[cwnyth]

As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone.

It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.

[golem14]

As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).

[cwnyth]

Sure, Ørberg coupled with other books is fine enough. I do think his basic idea (a text that gets progressively more grammatically complex) is important and good, but not without exercises, grammatical elucidation, drills, etc.

Also, you're much better off reading The Hobbit in English. The Latin translation is known to be less than superb.

[golem14]

Thanks for the hint on The Hobbit.

For me, the takeaway was that finding the Ørberg book later in life made me WANT to go out and read some latin texts. The Latin instruction in grammar school did absolutely NOTHING in this regard, sad to say.

I feel pretty strongly that treating Latin as a living language would have enabled me to go much farther, without necessarily spending more time on it.

As an aside - we probably agree more than we disagree, but I feel talking about the importance of drilling grammar just recalls the Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian, and not in a good way :)

[zombot]

Harrius Potter et philosophi lapis OTOH I found a blast to read. The translator is quite resourceful finding Latin names for all kinds of modern stuff. Visne ranam socolatam?

[golem14]

https://www.google.com/search?q=Visne+ranam+socolatam

has a delightful answer in the AI section, and the two top results are in this thread.

Since the AI section does not trigger, here is mine

   "AI Overview               

   Minime, gratias tibi. Ranae socolatae non mihi placent!

   (No, thank you. I do not like chocolate frogs!)

   Note: This is a phrase from conversational Latin exercises, sometimes appearing in materials like Rosetta Stone.
   "

[efskap]

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question

If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

[vintermann]

There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability.

I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.

[mananaysiempre]

On the flip side, Ørberg is a textbook for children, perhaps teenagers at the latest, and like most such textbooks it is in no hurry, so you’ll need to stick with it for quite some time to get results. That by no means makes it bad or unsuitable to whoever is reading this comment, but I can imagine how it wouldn’t work well in a typical introductory college course, where the instructor’s aim is to cram into the students’ heads as much Latin as possible in the semester or two they are given.

If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.

[cwnyth]

I think the direct method is essential for speaking fluency, but in that case, you're thrown into a living language. There are more constraints with dead languages.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way.

The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.

[watwut]

As someone who also learned multiple languages, the most typical result if grammar focused classes is that you cant use the language at all for years. And yes it is consistent outcome for majority of the students.

Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

I suspect that what you describe is the outcome for people who half-arse it. People who have no motivation and are doing it because the teacher says. But for those people, any methodology has low success rate.

[vintermann]

If you speak four languages, in most countries you are an outlier, and you should not assume that what works for you would work for others.

Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.

[quasigloam]

Now I’m curious; what book of grammar was it? What did the exercises look like? What other languages and strategies did you use?

[teiferer]

For all other languages, that is, naturally spoken languages, I would totally agree. You learn them by imersing yourself in the language, culture, country.

But latin is a dead language. What you describe is what it is used for. It is a grammar exercise.

[cwnyth]

The kind of work Latinists do also require a high degree of expertise in grammatical nuances. Latin isn't taught for the sake of reading modern works translated into Latin.

[adrian_b]

Intuitive comprehension works much better for Medieval Latin, like that used in the scientific publications of the 16th/17th/18th/19th centuries, i.e. the kind of Latin that would be used by people like Newton or Gauss.

Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.

On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.

The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.

Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.

For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).

There is a good Latin dictionary that is online:

https://www.prima-elementa.fr/Gaffiot/Gaffiot-dico.html

but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.

A large number of Latin books are online at:

https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/

[mananaysiempre]

Perseus has a couple of Latin-English dictionaries[1,2] along with a large number of texts and translations and tools to go between all three; Wiktionary is also often quite decent. Incidentally, the TEI XML files underlying the Perseus website are downloadable[3,4].

[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...

[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...

[3] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download

[4] https://github.com/PerseusDL

[cwnyth]

For Classical works, TheLatinLibrary is serviceable, but it's better to use PHI's database, which has the added benefit of being searchable:

https://latin.packhum.org/

There are more Christian and Medieval works on TheLatinLibrary though.

[anticleiades]

> but it is a Latin-French dictionary

I can recommend the Lewis&Short that is Latin-English.

[lo_zamoyski]

In which case, I’ll drop the books of the late Reginald Foster who taught at the Gregorian University, Teresianum and Urbanianum and worked in the Latin Letters section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State: Ossa Latinitatis Sola, Ossium Carnes Multae, and Os Praesens Reginaldi Docentis.

[Pay08]

I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.

[wy1981]

As an aside, do you still teach Latin? If not, any online recommendations for Latin tutors? Thanks in advance.

[cwnyth]

I've considered picking up a class here or there, but no, I left academia years ago. I have tutored in Latin afterwards, and I also answer questions on StackExchange's Latin site.

[wy1981]

Thanks for responding.

If you're interested in a tutoring Latin remotely, please let me know. If not, no worries.