers who love teaching with it so I wonder if some of the foibles are remediable with the proper supplementation of grammar charts and pedagogy. I really like the comparison of the agenda of the series to the "whole word method" fiasco which, having a child who is learning the aphabet and letter sounds, I think about a lot.
As a further anecdote to agree with another of your points, I learned Latin with LLPSI and can read and understand a good swath of Latin sight unseen. Not perfectly, and certainly not all Latin (Boethius was a nightmare for me) but it is a skill to which I largely credit a) starting Latin very young (age 8-9) b) an excellent Latin teacher and c) Oerberg.
Ah, you're totally right about the case! I hang my head in shame.
The grammatical flaws of Cambridge Latin are definitely remediable to some degree, but you have to be pretty clever about it because topics are introduced in such an odd order -- if you wanted to make your students memorize declensions, for instance, you would have to wait until halfway through the second year (or introduce them to the genitive way earlier). But yes, I think the people who teach well with Cambridge typically create their own parallel grammar curriculum.
> ok first to indulge in some pedantry: one would remember "Caecilii" because verbs of remembering and forgetting take a genitive object.
"Meminisse" & "recordārī" take the accusative rather more often than the genitive, & "recognōscere" only takes the accusative.
> I wonder if some of the foibles are remediable with the proper supplementation of grammar charts
I learned Greek using "Athenaze", which has some of the same flaws, & this is basically what I did: when I noticed a grammatical form I didn't know or an unexplained inconsistency, I would look it up, either in the grammatical charts in the appendix or online, in order to try to learn the rule behind it.
You’ve got me there as recognosco probably makes the most sense in this context.
I learned with Athenaze too and I’m deplorable at Greek. Despite several years of reading Greek literature at the college level and Greek being on my diploma (along with Latin) I never internalized the grammar enough to read it easily without constant referencing. I gave up and went Latin only for grad school.
I’ve always been perplexed by Mary Beard’s confession. If I were incompetent in the language of my specialization, the last thing I’d want to do would be confessing it in a major newspaper.
That being said, when I read from *Wheelock’s Latin* in middle school back around 2000, it did seem to avoid the mistakes attributed to the CLC here. At least, I haven't forgotten my declensions.
I think a lot of classicists see their field as the study and reinterpretation of a limited number of very well-known texts, so any difficulty or lack of fluency doesn't really matter if you're just tackling Tacitus for the twelfth time. The Vesuvius scrolls seem extra exciting in this context, since we might actually get something NEW and that would change the whole field for the first time in, oh, 1500 years.
This is all correct and matches my experience, but the natural language would out you for calling them by a name they think is misleading, the people call themselves Comprehensible Input, which might be best described as "sheltered vocabulary (unlike real life, only giving students a few new words per day) unsheltered grammar" (like in real life language). "Sheltered vocabulary, unsheltered grammar" produce a great range of wonderful little novellas on Amazon. Highly recommend and they are *far* more entertaining than Lingua Latina.
"students at classical schools, who are the only ones getting structured English grammar instruction nowadays, are probably better equipped to learn Latin with the natural method than anyone else." True but never underestimate a student's ability to ignore possible connections between the various subjects they study.
I always thought of CI as a particular tool that could be used alongside a fully natural or hybrid approach, rather than a synonym for natural -- you can imagine a natural method textbook that moves quickly, constantly pushing students to wrap their heads around new grammar rather than giving them time to repeatedly practice and absorb the "easy" stuff. But this probably comes down to a difference between adult autodidacts and a classroom setting -- appropriate pacing is much easier if you're doing it for yourself!
Did I miss a paragraph or three where you described some horrible problem with the modern CLC besides being too slow to introduce a declension that accounts for less than 1% of Latin words? The history of the CLC is fascinating but the pedagogical critique of it here just seems really thin.
(Yes, I'm a little defensive as someone who confidently read Ovid and Virgil on the back of the CLC in high school, only to struggle in college because my professor was an old Oxford snob who expected a completely different approach. Also *Unsong* and *Loki* both have delightful comic moments that only hit as intended if you're a CLC kid and I'm never giving that up.)
Your observation that learning Latin grammar likely prepared students to more easily learn English grammar reminded me that there's an entire series of books titled *English Grammar for Students of [insert foreign language here]* that teaches students unfamiliar with grammar terminology how the term works in both English and the foreign language.
