Hello everyone, my name is lfe1999.
I actually visited this forum long ago when I was a teenager almost a decade ago. I remember the topic was about the Dowling Method and if it worked for other highly inflected languages just like Latin. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Who knew that I’d be back after a decade.
I took Latin at a Jesuit high school because it was the most popular language at my school and because I was told that learning Latin would help improve general English comprehension. While I enjoyed reading about Pyramus & Thisbe, the Gallic Wars, and the Letters of Heloise and Abelard, I did not retain anything and my level of English was the same. I had no love of Latin and did not understand grammar aside from the cases. The only reason I got an A in my classes is because I’d brute force the needed information a few days before testing.
After graduating high school I would sometimes attempt to re-learn Latin, but would always give up when trying to re-learn declensions. What changed me for the better was studying other languages, continuing to practice mnemonic techniques, and re-discovering the Dowling Method and the value of repetition.
Through studying other languages I rid myself of the belief that I was just bad at languages and that languages were always hard and only for the super-smart.
I had known about memory techniques (think the method of loci) since my junior or senior year of high school, but I only really started to get a grasp of them when I entered college. They were a godsend, but I still had some problems when using them. Eventually, time brought upon epiphanies and skill, but I still could not use memory techniques to the extent that other memory athletes could. After re-reading the Roth Memory Course by David Roth, I stumbled upon a line that I had glossed over beforehand:
For permanent retention, every picture must be reviewed a number of times. > Every time the picture is revisualized the impression upon the brain is deepened.
Though it was not there, the only word in my mind at that moment was repetition. I brushed off the thought and went about my day. Sometime later I was bingeing Luke Ranieri’s videos. Despite me not wanting to learn Latin, I still enjoyed watching Luke’s videos and his conversations with others. I ended up clicking his Dowling Method video and that’s where everything clicked for me. The reason for my failures in learning Latin, and in perhaps many skills in life was the lack of practice, the lack of repetition.
My mind then flashbacked to the Roth memory book and I began searching for the terms “repeat” or “repetition” in my other memory texts and I found them all there. I then realized that the reason why my success with mnemonics wasn’t as good as it could be was because I had forgotten that one key ingredient after establishing my mnemonic images, repetition. I almost wept at the revelation.
For whatever reason, that spurred me on to learn Latin using the Dowling Method. While I have had success with memorizing things more easily with my new mnemonic revelation, I wanted to try doing things the old-fashioned way just to test it out. What I have found is that the Dowling Method truly does work. I have only finished the declensions as of writing this, but my fluency in Latin has exploded. So long as I know the words’ base form, I can parse sentences easily. I have a feeling that I’ll feel unstoppable once I finish with the whole method.
This introduction is starting to get too long, so I’m gonna end it here.
Well, that’s my long and rambly introduction. Hope you guys like it. 