Top Ten: Latin Proficiency Impediments

Latin has a bad rap nowadays. Actually it's had a bad rap for a while. It is stuffy. Archaic. Blah blah blah. I won't take aim at those paltry objections here, since I pity–and endure–modern man's alienation from his past. To one accusation, however, I strenuously object, and that accusation is of Latin's peculiar difficulty. Yes, the process of learning Latin has challenges, but far fewer than of learning languages like Greek or English, and no more than many other endeavors. Unlike the problem of learning the subtleties and seemingly endless variations of English, the difficulties in learning Latin, at least for the native speaker of English, are few and predictable. In my years teaching, they are the ten which follow. Additions welcome.

10. Ignoring the Part of Speech

One of the struggles I least expected was how unfamiliar some students are with the parts of speech: noun, verb, adverb, et cetera. Even having overcome this difficulty, I still have ripped hairs from my head trying to help students limit the function of words to what they are categorically able to do. Chiefly, this problem applies to comprehending verbs. For example, many times students define vultis, as "wish," which is all well and good excepting that in English, wish can be a noun or a verb. Similarly, many students try to determine case and use of adverbs, such as paulisper, "for a short time," since they seem often to conform to the case uses, ignoring that their part of speech makes such unnecessary and impossible. The problem is harder to overcome when explaining compound forms such as infinitives, participles, and gerunds.

9. Vocabulary and Broad Meanings

While every Latin teacher has to cope with students who don't diligently study vocabulary, more challenging is getting them to memorize the fully entry, and harder still to use that information. It is one thing to know that manus means "hand," another thing to realize it uses fourth declension endings, and still another to know its gender is feminine and therefore must agree with a feminine adjective. Likewise it is easier to know that pono means "put" than it is to know all of its principal parts by which to conjugate and recognize its forms in all tenses, persons, numbers, and voices. Even students who memorize their vocabulary, though, often struggle at calling them to mind as they read and using the information of the entry to identify the form in from of them.

At the upper levels, though, with the essentials mastered, the definition again becomes a challenge. No longer is it acceptable to know the most famous definition of condo "build," or even that it can also mean to bury, store, or hide, but the student must understand that its most essential, literal definition is "to put into," and that by extension it can mean "to found" (i.e. to put a foundation in the ground), "to save" (i.e. to put in a container for future use) and "to hide" (e.g. put in something out of sight.) I encounter the problem most prominently when I first teach Tibullus 1.1, where among many examples, lustro means not "shine" but "purify," lacus not "lake" but "trough," and levo not "lift" but "comfort," among others. The issue, though, is best exemplified by line 40 from Horace Ode 3.1:

Post equitem sedet atra cura.

Horace's line has been infamously mistranslated by Latin neophytes as, "The black lady sits cautiously behind the horseman," instead of "Black care sits behind the rider."

8. Brute Force Memorization

I have a passable memory, and I find it as often works to my disadvantage as to my benefit. For students with the gift of recall, the temptation is to memorize rather than comprehend. I have have seen students convince themselves, and others, that they can read Latin when they are in fact merely regurgitating. Sometimes the problem is obvious, as when a student vomits out a translation–how confused the look of a student whom I asked why he translated a phrase with "hath" and "doth"–but sometimes the error is concealed. Even students who don't memorize translations often simply remember the gist from the first read-through and use that as a tool by which to piece together what they missed. Other students, while they don't recall full translations, are apt at recognizing patterns, which is in some respects a virtue. (See #7) Other times, though, it can stunt their growth.

For example, it is one thing to remember that nomine may mean "named," because it is commonly seen as such, at least in some text books, but another to realize it is used in the ablative case to mean "with respect to name." This recall may simply look like experience, and it is in fact useful and as far as some students get in their understanding, but it is not proficiency. Such recall is commendable if it proceeds along with and feeds grammatical understanding, but alone is illusory understanding.

7. Heuristics

Similarly, one does want students to cultivate experience into rules which narrow down probabilities. It is reasonable, for example, to gravitate toward taking Marco as dative when the verb is one of giving, showing, or telling. I have seen many students struggle because they are unable to rule out what is improbable and they attempt every conceivable solution to a problem. On the other hand I have had difficulty restraining students from jumping the gun and getting them to explore the less obvious solution.

6. The Inflection Hump

A common situation: a student can perfectly write out all the forms of qui, quae, quod, but not translate it in a sentence. Likewise, a student translates all forms of the verb as if they were in the same tense. It's simply very hard for some students to break the habit, acquired by their familiarity with English, of taking words next to each other as related.

You can put a subject and object next to one another as in Marcus manum and you'll get "Marcus' hand." Likewise some students default to making proper nouns the subject, so if you put lupus Marcum terret, you will most certainly get as a translation, "Marcus scares the wolf."

5. Tunnel Vision

For students of English, another major hurdle is coping with the periodic style, in which elements at the beginning of the sentence are only partially comprehensible until some later element is revealed. Students will languish over a leading adjective in Cicero, for example, only to realize it must simply be held until we arrive at the last word with which it agrees. This is one of that hardest and most necessary skills to cultivate, for it includes the ability to hold an unfinished thought in one's head while proceeding to others and to observe the way in which the meaning of an unresolved word hovers over subsequent words until it finds resolution.

4. Analogical Confusion

This impediment presents itself in two extremes. In the first, students with a poor command of their native language have trouble early on, or learning new concepts, because they have no concrete concepts to which  they can compare the new topic. So, for example, students have trouble learning the accusative case because they have difficulty distinguishing subject and object in English. On the other hand, and this problem tends to affect the more proficient, some students never get beyond using English as the intermediary between Latin and their understanding. Some phrases do not translate well, into English especially, and some students have great difficulty moving on from a passage which has not been converted into a definitive English version.

3. Murdering to Dissect

It is perhaps the worst fate of literature that it is taught, for in the process of teaching the constituent parts the work is dissected and appreciation of the whole is diminished if not obliterated. How terrible it is to dismantle an Ode of Horace into questions grammatical, metrical, philosophical, and textual, and yet to be comprehended its constituent parts must be discretely studied. There are various ways of coping with this problem, each with drawbacks. You can teach concepts first in the hope that students will quickly observe complex features in the text and not need to butcher it, but this approach risks losing students amid mundane drills. Alternatively, you can layer on aspects of the text one at a time while either supplementing or even ignoring other aspects, though that risks spreading out study of a text beyond a duration in which it can be absorbed as a whole.

There seems no perfect solution to this problem other than diligent preparation and encouraging students, sometimes by no other way than sheer enthusiasm, to revisit the text after they have matured.

2. Lack of Awareness of Author or Genre

There is no such version of Latin devoid of the variations of style, author, genre, and time period. One of the most difficult transitions is from the typical textbook paragraphs devoid of such aspects into actual Latin. Also, while Cicero and Vergil are the gold standards for prose and poetry, there is quite a bit else which one needs to know before considering oneself proficient.

1. Cribs and Aids

Everyone has peeked at a translation for help. Everyone owns a few Loeb editions for reasons other than the fact that they were the cheapest. It's one thing to peek and another to sit with the facing translation, reading the English before the Latin. It's one thing to look up a word and write it down for study and another to sit with an electronic dictionary open and let it give you all the inflected possibilities.

Perhaps the worst premises from which to start are that a task is either near impossible or that it is trivial. Learning Latin is challenging and it requires discipline, rigor, and the willingness to address one's weaknesses. These are virtues many studies demand and the pained acquisition of which is itself a valuable lesson.  To paraphrase Willamowitz, the ancients have much to say, but to make them speak you need to feed them with your own blood. If you don't suffer, they are silent.