Advanced reading help?

Latin Learning Latin
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I want to make sure I’m on the correct path (if there is such a thing!). I am currently reading daily and drilling vocabulary with an Anki deck. Mostly I will proceed through the reading at the same speed as if I were reading English, even if my comprehension isn’t 100%. I have found that sometimes I will catch a glimpse of the soul of the writing–whether it’s a descriptive passage in Ovid or an unexpected sweep in Livy–and ever since I’ve caught these glimpses, I’ve resolved myself to read for immersion.

I started by re-reading Ovid with the goal of reading him again and again to the point of a freakish memorization, but after 2-3 re-reads, the motivation dwindled and I moved to Vergil, and then halfway through Vergil I picked up Augustine, and then eased out of Augustine after a few books of City of God. At night I’ll pick a random author and read through: Juvenal, Lucretius, and recently I made it all the way through Lucan. If I merely continue to read and re-read and drill vocabulary, must I not eventually get a solid grasp?

I am currently going through Livy, determined to read through the whole text while pausing now and then to jot down a vocabulary word. What do you think about this strategy? Livy used to intimidate me, but I feel a little more comfortable the further I go.

For further background: I went through Wheelock’s and Lingua Latina I 5-6 years ago, and then I put Latin on hold after being intimidated by Lingua Latina II: Roma Aeterna. Now when I try to make it through Roma Aeterna, I get bored AND I do not comprehend all of it–an odd mix. Another recent enjoyment was Tarrant’s commentary on Vergil’s book XII–this was a great tool, although I only made it 60% through before moving on. Another thing that I’ve only recently incorporated, are flash cards of the ENGLISH word first, rather than the LATIN word. Somehow it took me this long to make this leap–will this also improve my reading? What can I do at this stage to read fluently?

Does anyone have experience with this learning method? I like to imagine someone in history had a book, a dictionary, and time, and eventually it clicked.

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While my Latin has become rusty over the years (I’m here because I’m getting back into it), I have had experience with other languages in the meantime, and have read a lot and talked to a lot of teachers about these things.

I haven’t looked through a lot of the stuff being read aloud on YouTube and similar, but in my experience with German and French, that helped me when used in addition with reading texts (especially music and films), because it gets the grammar and vocabulary into your head in a different way (reading comprehension is not the same as listening comprehension), so I’m interested in trying that out for myself.

As for not understanding all the words, we all learned our first language that way too, and eventually you figure out some things from the context. (If not, jot it down and get a dictionary later.) I’m going through some of the books I have that have texts and then questions, then just answering the questions again in my head.

With German, I just forced myself to hear it all the time, read it all the time, use it as much as possible, and I plan on doing the same with Latin. That, and remembering to think in the language rather than translating, but since my original Latin classes were taught in a fairly conversational way, I don’t have that much trouble with that part, it’s just getting my vocabulary back.

For that same reason, I personally don’t use flash cards because I feel like they’re promoting translation more than comprehension, but your mileage may vary and I’m sure some disagree with me there. My reasoning is that If you’re a native English speaker and are just now learning what the word “dog” refers to, you attach that word directly to the concept of canine animals; thus, when learning Latin and learning the word “canis,” I try to imagine a dog so I attach the word directly to that concept, rather than going “canis” → “dog” → [idea of dog].

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I wonder what you feel you will actually gain from this speed reading?

Ovid in particular plays verbal games with the reader which if you read it fast you are very likely to miss. Its only by rereading it carefully you begin to appreciate the artistry. All latin poets are very allusive and build on a literary tradition which if you just plough your way through it will pass by unnoticed.

Would you read Spenser quickly? Or Joyce? Would you advise a non-native that this would be a good way to learn English?

There is much to be said for reading a passage several times trying to work things out and improve your understanding but at some stage you will need to look at the passage carefully making sure you have understood the syntax and vocabulary at more than than a surface level. You will then need to think about what you have read actually means. This is the beginning of a life long project.

So if you continue as you are, provided you are not making too many errors which you do not correct, your fluency in reading will improve. Whether you understand what you read is another matter. I think you need to think about why you only “made it 60% through” Tarrant despite enjoying it. Literary commentaries are a key resource in understanding classical texts. One can only go so far in understanding a text without them. You can choose to reject or accept the interpretations you read but by reading them you are taking part in a centuries old conversation about the texts.

On a practical level if your aim is to become more proficient in reading I would suggest you supplement whatever reading you do with latin prose composition.

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My experience using something like this method has been with French and Greek rather than Latin. I’ve also heard from a second-hand acquaintance about doing something like this with other languages.

I think the danger with your method is that you will never actually close the loop by correcting any problems. You don’t want to be like the little kids who recite the pledge of allegiance in school but never understand the words.

For modern Greek, I used comic books (mostly Popeye and Asterix), and it worked fairly well. The pictures helped to ensure that I wasn’t misunderstanding things. Many years later, when I started on ancient Greek, I read the gospel of Mark, which I already was pretty familiar with, and I also could easily look up translations when necessary. In both cases I used a grammar, a dictionary, and flashcards.

