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Why “Traditional” Methods Don’t Work for Latin or Greek (or any language!) 2nd Language Acquisition

57K views · Mar 22, 2024 · Education

polýMATHY

271K subscribers

Comments · 428

@polyMATHY_Luke · 2 years ago · pinned
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@josephmaxwell6259 · 2 years ago
I've had to explain this to my school leadership to make some significant changes to our Latin program. The original curriculum was heavy grammar translation using Henle and students were suffering. We've switched to immersive Latin and Lingua Latina. So far, I've seen enormous dividends in focusing on compelling content and making class a "conversation" as much as possible.
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@cito2820 · 2 years ago
I like mixing the two, based on personal experience. I find that studying grammar for like 10-15 minutes for every hour of comprehensible input makes it so my input feels a lot more meaningful, but also enjoyable, as I have the grammar reinforced. That’s just me though! I’ve found it super helpful for French and Latin so far.
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@matthew_scarbrough · 2 years ago
You know, you touch on something very good at the start of this when responding to the guy who asks why would you waste time with modern graded readers instead of historical literature. While I could rant about how trying to do that made me hate Old English because I would sit at my desk for 3 hours, ruin my whole day, and not even get a whole stanza through of like Wanderer or something (and that is with me being like A2 in German at the time), I won't. I used to have the same mindset about watching TV and movies and reading books.  So I spent most of my whole teens in high school not doing that.  I didn't even watch anime.  And then in my early twenties, I was going through a rough spot and I watched some stuff, and then it clicked, and I got it.  And I realised that not everything has to be work-work all the time.  When you do other stuff, you broaden your horizons.  And when you approach a language slowly through children's books and graded readers or watching a dubbed TV show you already know by heart for passive input, it lets you have fun, and learn at a steady pace so that when you do have to do something strenuous or whatever, that is the exception, not the norm. And you have to have a balance.  It can't all be fun and it can't all be overly serious.  That's why relatoinships fail.  They either are overly non-serious or overly too-serious.  C.S. Lewis has a great quote, "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
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@MichaelBolan-v6u · 2 years ago
One of the criticisms you mentioned that people have against graded readers is that you spend a lot of time reading about fictional characters created specifically for those readers like Iulius and Dikaiopolis rather than actual works of ancient literature. That made me wonder if it might be possible to make, or if there might be a market for, graded readers that are direct adaptations of ancient literature. I'm currently reading through the "Aeneis solutis versibus" section of Roma Aeterna, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I don't feel confident enough to jump into the unedited text of Vergil's original poem with enough fluency yet, but I still feel as though I'm engaging with the story in Latin in a way that I wasn't when I was just methodically translating passages of Vergil into English in my college Latin class. What if there were graded readers that allowed students to have that sort of authentic-feeling engagement with a text from the very beginning? A Familia Romana-style adaptation of the Aeneid could begin with a chapter establishing the geographical settings relevant to the story: "Latium in Italia est. Troia in Asia est. Karthago in Africa est..." In Chapter 2 we start introducing the characters: "Aeneas vir Troianus est. Creusa femina Troiana est. Ascanius puer Troianus est..." Obviously the early chapters with their limited grammar and vocabulary wouldn't do any sort of justice to the story, but that's all the more motivation for students to read the original when they're ready. Would this sort of text feel like less of a "waste of time" to those with this criticism? I don't know. Just a thought.
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@benedyktjaworski9877 · 2 years ago
Generally, for people interested in how language acquisition works – from the cognitive and neurological side, and how multilingual individuals’ brains work – I highly recommend Martin Hilpert’s Youtube channel – he has there lecture series on these things. I very highly recommend his bilingualism series! He talks about ambiguity and how vocabulary doesn’t map between languages (so translation is never fully accurate, one really has to make idea → vocab mappings for each language separately to truly use and understand a language). And his lectures on Construction Grammar also provide some good information (both from cognitive experiments, and from observations of what’s grammatical to different groups of speakers) on how language may actually work and why some structuralist and transformational ideas do not work. There’s also series on working with text corpora, and much more stuff. It’s great for general linguistics.
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@cellospot · 2 years ago
I spent about 15 years trying to study Spanish on my own off and on, and did learn a few things... was even getting to the point of being able to have short easy conversations. Then I spent some time in a Greek community here in the US, and in a year ensconced in this community, I learned as much Greek as I had learned Spanish over 15 years. It was amazing. During this year, I spent around 4 hours a week studying Greek, but the rest of the time I was hearing it around me, and attempting to speak it. Right before I left that community, I was able to understand a full conversation and respond to it as best I could. Studying from books is great and valuable, but the input immersion is the best!
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@sleirsgoevy · 1 year ago
i guess, the reason why language learning in a school setting is usually done the "traditional" way, is because basically the only way to verify that the student understands the language is to tell them to translate the text. asking follow-up questions directly in the target language is less effective in *proving comprehension to others*, because one could easily argue that the student is answering the question in a "jabberwocky" way, without actually understanding what the words mean. and schools care about being able to track the progress of their students
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@Belcampo1815 · 2 years ago
most people confuse understanding the grammar of a language with reading books or grammar explanations. In fact, the so-called "natural method" teaches grammar and vocabulary at the same time and in context, as Orberg demonstrates in LLPSI when he explains the fourth declension: "In Germāniā et in Britanniā sunt magnī exercitūs Rōmānī quī contrā exercitus hostium pugnant. Mīlitēs et ducēs exercituum Rōmānōrum ab hostibus metuuntur. In Hispāniā et in Galliā nōn multī sunt mīlitēs Rōmānī, nam Hispānī et Gallī, quī eās prōvinciās incolunt, iam exercitibus nostris pārent. In exercitibus Rō mānīs etiam Hispānī et Gallī multī mīlitant, quī et alia arma et arcūs sagittāsque ferunt." So I don't understand why many people think that grammar is a separate area from the language they want to learn. On the other hand, the translation method pretends to teach a language as if it were algebra or geometry when they are totally different things, besides they fragment the structure of the language in a ridiculous way, for example they teach imperatives at the end of the textbooks, when it is probably the most used in spoken communication.
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@stephm4047 · 2 years ago (edited)
I totally agree with that view. In France I studied English with comprehensive input and I also decided to watch all american or british TV series/movies in their original versions with english subtitles, and I became quite fluent. But I studied Latin for six years, by learning grammar and  then how to translate texts: I feel I kind of wasted my time, Ok I can say that I translated Seneca or Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. And as French intellectuals love pedantry, we are made to learn tons of Latin quotations so we can thus imitate Montaigne, but I never managed to read anything fluently, without even considering speaking. The whole concept of dead languages is misleading because it tends to imply that they should be taught in a different manner.
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@YeshuaIsTheTruth · 2 years ago
I've noticed that when I keep up with the Torah portion (or at least try to) my spoken Hebrew is a lot better than when I just go to class and do my homework. Its amazing how necessary actually using the language is.
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@majddarc7292 · 2 years ago
About comment #3: part of the 'input method' is tolerance to ambiguity. So it wouldn't really matter whether you think it is a wolf or a fox that particular text is talking about, because you have confidence that with enough input, you will disambiguate the words fox and wolf. And in cases where that still does not happen (for example liberty vs freedom), you can still approximate what the writer is trying to convey.
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