I have posted a lot about the many struggles that Latin students may face when learning the language, even some of my own. Yet Latin also allows a second language leaner something that many other languages do not. Structure, the amount of structure and rules in Latin may sound scary, and for some may seem daunting, but Latin’s structural base is what makes the language so easily grasped. Classic Latin has no silent letters, what you hear is for the most part what you see; yes there are different sounds to some letters that are different for English speaker, but there are few ways to say these letters compared to other languages. The phonology of the language is not really difficult to learn, and once mastered, well no limits. Other aspects of Latin that make it so attainable to someone who maybe isn’t a native English speaker would be the fact that conversational Latin is not that popular, due to the lack of native Latin speakers. Students are not going to be holding cell phone conversations entirely in Latin, at least a normal one. There are no original Latin speakers to harp on the pronunciation, I mean aside from the correction one would receive in class, but it is not the same as if a student went to France and started a conversation, only to be corrected to the “t”. Latin is a more written, text based language and therefore students would be spending more time reading and writing Latin than they would be conversing in it.
In my own experience with such an issue for non-English speakers, I have never had fellow peers who fell into this category. I learned Latin in a classroom that is probably very similar to what you as a Latin learner experienced. The school was either christian and/or classically based. The people learning the language were probably native English speakers. Yet that does not discount that as a future educator I will be in a classroom as such. I will probably come across students who are learning English, and that is okay. Latin opens doors to other Romance languages, it helped me learn French, I could probably pick up Italian quickly.
Latin being so structurally based also means that you have rules that are always true, hardly any exceptions. Latin also has some leniency, like in sentence composition, as long as your endings are sound you can put the words in any order you want, verbs usually go at the end but that can change too. This is the case because Latin is based on special endings for nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and pronouns, there are no articles of speech, so you do not have to worry about remembering a word based on “le” or “la” or the dreaded “l'”. Since these special endings also correspond in gender and number then there is no need for an article to indicate the gender or the number. I believe this is why I found Latin so beautiful, it has structure but also fluidity, if I wanted the adjective or a prepositional phrase at the beginning then I could write the sentence like that. It was freeing yet with some boundaries.
Other things in a Latin classroom that I feel would make the Language even more attainable would be mentoring; having older, more experienced Latin students come into a first year classroom and mentoring these students. Changing up the classroom dynamic so that there is always learning. You know how people say that you really know something when you can teach it to others? Well this is how those third and fourth year students will get to practice their knowledge.If students can take what they have learned and explain it in a way someone who is just learning the material in a manageable way then that is a great indicator that this more advanced students knows his/her Latin.
As a current Latin tutor to a young girl I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I know and how much I didn’t completely understand. When I ran into this problem I would go back to my books really read the concept and think about it and then come back to my student with a way to learn it. Mentor ship in a language classroom is a great exercise for the beginners and the advanced students, it helps students grasp terms and concepts in their own words. If I had this sort of set up in my own Latin classroom as a student then I think I would have been able to understand Latin quickly and well rounded way.
In the future I hope I get to implement these different practices and divulge this knowledge with my fellow Latin learners.
Ms. Smith 