I’ve been tutoring students in Latin for a few years, but recently I started teaching Latin full-time. I’ve always used William G. Most’s “Latin by the Natural Method,” and moved through the lessons by having students read a sentence, then translate it, encouraging them to read and re-read old passages as often as possible. This is how I was taught.
I have doubts about the effectiveness of the “read-translate” routine. I don’t think it actually teaches Latin, but just trains them to decode sentences. That was my experience, and I’ve taken a long time to reverse it.
What are some ways to get around this? Are there other ways to make progress, especially for beginners, into understanding Latin as Latin?
The vital thing—expertus dico—is to get them to take the Latin words in the order in which they come. Once they do that, they’ll find it progressively easier to pick up on how Latin works. Underscoring the ways in which a given Latin sentence differs from an English translation of it can be helpful. In a classroom situation or even in individual tutoring there’s no avoiding translating, but it’s essential for gaining reading proficiency that the Latin is understood, and fully understood, in its own terms. If in the early stages that means consciously “decoding”, so be it.
The Latin they read should of course be real or as-good-as-real Latin.
That’s not exactly what Michael means by decoding. The normal definition in this context is the process of turning the Latin into English. The goal is to be able to read it without consciously translating. To that end, I think the more involvement with the language the student has the better. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to incorporate a variety of methods so to engage the students. That includes for me some TPRS and CI activities. It also includes reading-translation, and good old memory work (“get to know your paradigms – they are your friends”). I am everybody’s language teaching heretic!
How do you tell when you are reading without consciously translating?
I am fluent enough in the reading of literary French to take pleasure in works like Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault. But the way I reached this skill was by reading, and rereading Proust, with frequent reference to Scott Moncrieff who was extremely helpful in unwinding the long sentences with their nested clauses, and relative pronouns. I believe that the advice “don’t translate” would have been of no help at all, because it was through reading the translation, and phrase by phrase relating it to the French, that I learned the complicated grammar of the sentences. I cannot even tell now if I am reading without translating. I can read literary French at about the speed of a recorded book, and at my age I don’t expect to get much faster in demanding literary works in that language.
I’m reading Cicero right now, “Pro Sestio”. There are many long sentences, with complex structure. Moreover I don’t have the mastery of the historical knowledge, if it even exists, as I would in for example a document from 19th century American or British history, to guess word meaning from contextual knowledge.
So my difficulty is that I cannot even understand what the advice “don’t translate” means. Frequently it is by consulting translations that the baffling sentence becomes clear enough that I can then study its grammar.
To read something without consciously translating means that you grasp the meaning of what you are seeing without turning it into English. If I write a simple Latin sentence such as plurimi etiam Romani Ciceronem amaverunt, did you really have to translate that in a formal sense? Now, agreed – you can run across some really complicated Latin sentences that are not immediately clear and need to be worked through. What is preserved for us is for the most part the best literary tradition and the highest register of the language, the kind of thing that even native speakers may have had difficulty with at times. My strategy for that is always to go back and reread such a sentence until it registers. It’s a process, and something that we grow into with practice, but it’s well worth the effort.
Yes, this is very good, an attempt to treat the Latin as Latin and not for decoding into English. The more someone follows this sort of reading discipline, the easier it gets over time. You will find times when you look at a sentence, and you just get it, little need to work with it. It’s just there. At other times, not so much, and one has to work through it more carefully. As I said before, most of the Latin that is left to us is in the highest literary register. It’s difficult, and would have been difficult even for native speakers of the language. I’m always reminded of a story told by one of my undergrad professors, who had to read an article in German for his dissertation, and was having some trouble with it. He showed it to the cleaning lady of the apartment complex where he lived who happened to be German. She looked at it for a while, handed it back to him, and said “This is horrible. Nobody can understand this stuff…” But the more we practice, the easier it gets.
Cicero reworked his speeches for publication, but I can’t accept that they “would have been difficult even for native speakers of the language,” as Barry asserts. They’re not particularly difficult even for non-native speakers who have learned Latin.
Well, I always personally have found Cicero concordant with my own sense of Latinitas. Even in graduate school I found that I rarely had to prepare an assignment. I could pretty much sight read it, and the professor never knew. That is not, however, a universal experience, and we need to be careful about cosmologizing our own sense of the matter. It will have to remain speculation, however. Even under comparison with other languages having similar differing registers, we cannot resurrect a native speaker and ask him. Of course, I’m not referring to Cicero’s peers and those who would have had more of a formal education…
And yet you started this speculation. The ancient Romans knew Latin much better than the best Latinists today. They were imbued with it all their childhood, adolescence and and adultness, every single day. There arises little reason to assume that an average Roman would have had trouble understanding Cicero. (Not that every single one would have been interested in it, of course, but that’s beside the point.) For the sake of it, we could assume there’s a teapot behind the Moon that happens to be in such a position that we have never seen it, but there is little sense for doing so.
That German cleaning lady clearly lacked the complex vocabulary needed to translate the scientific article with all the terminology, which is why she cleverly turned the situation into humour. Anyone can have trouble with scientific articles from a discipline not his own, even when they’re written in his mother tongue.
One can objectively compare between different authors and different texts from a single author, and I tend to agree with mwh that Cicero’s speeches are not particularly difficult. I’ve always considered them just a step up from Caesar. If I read the speech ahead of time, I can listen to it and grasp most of it. Of course the long periods are very daunting, and I wonder if this might be one of the things reworked by Cicero after the speech.
Well, that raises the question of what to use for objective criteria and the relationship of that criteria to the reader’s level of competence in the language, including native speakers of the language. Simply because you or I find Cicero just a “step up from Caesar” does not mean that everyone does, hence the warning against cosmologizing our experience with the author. The way in which the native speaker would process what he was hearing or reading would certainly be qualitatively different from the way we do, but his or her understanding of the text would be qualified by their education level and the difference between their register of the language and that of the elite (which could be considerable at times). By comparison, consider the fact that people argue about the meaning of texts all the time in their own languages. They rarely discuss grammatical or syntactical issues (though occasionally), but complex syntactical constructions will tend to obfuscate the interpretation of the text even for native speakers who regularly communicate in a lower register.