Whilst I do indeed love Latin...

[Eurysilas]

@MarcusE

There have been more than a few brilliant latin scholars who learned the language inside out but never really acquired it. That is, they never learned to read it fluently from left to right without mental translation - the way we all read English. It forever remained a puzzle to be decoded and translated sentence by sentence- a puzzle they could decode quickly perhaps - but that is not what language acquisition is. I love the fact that I can read Spanish the way I read English where the meaning simply pops off the page with no translating or mental rearrangement of the words needed and I hope to be able to read latin that way as well some day.

I don’t claim to know jack about linguistics, but I was under the impression that EVERY language you learn past your first will necessarily be less efficient than your native tongue. That being said, I highly doubt you can read Spanish as well as English. It may be that you you can read it fluently, but what you describe is a step beyond fluent.

[MarcusE]

Well, I didn’t actually say I can read Spanish as fluently as I read English. I certainly don’t. I did say I can read Spanish in the same way that I read English - left to right, directly for meaning. And it wasn’t always that way. It took a bit of time to stop reading Spanish as if it were scrambled English where I was mentally rearranging the syntax to make it “right”. Spanish preserves quite a bit of the flexible word order it inherited from Latin and this seems very odd when glossed into english and one tends to do that in the beginning. My point is that my goal in learning latin is to be able to read in the same way, to really acquire the grammar and syntactic rules rather than merely learning them.

[Amadeus]

Well, I for one can read English (my second language) just as MarcusE describes: no rearranging the word order, no translation, no complicated analysis, etc. The meaning just “pops off” the text. It is like reading in my native tongue, but just shy of being exactly the same (for instance, I have trouble distinguishing between “shall” and “will”). I don’t see why it can’t be the same with Latin if you really put the effort and start as early as possible.

[Eurysilas]

What can I say? Perhaps the human brain is more powerful than I thought?

[Interaxus]

Scribo:

Thanks for sharing ‘The Latin Speaker’. What a find! Edonnelly does it again! E: How did you find it? Try as I might, I can’t find a downloadable version of Corderius on Google Books.

It’s a shame Google didn’t bother to remove the note that the original owner stuck over page 61 (English version of a Latin dialogue). Perhaps some Textkitten can fill the gap with a model translation of the Latin? Moi? Ask again next year…

Also, I notice pages 124 & 125 are missing. But they are in fact the first 22 lines of Erasmus’ colloquium ‘Diluculum’ and can be found here:

http://www.grexlat.com/biblio/colloquia/colloquia_54_Diluculum.html

MarcusE:

I (think I) understand your point about ‘left-to-right reading’ of Latin sentences versus the ‘decoding’ method (first find subject, verb, etc). But perhaps it’s equally erroneous to suggest that we ACTUALLY read word-by word in a left-to-right progression. At least, when I read English (my native language) I seem to take in whole swaths of words at one go. Swath after swath. (Rather like how we are told we read individual words - the actual letters (lterets) can be scrambled in any order providing the first and last letters are in place - context of course being essential. In the process of reading, it’s as though I create my own parallell (anticipatory) sentence (or set(s) of sentences) in my mind as I scan the word landscape below and then ‘beam up’ the ‘meaning’ that feels most plausible or convenient at that moment. There is admittedly a general left-to-right forward (plus downward) movement through the text but the sense-grains within each ‘swath’ seem to obey no sequential rules.

Thus far I can only read very simple or familiar Latin texts in this way. I confess I’m out of touch with the latest developments in the psychology of reading - please anyone, can you shed light on this matter?

My question is: How best to create in the learner that target-language ‘parallell universe’ that can operate alongside the learner’s own jealous native language system?

Cheers,
Int

[Scribo]

You’re welcome Interaxus, they are good fun.

[Interaxus]

Another great ‘conversational’ resource is Franmorar’s ongoing series “De variis formulis colloquendi” in Textkit’s very own The Agora. I only just noticed it. I hope everyone else spots it.

Cheers,
Int

[Scribo]

Ah good stuff, will check it out. Also the “Lingua Latina et Graeca” podcast (I spotted the link from Latinum) author is developing his own textbook, you can download the first unit and sound files. It’s great stuff.