By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
Latin is now not a spoken language, even if your educator speaks some Latin with her class. The conditions necessary to emulate natural language acquisition are not accessible to all but a handful of lucky individuals. Programs in which students could experience natural language acquisition in Latin are rare, expensive, and require a commitment far beyond 5 to 7 hours a week, typical of a first year of language studies.
Perhaps you will find a true Latin immersion program. Even if your child begins such an ambitious course of study in first grade, one where students speak exclusively in Latin for all or part of a school day, they will still need to wait for intellectual maturity before they jump into the more complex pieces written by Vergil, Cicero, or Ovid, much like one normally waits until 7th or 8th grade to start reading more complex and weighty literature in English.
Curricula that like to call themselves immersive aren’t. They will touch on some of the principles of natural acquisition such as some deductive reasoning and a slow build in vocabulary and sentence complexity through repetition, but in the end, the student must eventually make the jump from basics to take a more grammar-based approach when it is time to move up in complexity. Some curricula and approaches disguise this short fall by limiting students primarily to late Latin such as the vulgate translations which were translated into very basic Latin as a way to communicate to the common man. The student may never know she only half-learned Latin but could go no further without taking a more logical and grammatical approach.
Latin is not Spanish, German, French, or any other spoken language in which a native-speaking relative, a summer intensive abroad, or daily class time with a native-sounding tutor can take your young learner from basic salutations to conversational ease right up until they are ready to move to a more literary version. Latin has basic salutations and the potential for short conversational exchanges, but a summer abroad speaking Latin is not only nearly impossible, it is also not the goal.
Families choose to study Latin, among many other reasons, for the wealth of benefits it offers. A careful study of Latin—and her advanced grammar—builds intelligence, analysis, grammatical mastery, expansive vocabulary, plus academic grit and patience. Learning Latin for real will teach you how to learn anything for real but this miracle is not the result of just brushing into contact with Latin and some basic conversational skills. Congratulations. Learning how to converse in basic Latin is nice but there is beneficial distinction between trying to talk about weekend plans in Latin, Italian, French, or German. Study a spoken language to go use it as a spoken language. Latin is not now a spoken language except in her daughters French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a dozen other languages.
When Aristotle defined the stages of intellectual development, he named three learning stages that still broadly apply today in the sense that typical human brains follow a normal progression through stages of intellectual capacity. Again, broadly speaking, most of us go from the grammar stage (really good at learning letters, numbers, basics, vocabulary), logic stage (ready to put those elements together much like a student moves from simple games to more complex chess), and rhetoric stage (when a student begins to develop that pre-frontal cortex through improved synthesis and analysis, equivalent to the final years of high school, college, and adulthood).
The term grammar (grammatikē technē) in Greek employed by Aristotle refers to a period of development best suited to mastering how you form your letters, learn to read, master basic concepts, populate your mind with all the basic essential data and a lay down a loose framework for how things work. Unfortunately, some have misinterpreted that Greek term grammatikē with our modern grammar, a system of rules that governs how language is structured.
Keen on classically educating children, parents may find their third grader deeply confused about complementary infinitives and subjunctives because that child is ready for grammatikē (distinguishing basics like what is a noun and a verb), not grammar (mastering how syntax and morphology combine to express a complex thought in a highly inflected language). Even if a grammar stage student were to pursue a course of instruction with a true natural acquisition of the Latin language, they would still be focused on essential basics until they are intellectually ready for more complexity.
A child moves into the logic stage in what most refer to as “middle” school in a modern progression primarily because their brains go through a major transformation just as their bodies do the same. Very occasionally logic kicks in early around age 10 or 11. Sometimes it waits until 14 or 15. Mostly it happens around 13 and is marked by a major change in how the student interacts with others and the kinds of questions and topics they find interesting. I usually see the transition most clearly in the types of games they like to play. They might dabble in chess before the logic stage, but now they are ready to challenge anybody as they sort out the best moves against their opponent three or four steps in advance.
When a student begins a language like Latin in this stage, they can at once grapple mentally with the grammar of an inflected language, a system in which the actual form of the word changes to show its role in the sentence. In English, we relax and trust word order, but Latin grammar is like an interlocking gear system that requires slow, careful analysis to see how one suffix affects the meaning of another elsewhere in the clause.
A student can dabble in Latin for years in his grammatikē stage as he becomes naturally comfortable with the subtle changes in a word being the subject or direct object. He might deduce changes in the verb showing tense or a personal ending. He can grow a collection of vocabulary as he makes somewhat informed guesses about how the words work together. All of this is certainly true. He, however, will not typically be ready for the next step, the actual Latin grammar, until around age 13. A year too early means mastering chapter 1 basics will seem formidably complex. The logic stage doesn’t remove the effort needed to learn a new language, but it does make it possible if not actually fun once the rules of the decoding game are learned.
It is a common phenomenon for students who “studied” Latin for 3 or 4 years prior to age 13 to align cognitively with peers who just cracked open their first Latin textbook two months earlier. Certainly, by the end of the first semester of a decently rigorous grammar-based approach, there is no real distinction between how well a new-to-Latin student performs when compared to one with years of experience working at grammatikē technē. Is it wrong to spend those early years in Latin? No. Is it ok to start for the very first time at around age 13? Yes.
Any spoken language should be started as early as possible in a form that is as close as possible to true immersion/natural acquisition that time and budget can allow. Latin (and Classical Greek, for that matter) can rapidly advance even when started afresh as the logic stage begins. The beauty of Classical inflected languages is that, once mastered, they are the base code for French, Spanish, Italian, and a half dozen languages, all while building English into a substantial and reliable life skill. Don’t skip French and Spanish. But also: don’t skip Latin.
No comments:
Post a Comment