The second-hand acquaintance was a university professor who was a medievalist working on the history of the Catholic Church. I heard about his system from one of his grad students. This guy would say, “Hey, I need to learn Armenian for my research,” so then he would just obtain a copy of the bible in Armenian and read it through from cover to cover, without a dictionary or a grammar, but since he knew the bible really well, he was never in doubt about the meaning – he was just learning the vocabulary and grammar by inference from the known meaning. He had learned something like 10 or 20 languages this way. Obviously not everybody would use this method, but I think the same principle is there: you want a way to close the loop using a known meaning.

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Thank you for this. I had a similar experience with German and I’m thankful for podcasts like Easy German where I can hear it being spoken. Similarly with trying to visualize the word instead of translating it, I use pictures on flash cards on words that I struggle with. What were your Latin classes like?

Great post, Seneca, and I was hoping you would respond! I’ve seen your responses elsewhere and you are sharp. I agree with you, but I want to challenge you a little further. The first time I read Ulysses I didn’t much catch anything, but I read it all the way through. The only thing I could takeaway was…Bloom was a dentist. What! Somehow I had gotten that lie into my ahead and everything else slipped through the cracks. But afterwards I re-read it, this time slowly, and with annotations, and somewhere around Hades and the preacher and the descriptions, I began to see. Now when I think of Ulysses, how endless are those beautiful moments! Molly’s waterfall at the end, Stephen leaving his sister Dilly, and Stephen sharpening up in the library for Scylla and Charybdis! (But why didn’t I read it slow the first time? Why did I power through? I don’t know…)

Thank you too for bringing up Spenser, because I recently went through the first few books of Faerie Queene, and I took it slow, like you say. However, I did not pause too often. I only paused at huge revelations and my favorite moments to let it sink in. I’m still not fully convinced of spending too much time on something rather than going forward and then coming back. To resort to authority, I’ll mention Mortimer J. Adler’s “How to Read a Book” that advises to read through first, and then go back again, and also Nabokov, who says we cannot understand a book on the first read.

I will admit that I haven’t done prose composition and it intimidates me. I’ve tried to journal but it comes rather slowly. I will search the forum for some Prose Composition books, because I remember seeing them mentioned.

Yes! I am not a little jealous of this technique. To know a text so well, that we could use it as a foundation to learn the grammar–I would like that. A couple times I tried this with Ovid, where I’d read the English translation of a book first, and then the Latin, but I quickly succumbed to being disappointed that I wasn’t getting the meaning as fast as in English. This is a failure on my part because I should take it slower and like Seneca says, recognize that it’s a life-long project. I’ve had my eyes on the Vulgate Bible for a while, and I’m ready to hop into it any time soon.

Thank you all for the terrific advice.

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Maybe. Yes, there certainly are people that manage to sabotage their foreign-language fluency somehow well into old age despite lots of work. I suspect that one thing that matters is precisely how you define “reading” practice.

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And since I posted that, I’ve remembered to actually subscribe to Deutsche Welle on YouTube, just the act of playing the news in German will help me not lose my hearing comprehension (I work as a translator and mostly only read and then translate, rather than write or speak or listen!) Was going to mention image flash cards but I’d turned off the computer by then! But English may still be useful for some flashcards or like “recite the imperfect endings!” Though I’d supplement that with writing out the verb endings using actual verbs, ideally.

My Latin classes were great, the teacher would greet us in Latin, make us respond in Latin, and made it fun by teaching conversational stuff and having us each make our own bulla (girls and boys). Some of us made tunics to wear. Though bullae were more usually lockets, he had us make wooden ones to wear every day. I made a pencil drawing of what mine looked like, since I don’t have it anymore (my “Latin” name is on it), below. I appreciate he actually bought stuff for us to make it more fun like that. This was in 6th and 7th grade, by the way, first language class I ever had but it got me hooked on language learning the extent that I took several more languages in high school and college.

A lot of reading with pictures and we did memorize grammar stuff, even without refreshing it I could recite the imperfect endings 30 years later! We’d recite all the non-present tense endings this way “-bam, -bas, -bat, -bamus, -batis, -bant” which was sort of like having access to the verb chart but inside your head.

I was going to bring up Joyce, but for other reasons. I see so many people complain about having to read him for college and saying it was like getting teeth pulled, I wonder if the view would be different in a forum about languages? I read him on my own (except for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and thought he was great delightful. Finnegan’s Wake was like extended wordplay, but I can understand some bad feelings if you were getting graded on your understanding of it.

I was watching something about how American diplomats take intensive language courses the other day, I liked the breakdown in the video of input (reading, hearing) vs. output (speaking, writing) and how listening allows you to get a “feel” for the grammar to an extent, but then you do need to do the technical stuff, memorize grammar rules, learn vocab. The guy in the video also mentioned watching the news (if it’s a living language, of course!) and things I did with German, like listening to music, watching German films (even took a German cinema course in German), buying novels in German.

I feel attacked! :laughing: No, I mean to say that I was once very good in Spanish and stopped using it, and now I’m not. And now I have relatives who’ve moved to Mexico and speak excellent Spanish and I feel a bit bad about it, though it’s only because I was focused on German and studying in Germany. My spoken French has become worse, too; I have some Sartre and Beckett and other stuff in French, and some films, but I don’t speak or write much, so that doesn’t help. At least I use German every day, still, so I feel like I can now use my time to get back into Latin.