[deckeraa]

> To commit the very Accidence and Grammar to memory, requires three or four years, sometimes more, (as many can witness by woful experience) and when all is done, besides declining Nouns, and forming Verbs, and getting a few words, there is very little advantage to the Child.

[I know the article is about understanding the cultural level of Latin and Greek understanding in 18 century Britain, but as a Latin teacher I feel obligated to comment about Latin teaching methodologies]

This is a common complaint and is encountered many times in modern contexts. I contend that this is due to the method of teaching; namely in language courses that lack sufficient amounts of comprehensible input (i.e. simple text that one can read quickly without needing to pause to consult a glossary).

Using a Comprehensible Input method, one can acquire a language much better and faster. For example I was able to read books in the Vulgate comfortably after only 200-300 hours of language learning. There are also people who have learned to speak Latin fluently, for example SaturaLanx or ScorpioMartianus on Youtube.

[coyotespike]

I love this comment a lot. I am not fluent in Latin, but have also experienced amazingly fast progress using CI methods (relying on the resources you mention below).

Currently I'm brushing up on Spanish in the same way and absorbing (for instance) the subjunctive painlessly.

I think most people still underestimate how easily an adult can learn a language.

"Paul Nation in a 2014 article estimates that to acquire a vocabulary of about 5000 words a student needs read about 2 million words."

If you absorb about 3000 words a day, after less than a year you'll have read 1 million words. With a vocabulary of 2500 words you can do quite a lot. For me, in Latin, that's about 40 minutes of reading (I read faster in Spanish, slower in Ukrainian).

Read/listen/watch 3000 words a day, understanding the majority of the words so you understand the whole passage, and after a year or so you'll be mostly fluent.

These figures line up with your 200-300 hours to read the Vulgate, as well.

[nicoburns]

What resources do you use for Spanish?

[coyotespike]

The great thing about CI is that it implies less is more. Don't do anything elaborate, don't memorize, don't practice grammar, just consume media you understand.

I'm at a somewhat intermediate level, so mainly I am just watching The Mandalorian, Clone Wars, etc, in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. I'll often repeat a phrase or sentence into Google Translate, or repeat it into ChatGPT mobile and ask for a grammatical explanation or if the phrase is colloquial.

I do copy transcribed phrases I like, so I can read them again later. That's all the review I do and is more than necessary.

I've also signed up for News in Slow Spanish but not sure how much that adds over watching TV tbh.

In a few months I'll think about adding conversational practice in some way.

[popularonion]

So what was your source of comprehensible input?

[deckeraa]

Primarily Familia Romana by Hans Oerburg, and then a lot of public-domain Latin readers.

There's a guy named Justin Armstrong who maintains a pretty good list here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TugURNkc0461IQoToKIl...

[ben_w]

In retrospect, I wish my secondary school French had been as you suggest.

The tables of verbs and conjugations into tenses whose group-names made little sense, and my difficulty with them, was a permanent source of woe at the time.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Ugh, the conjugaisons are a torture. I was lucky and knew how to speak and read and write in French before I had to study them or I'd never learn the language.

I learned to read and write in French before I started school; I'm not a native French speaker btw, but Greek. I learned by reading Asterix and Tintin and I'm not half joking. That's how I also learned to read and write in Greek (by reading Disney comics in that case), also before starting school.

I don't know if it was just me, but the combination of text and images in comic books is almost as good as being immersed in the culture of a language. Illustrated books, that simply have a few images along with the text aren't as good for that purpose. With comics you get to read text that directly relates to the goings-on in the images, and it's the next best thing to living in the real world and observing people speak as they go about their day.

It also helps that text in speech bubbles tends to be short, and the things said aren't too complex, but not too simple either. There's some puns in Asterix that I only ever got much later, and one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss").

Of course, no school is ever going to stoop so low as to teach kids to read and write in their language or a foreign one with something as base and vulgar as comic books. Or it'd be something along those lines. Even in France where comics are big they wouldn't think of doing that. And yet, in my case at least, that worked out much better than all of school taken together.

I bet computer games would also work in the same way. Good luck convincing educators that kids can learn anything useful from playing mere games. Unless it's chess I guess.

[deckeraa]

I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Some other examples of high-context sources: - TV shows in the target language (subtitles may be helpful) - stories that one is already familiar with (in my case, I was already really familiar with the plot of the Vulgate). - stories that aren't familiar, but where you can read the same plot repeated in several sources. For Latin, John Piazza's Narratioines Faciles de Historia Romanorum does this well https://archive.org/details/piazza-john-narrationes-faciles-... . For living languages, probably looking in a kid's library section for books all on a similar topic would be good. - Talking with someone in the language, since they'll give you real-time context.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Absolutely!

[acqq]

> one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss")

Be kind to us who still don't know enough and explain it here.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Of course. "Oursenplus" sounds Latin because it ends in "-us", like "Gaius", "Julius", etc. It's a standard joke in Asterix to make up "Latin" names that are in fact French words or short phrases with an "-us" (or other Latin-like) last syllable. e.g. "Gaius Faispaslgugus" (appearing in "Le Devin") - from "ne fais pas le gugusse" which translates roughly to "don't be ridiculous".

The same goes for making up Gaulish names, except the last syllable is usually "-ix" e.g. Abraracourcix, from "[prendre quelqu' un] a bras racourcis", which means to beat someone up. And the same with all the other cultures satirised in Asterix [1].

Now, "Oursenplus" (appearing in "Le Domaine des Dieux") sounds like "Ourse en peluche", meaning a plushie bear. "Peluche" is felt. In a native French accent it is pronounced with a silent "e", so more like "plush" with a long "u" as in "heuristics". Well, OK, it's hard to explain the pronounciation without sound.

The funny thing is that I know the word "peluche" and what it means (I learned it from another comic book, Bob & Bobette) but just seeing "Oursenplus" written, I didn't get it, because I was confounded by the "enplus" at the end, which could as well stand for "en plus", or "one more"; as in "one more bear". Or, more unlikely "en plus, c'est un ourse", as in "also, it's a bear". I figured that was some kind of saying I didn't know and I only caught on to the actual meaning when I asked a French colleague whether the knew the character in Asterix, and what the name meant. My colleague in turn, who didn't know the character, misheard the name and asked me "Comment, ourse en peluche?". And then I started laughing with the confusion of decades finally lifted, the joke finally understood :)

___________

[1] See: Epidemaïs, a Phoenician merchant, from "épis de maïs", "ear of corn"; Okéibos a Greek javelin-thrower, from "OK Boss"; Soupalognon y Crouton, the Iberian chief, from "soupe à l'oignon avec des croûtons", oninon soup with croutons, etc.

Many more here:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_personnages_d'Ast%C3...

[watwut]

300 hours realistically amount to 3 years of school teaching.

[fullmoon]

You’d be surprised to learn how unrealistic it is to expect someone that has learned Latin from 3 years of grammar drills/translation exercises to read any intermediate text comfortably (without translating sentence-by-sentence).