I was planning to have my son (8yo) start working through Familia Romana, but I just discovered he'll be studying some Latin at school starting in the fall. They'll be using the Minimus series, and I'm wondering what I should do to support and/or supplement.
Minimus is fine as a “look kids, here’s what Latin looks like!” but it’s even worse than the big kid CLC as language pedagogy.
If you know Latin you can certainly make LLPSI work, but the best “out of the box” textbook solution I’ve seen is “Latin for Children” from Classical Academic Press, which also had readers on Roman history to go alongside.
Thank you for this! My organization recently published a new online Latin textbook that attempts to take a middle path between grammar translation and the "natural" method: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/living_latin. It works for individual learners and for schools. Please check it out, and if you like it, tell your friends!
In this review we have yet another piece of evidence for why you are a better writer than I: you wrote the entire thing without saying “CLC delenda est”.
Carla Hurt is a Latin teacher, she wrote a tiered reader of the Aeneid book four, and a wonderful essay on Latin pedagogy. Her basic point is that there are fast and slow ways to learn, but everything works eventually. She likes “comprehensible input” as a metric for learning, which I believe is the newest trend in language teaching. It convinced me!
I need to as the obvious of all the Latin-reading people here: in what context did you learn Latin in middle school? I could understand a college student studying it, but it's hardly standard curriculum in youth education.
There's a "classical academy" in my neighborhood, and I assume they teach Latin. Did you all go to classical academies?
It used to be more common in “normal” schools a generation ago, but the prevalence in public schools seems to be very regional. (More nationally, most Catholic schools do offer it, and many of the expensive/prestigious secular private schools do too.)
This is a great statement of the "mixed method" of language instruction, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The natural method (usually) has the right end in mind, which is essential, viz. reading Latin texts. It also supplies the essential fuel for language acquisition: comprehensible input.
But immersion sans grammatical instruction is only an efficient method if it's full immersion, or at least close to it. For example, learning Thai by living in Thailand with a Thai family. By contrast, going to class a couple hours a week and speaking in Latin isn't even close to full immersion, and proponents of the natural method do themselves and their students a disservice by withholding explicit grammatical instruction in such cases.
You can even defend grammatical instruction from within a CI-framework. For example, a very simple and concise explanation of the grammar in a sentence from a teacher can transform that sentence from incomprehensible to comprehensible input. So, like you say, grammatical instruction and natural method/immersion/CI are in fact allies. They just need to play their respective parts and be properly ordered.
Yes, and the appropriate balance of the different parts is going to vary based on the student’s age, previous language experience, etc etc. The real, secret reason to learn Latin is that it’s good mental preparation for Greek!
Haha too true!
Two things from my own experience of classical language pedagogy that seem relevant:
1) A possible secret, third thing for classical language learning was Gareth Morgan's *Lexis* morphological approach, as taught in the University of Texas's Intensive Summer Greek program (and now available as a self-study textbook and some other tools): https://jamesfpatterson.com/gml/
It sought to teach the roots and basic morphological rules that led to the complex grammatical tables through examples of slightly-simplified real prose, which were gradually ramped up to real Greek as you went. I found it extremely congenial and went from not even being able to sound-out the Greek Alphabet to reading *Philoctetes* in the original (albeit, poorly, but I blame me more than the instruction for that) over the course of a summer. Compared to poetry, it was *very* effective at learning to read prose, like Herodotus (but it did okay with Homer, which I could read decently back in the day).
2) Another benefit of the Grammar-Translation approach: songs as mnemonics! My high school Latin teacher taught us the first declension table to the tune of "Cielito Lindo," and the second declension to the tune of "The Mickey Mouse Club." I can still recite those from memory at 40, but the third declension (alas, with no song), I have to squint and struggle and guess at. Just like how literate English speakers don't break into the "ABC" song to figure out what weird glyphs they're looking at, but might still call it up when trying to alphabetize something, such formal mnemonics are sometimes helpful, and are made easier by more structured approaches.
