I have recently been reading Eleanor Dickeys’ “Learn Latin from the Romans”.
I thought I would share some remarks she makes in the introduction.
"Throughout this course students are encouraged to use Latin actively as well as passively, by translating into Latin as well as out of it. The reason for this practice is not a belief on my part that all students should learn to write good Latin; I do want to give students the opportunity to learn to write good Latin if they so desire, but many quite reasonably want to learn the language in order to read what the ancients wrote, rather than in order to add to our store of Latin literature. The point of translating into Latin is that good reading knowledge can never be attained without some active capacity in a language. Language learners forget material almost as fast as they learn it; individual students often see this as some peculiar shortcoming in themselves, but it is actually a feature of the way human memory works, and one has to accept it and work with it rather than being ashamed of it. The best way to deal with the problem of forgetting things, of course, is to re-learn them, and every student has to do a lot of re-learning throughout an elementary language course (though each time around is easier than the time before – this is a more fortunate feature of the way human memory works). But even with extensive re-learning, most people are unable to retain simultaneously all the material that they learn; sometimes each word that enters the brain seems to push another one out.4 And yet it is not possible to read a page of Latin literature without retaining nearly all the material in this book.
4 This phenomenon has in fact been documented by scientists and is known as ‘retroactive interference’. An understanding of memory and how it works can be very useful to language students; one good work on this topic is A. Baddeley, Your Memory: A User’s Guide (London 1996). " p. xvi.
“The author of this book did not have an easy time learning Latin. I struggled repeatedly with concepts that ought to have been easy, took years to reach the stage where I could read any original literature at all, and was the only member of my (originally large) Latin class who made it to that stage. I only got there thanks to dedicated teachers at the more advanced levels, who insisted that I re-learn all the grammar from scratch and helped me to do so. Throughout my time as a student and my decades of teaching since then, I have thought about what could have made my task as an elementary Latin student easier and more enjoyable: this book is the result. Probably it will not work for everyone, for different people have different strengths and there is no one best method of learning anything. But I hope that for a significant number of students this course will offer the chance to obtain more knowledge of Latin more enjoyably and with less confusion than most other available Latin courses.” p. xvii.
This last paragraph should hearten everyone who finds learning Latin (or indeed Greek) hard. I think many of us have the impression that professional classicists have some innate natural ability that the rest of us dont. We read so many stories of famous classicists of the past (and indeed the present) who were prodigies. It is good to hear someone who is so admired and renowned admit that language acquisition is a slog and there are no short cuts. It is also good to read the underlined sentence in the second paragraph that there is “no one best method of learning anything”. Sometimes we can all be guilty of simply recommending what worked for us as the “best” method.