Just curious to ask

Textkit Community Open Board
1

Do you think that lack of depth in the grammar of their own language is the main thing
that can make Latin & Greek so difficult for some?

I ask because I’m just wondering if another answer in the past might have been the
requirement of courses like Latin and Greek in some schools. This meant students would
achieve deeper grammatical knowledge as a result of grammar’s mandatory role in public
education rather than some mythical “better” methods of the past (Que the clip from,
“Goodbye Mr. Chips”). So they may have struggled as much as some do today, but since
it was expected they buckled down and learned what was needed. If you need better
grammar to handle Latin & Greek you just had to achieve that, whether it came from your
learning your own language or as a result of your Latin & Greek studies.

Just Curious,

Cathexis/Andrew

2

I think in the past English speakers learnt English grammar as a by-product of learning Latin grammar. So they weren’t taught English grammar as such, they were taught Latin grammar as applied to English. That’s still effectively the case today, unfortunately. There’s no need for a native English speaker to know what an “indirect object” is, let alone what a “dative” is—or to think that it’s somehow incorrect to use split infinitives (“to boldly go”), or that the relative pronoun “whom” is omitted in “The man I saw today …”. But undoubtedly it makes learning Latin easier if they know the relevant concepts and terminology.