27.03.24: John Comenius

Before the next post on ille, illa, illud, I wanted to share a few more personal thoughts.

How you approach learning in Latin – and not just Latin – can affect your view of the “challenges” you face, and make the task appear far more daunting than it actually is.

One author writes in his introduction that the purpose of his Latin text book is:

"To entice witty children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the school, but dainty fare."

The author, John Amos Comenius, wrote that in 1658.

Comenius was well aware that teaching children had to be done in a different way. His book was a best seller throughout Europe.

The book is available online: https://archive.org/details/cu31924032499455/mode/2up

What’s interesting is that some schoolbooks in the 17th and 18th centuries followed Comenius’ pattern. In an earlier post you saw an excerpt from the work of Charles Hoole; it was Hoole who translated Comenius’ work into English. Furthermore, you can take a look at Learning Latin the Ancient Way by Eleanor Dickey which produces colloquia, dialogues for learners of Latin which date as far back as the 4th century CE.

Of the ancient method of learning Latin Dickey writes:

"They then read easy-reader texts designed for beginners … in which the Latin was divided into narrow columns one to three words wide and accompanied by a Greek translation that matched line for line. Such a translation enabled the ancient learner to understand both what the individual words meant (as with our interlinear translations) and what the sentence as a whole meant.

Of course, once such a translation was provided the students could not be asked to engage with the Latin by translating it; rather they memorized the Latin, using the translation to make sure they understood it. This procedure is not dissimilar to that sometimes used in modern language teaching today, where students memorize a dialogue concerning some activity that they are likely to participate in once they start using the language.

Thus a modern student learning French might memorize a dialogue in which a character goes to a café in Paris and orders a sandwich, and the ancient student learning Latin would memorize one in which a character goes to the baths in Rome and gets someone to watch his clothes while he swims. Many bilingual texts were written specifically for language learners; these are known as “colloquia,” because much of their content (though not all of it) is in dialogue form."

The books by, for example, Comenius and Hoole did not shy away from grammar, but they incorporated it in a way that was both practical and accessible. Then came the Victorians. If you pick up most Victorian textbooks you will, from day one, be subjected to [i] full tables of endings [ii] half a dozen sentences to illustrate the points [iii] half a dozen sentences to translate [iv] highly complex notes and then … on to the next point.

The 19th century attitude towards learning in general was that kids had nothing better to do with their time than learn Latin, recited tables, listened to the word of the schoolmaster, didn’t ask too many questions, were assumed to have understood immediately, and woe betide them if they admitted that they didn’t. In fact, there are textbooks that were published decades later that adopted a similar system.

The excerpts I give from Sonnenschein, Chesnutt and a few others did, however, try to address that, and there are numerous books from the 1920s and 1930s, particularly from the USA, that developed a pattern which is still evident in, for example, the Cambridge Latin Course.

Based on my own experience, you need to tread carefully on all of this. All of the posts so far have introduced concepts gradually, with some practical exercises, reading in context, notes, translations, quotations from authors and, yes, finally, the “dreaded” table as a summary. Simply looking at a table and memorising a shedload of endings does work for some people – but it didn’t work for me any more than it did when I was learning Russian which also contains shedloads of endings. That’s like learning your two times table but not knowing what to do with it!

Seeing concepts in context, reading and understanding them without thinking too much about the endings at the initial stages at least, memorising phrases and short quotations, using visual clues (especially for vocabulary), doing a few exercises, referring to translations, having a go at some translation yourself, doing some online research and asking others i.e. a mixture of approaches rather than only one will go a long way into embedding the language.

And one final point: there were aspects of Latin that I revisited again and again and again. I would have been the Victorian lad who wanted to tell the schoolmaster that I didn’t “get it”. But I wouldn’t have wanted to stay behind after school!