Cheers, and good luck with "CLT, but structured better,"
Jeff
"Just like how literate English speakers don't break into the "ABC" song to figure out what weird glyphs they're looking at, but might still call it up when trying to alphabetize something"
I have sometimes wondered if I am the only one who does that, or at least still needs to do it. Glad to know I am not alone :D
> This doesn’t matter so much for simple stories, since you can probably figure it out from context
At this point my brain was screaming "whole language method!" I'm happy that point came up later.
There's a little book called Gwynne's Latin, which one should imagine read by someone in perfect RP English while wearing a chalk dusten tweed jacket. He first throws a diatribe against the "modern method" that makes me think he would do well on Twitter, then there's the tables and brief examples that anyone using the 1st edition CLC could consult alongside their textbook and gain an instant unfair advantage over the rest of their class.
Reading this blog has started to cost me quite a bit in purchases of books that are not available at the library. I'm so glad this review will be "free." :-D
I started Latin with Horn, Gummere, and Forbes' Using Latin I (1961 edition), which taught grammar at a rapid pace and had interesting readings from pretty much the beginning, as well as good little snippets of culture in every unit. (Instead of Caecilius, what I think of as my first Latin, though it's actually the third or fourth text, is "Roma magnas cloacas habet," Rome has large sewers. In French class you have to wait till you read Les Misérables to get to the sewers!) It was the ideal textbook for middle-schooler me. (I was self-taught; I placed out of regular Latin in college but took medieval Latin for my medieval studies degree.)
ok first to indulge in some pedantry: one would remember "Caecilii" because verbs of remembering and forgetting take a genitive object.
now for real: this is one of the most interesting articles I have read in a long time. As a Latin educator it gave me a lot to think about. I enjoy the Cambridge Latin curriculum for its stories, but I have never taught or learned with it (I just collect Latin textbooks for fun) so I was frankly unaware of the history and the many vices of the project. I do know some very excellent teachers who love teaching with it so I wonder if some of the foibles are remediable with the proper supplementation of grammar charts and pedagogy. I really like the comparison of the agenda of the series to the "whole word method" fiasco which, having a child who is learning the aphabet and letter sounds, I think about a lot.
As a further anecdote to agree with another of your points, I learned Latin with LLPSI and can read and understand a good swath of Latin sight unseen. Not perfectly, and certainly not all Latin (Boethius was a nightmare for me) but it is a skill to which I largely credit a) starting Latin very young (age 8-9) b) an excellent Latin teacher and c) Oerberg.
Ah, you're totally right about the case! I hang my head in shame.
The grammatical flaws of Cambridge Latin are definitely remediable to some degree, but you have to be pretty clever about it because topics are introduced in such an odd order -- if you wanted to make your students memorize declensions, for instance, you would have to wait until halfway through the second year (or introduce them to the genitive way earlier). But yes, I think the people who teach well with Cambridge typically create their own parallel grammar curriculum.
> ok first to indulge in some pedantry: one would remember "Caecilii" because verbs of remembering and forgetting take a genitive object.
"Meminisse" & "recordārī" take the accusative rather more often than the genitive, & "recognōscere" only takes the accusative.
> I wonder if some of the foibles are remediable with the proper supplementation of grammar charts
I learned Greek using "Athenaze", which has some of the same flaws, & this is basically what I did: when I noticed a grammatical form I didn't know or an unexplained inconsistency, I would look it up, either in the grammatical charts in the appendix or online, in order to try to learn the rule behind it.
You’ve got me there as recognosco probably makes the most sense in this context.
I learned with Athenaze too and I’m deplorable at Greek. Despite several years of reading Greek literature at the college level and Greek being on my diploma (along with Latin) I never internalized the grammar enough to read it easily without constant referencing. I gave up and went Latin only for grad school.
I’ve always been perplexed by Mary Beard’s confession. If I were incompetent in the language of my specialization, the last thing I’d want to do would be confessing it in a major newspaper.
That being said, when I read from *Wheelock’s Latin* in middle school back around 2000, it did seem to avoid the mistakes attributed to the CLC here. At least, I haven't forgotten my declensions.
I think a lot of classicists see their field as the study and reinterpretation of a limited number of very well-known texts, so any difficulty or lack of fluency doesn't really matter if you're just tackling Tacitus for the twelfth time. The Vesuvius scrolls seem extra exciting in this context, since we might actually get something NEW and that would change the whole field for the first time in, oh, 1500 years.
"Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis" is still in print.
