[svat]

You're describing a bad experience you had with a specific course (Rosetta Stone's Korean), and this data point is a useful warning, but generalizing from it to say that the method itself is “in practice it's just absolutely awful” and “a horrible experience” — when replying to a post about Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which many people have tried and absolutely enjoyed, and indeed successfully learned Latin from.

All that this shows is that a course using this method can be either well-designed or not (possibly depending on the language and learner), and we don't know which one the current Greek one is.

[RheingoldRiver]

That's fair, I'd appreciate hearing from someone who actually did the Latin curriculum and learned Latin from it if they managed to do it without additional resources to learn e.g. case endings from a text written in English.

Part of my reason for commenting is also that language-learning is something that a lot of people want to do but is extremely difficult to do & stick with outside of a structured environment/with a teacher. If you truly want to pursue it, I think finding an online class is going to help you considerably more than a self-guided curriculum like this; I probably should've mentioned that before. I wish I'd done that for Korean.

[schoen]

An interesting thing about LLPSI is that it does include abstract discussion of grammatical rules and concepts - in Latin, once readers have learned enough to permit following the discussion.

So it's not just learning from example and trying to pick up grammatical rules intuitively. Like when I took my German class, it was taught by immersion but included discussions, conducted in German, of how grammatical rules work. LLPSI is also attempting to do that kind of thing.

[troad]

You are entirely correct in your criticism of Rosetta Stone, but LLPSI genuinely takes a very different approach. (I've done both, though for different languages.) LLPSI is carefully structured, precisely to teach things like declension and conjugation. As an example, this is very first line:

Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Europā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt.

This is not what most people mean by immersion. It's not a natural dialogue you're expected to understand by osmosis, it's an extremely carefully designed series of sentences aimed at manually bootstrapping your Latin. The book contains grammar explanations - wholly in Latin - from chapter 2 onwards. Every chapter has a grammatical concept it's designed to illustrate, and it manages to introduce fairly complex ideas - passive conjugations! ablative declensions! - in a deeply intuitive way, entirely in Latin. It's an incredibly satisfying course. If you have any interest in Latin at all, or are just looking for a New Year's Resolution, I would heartily recommend it.

[RheingoldRiver]

That's interesting actually. It suggests that a major reason this works is because of its cognates with English that give you a starting point. So for example, a native Korean speaker would really struggle to learn from this curriculum, and the strategy wouldn't work very well to learn Korean. I wonder if it's possible at all to convey enough with pictures to design a curriculum like this when you don't have the help of cognates.

[troad]

Cognates and illustrations definitely assist, and the book uses both freely. Chapter 1 begins with a map, for example. It’s a very clever strategy, one especially well suited for teaching Latin to people already speaking an Indo-European language.

I imagine it would be less useful to people who speak a language that doesn’t share the features of Latin. A map isn’t going to be of much use if one’s native language doesn’t have the concept of plurals, and one therefore struggles to comprehend the est / sunt distinction altogether. Then again, English doesn’t decline nouns or conjugate verbs (for the most part), and English speakers tend to be big fans of LLPSI. To its credit, it goes slow, and reinforces its lessons very well. The rest of chapter 1 is basically spent on variations of the above grammar point, introducing new nouns but reusing those two verb forms again and again in different variations, illustrating their use and how they contrast.

To your question, I also wonder how well this kind of bootstrapping approach could be achieved without relying on language similarity. The trick seems to be to tap into pre-existing adult skills or knowledge - e.g. logic, map reading. I think this is what sets LLPSI apart from “immersion” approaches like Rosetta Stone, which are based on the erroneous assumption that adults (do / should) learn language as toddlers do.

[gnubison]

The book also includes a map of the places mentioned, at the time of Classical Latin that the narrative is set in. I’m only about half way through, but there really aren’t that many cognates. An aha! moment every so often, sure — like silēre -> silēns -> silentem -> silent — but it’s not like I read through and it only makes sense because of cognates.

[svat]

Yes indeed a structured environment and teacher would be best… another reason is that self-guided learning also tends to run out of steam/motivation more easily. But it's not as if there's an abundance of classes (online or otherwise) for Latin.

Apart from what others have said about their experience learning Latin from LLPSI, a couple of other points:

• Using the book does not necessarily preclude looking up other resources now and then, it's probably ok.

• Consider your example of getting the wrong understanding of some items of vocabulary, like "behind" and "far behind" instead of "near" and "far". While this is not ideal, at the same time, in a well-designed course (which yours may not have been), you're at least getting a feel for how these terms are used in sentences. The understanding of words can get corrected/refined over time, based on seeing new contexts. What you're avoiding meanwhile is mapping the terms into your native language, in which you have a very clear understanding of words and their fine distinctions. This is a trade-off when one considers what this method aims for: eventually being able to think and compose naturally in the language, without always "decoding"/translating into/from another language. See this post shared by someone elsewhere in this discussion: https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — it describes the problem very well (and incidentally ends with a recommendation of Ørberg's LLPSI in its final paragraph).