This is all correct and matches my experience, but the natural language would out you for calling them by a name they think is misleading, the people call themselves Comprehensible Input, which might be best described as "sheltered vocabulary (unlike real life, only giving students a few new words per day) unsheltered grammar" (like in real life language). "Sheltered vocabulary, unsheltered grammar" produce a great range of wonderful little novellas on Amazon. Highly recommend and they are *far* more entertaining than Lingua Latina.
"students at classical schools, who are the only ones getting structured English grammar instruction nowadays, are probably better equipped to learn Latin with the natural method than anyone else." True but never underestimate a student's ability to ignore possible connections between the various subjects they study.
I always thought of CI as a particular tool that could be used alongside a fully natural or hybrid approach, rather than a synonym for natural -- you can imagine a natural method textbook that moves quickly, constantly pushing students to wrap their heads around new grammar rather than giving them time to repeatedly practice and absorb the "easy" stuff. But this probably comes down to a difference between adult autodidacts and a classroom setting -- appropriate pacing is much easier if you're doing it for yourself!
Did I miss a paragraph or three where you described some horrible problem with the modern CLC besides being too slow to introduce a declension that accounts for less than 1% of Latin words? The history of the CLC is fascinating but the pedagogical critique of it here just seems really thin.
(Yes, I'm a little defensive as someone who confidently read Ovid and Virgil on the back of the CLC in high school, only to struggle in college because my professor was an old Oxford snob who expected a completely different approach. Also *Unsong* and *Loki* both have delightful comic moments that only hit as intended if you're a CLC kid and I'm never giving that up.)
Your observation that learning Latin grammar likely prepared students to more easily learn English grammar reminded me that there's an entire series of books titled *English Grammar for Students of [insert foreign language here]* that teaches students unfamiliar with grammar terminology how the term works in both English and the foreign language.
There's even one for Latin!
https://a.co/d/8i8Qfmv
Yes! Those are excellent books.
I'm curious to know what you think about the Minimus series?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Minimus-Pupils-Book-Starting-Latin/dp/0521659604
I was planning to have my son (8yo) start working through Familia Romana, but I just discovered he'll be studying some Latin at school starting in the fall. They'll be using the Minimus series, and I'm wondering what I should do to support and/or supplement.
When I was a kid we used Civis Romanus: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Civis-romanus-Reader-First-Years/dp/B0041MAM24/
And the associated exercise book: Mentor: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/116267842041
Minimus is fine as a “look kids, here’s what Latin looks like!” but it’s even worse than the big kid CLC as language pedagogy.
If you know Latin you can certainly make LLPSI work, but the best “out of the box” textbook solution I’ve seen is “Latin for Children” from Classical Academic Press, which also had readers on Roman history to go alongside.
Thank you for this! My organization recently published a new online Latin textbook that attempts to take a middle path between grammar translation and the "natural" method: https://www.paideiainstitute.org/living_latin. It works for individual learners and for schools. Please check it out, and if you like it, tell your friends!
Thanks! I’m a big fan of the Paideia Institute’s live classes.
In this review we have yet another piece of evidence for why you are a better writer than I: you wrote the entire thing without saying “CLC delenda est”.
Only because I couldn’t decide what gender it should be… ;)
Fabula Cerberi est optima! Maybe I ought to read the CLC…
I learned via Orberg’s Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata and loved it, but I wanted a bit more of the grammar.
You might also find this essay interesting: https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/
Carla Hurt is a Latin teacher, she wrote a tiered reader of the Aeneid book four, and a wonderful essay on Latin pedagogy. Her basic point is that there are fast and slow ways to learn, but everything works eventually. She likes “comprehensible input” as a metric for learning, which I believe is the newest trend in language teaching. It convinced me!
The CLC is all available to read on archive.org! It really is a fun read. I'll check out the Hurt essay, thanks.
I need to as the obvious of all the Latin-reading people here: in what context did you learn Latin in middle school? I could understand a college student studying it, but it's hardly standard curriculum in youth education.
There's a "classical academy" in my neighborhood, and I assume they teach Latin. Did you all go to classical academies?
It used to be more common in “normal” schools a generation ago, but the prevalence in public schools seems to be very regional. (More nationally, most Catholic schools do offer it, and many of the expensive/prestigious secular private schools do too.)