Dear Carla Hurt, I can assure you, my father did not want anybody to worship him, so don't worry about your not doing so. Neither would he have liked to be the leader of a cult.....😉 Did you know, he never ever intended teaching students to SPEAK latin? He did not speak Latin himself. He only spoke Danish, English, French, German - and Spanish. The latter he learnt, when he was 80 years old to be able to communicate with the Spanish teachers, who taught Latin using his method. His intention with his course was to make students able to READ Latin and ultimately read the original texts such as Virgil, Petronius etc. I am actually Iulia, although I was born after he wrote about the Roman family. I guess he wanted a girl after two boys. And Aemilia is expecting identical twin boys, and so did my parents. They were born i 1960. My father was a very kind man, and it is a little strange to listen to the passionate negative way in which you talk about his course. He was just a talented teacher, who wanted students to have a good experience learning Latin. He was a wonderful father, and I still love him. Yours sincerely Trine Ørberg 🙂
Great big hugs to you. I keep on wondering why anyone who is pronouncing Latin so badly and wrong with such an intense English accent dares to judge about this wonderful book. The book is so much fun for many people and I learned so much in a very short period of time from it and it made my dream to learn at least a little Latin come true. There is no simple template for language learning as certain unexperienced greenhorns driven by some theory they have read or heard about somewhere seem to assume. Some learners may benefit from a certain method, others may not. Ideology and envy must never be the benchmark. I am convinced that most of the people who clicked on this video adore your father's work.
I've been learning various languages for years, and llpsi is the best introduction to a language and greatest comprehensible input resource I've ever found. I love it, and there's a reason so many people praise this book
@erythrodysesthesia ok well what's the opportunity cost? Listening to this video essay for an hour vs putting forth an hour of instruction into something highly esteemed and tested by many?
I taught classes in mathematics for about fifty years, and when students asked me which book they should read, I told them of my own experience. I said "I read them all." Naturally, I didn't really mean it. More precisely I ment that approaching a subject I would look at many dozens of books and then eventually aquire a few that I hoped would hold my attention. I have never learned from any book that did not please me --- and pleasing me was always sine qua non. I found LLPSI enjoyable, explored topics that interested me in other souces, focused on vocabulary, and skipped most of the exercises. This was fun and the experience served my purpose.
After ten years of thirst, I stumbled upon this little oasis of a book and finally got proficient in reading the language. We know it's not paradise, but it's still water after all... Please don't fault us for being elated with this tiny oasis in a huge desert!
I think that's fair! I hope that as we make more resources and make them easier to find for everyone, there will be more and more oases, with even more refreshing water!
LLPSI works for me because I don't approach it as a story book. To me it's more of a repetition book. The stories repeat the same grammar rules so much that you just end up learning them without realising. By the end of chapter one I knew the nominative, accusative and ablative forms of the first declension feminine and the second declension masculine and neuter without having to memorise them. And also the nominative plural of those declensions. I repeated them so many times in the story and in the exercises that now I can automatically say them without giving it much thought. That being said, different people need different approaches. LLPSI to me is a quick way to acquire it naturally. I can even understand a few sentences now when I watch Luke's videos.
No one's really claiming that Hans Orberg's LLPSI can't be improved upon. Rather, until then, it's probably the best we have for learning to read Latin. I understand the logic behind wanting people to learn to speak it to acquire it better. But the harsh reality is that Latin is primarily for academic purposes. And academics, for the most part, couldn't care less if they can speak it. Also, this idea that you've got it all figured out more than all textbooks has to stop. Most of the creators of those textbooks have been teaching Latin for decades, and not simply teaching it to kids.
Nos omnes Latine loqui et scribere possumus, non tantum qui in universitatibus linguam latinam docent. Pulchrum et utile est linguam latinam discere. Cavete ut valeatis
@@marcougenti30 Not all are able nor desire to speak it. For most of academia learning Latin is merely a tool to be able to read and interpret source-material. Dialoging is usually of much less importance. Though not disputing that it is beautiful and useful.
Thank you for taking the time to write and record this essay! I'm teaching myself Latin using mostly resources on the internet and I find LLPSI to be a useful supplementary resource for practising things I've already learnt, but it doesn't give enough explanation to use it on its own, and I find it a little jarring how much people rave about it. I also find I can't spend too much time reading it at a stretch because the stories make me irrationally angry too! I find the whole attitude of it horrible, and not in the same way that classical texts are sometimes horrible, but in a midcentury way. I really appreciate you taking the time to express these things so clearly, since I was beginning to feel like a periah for having these kinds of thoughts/experiences
Are you freaking kidding me? I've been an English teacher for more than 25 years now and, of course, I've practically lived (or at least, been a very close witness) all the post-crazy-70s SLA evolution and revolutions of the 80s and 90s (Krashen's comprehensible input, Tarone's variationism, Anderson's connectivism, Gardner's motivation theory, White's specific nativism, Quintero's general nativism, Schumann environmentalism, Gile's social studies, McLeod's psycnolinguistics, Schumann's creole and pidgin studies, CALL, CLIL, SIOP, you name it!) and, believe me, HO's LLPSI is the BEST language learning/teaching book ever. Give us a break and start by considering that Latin is a DEAD language, and therefore the purpose of any Latin teaching book cannot be making students fluent in it. Having said that, if one book is able to go well beyond its original intent, that book is Hans Orberg's LINGUA LATINA PER SE ILLUSTRATA. 🙂
LLPSI is a great work of art, standing for it's own. But learning a language is like sculpting your own work of art, fighting your own battle, go on a journey without return. I learned spanish starting with 6 weeks of duolingo, then starting to read a zombie-novel "Apocalypsis Z" looking up almost every word of the first 28 pages word by word, the it clicked. I still had to look up 10 words per page, but it was fun.
I understand your opinion but I don’t think it’s a waste of time . LLPSI has a progressive method of learning and it is really a gradual learning. I know it has limitation but it is a useful method of learning.
No cult at all, simply it's still the best book to teach Latin from the scratch. Other good books have been written, but not at LLPSI level yet. If and when in future something better appear, we will happily change.
I wonder if it's really possible to create a "textbook" for comprehensible input. It woud require practically a whole library of graded reading material written to reflect natural speech.
i think LLPSI is the closest we have to comprehensible input: it is input that is understandable without needing your normal language. it builds in difficulty. when you read it and then listen to someone with verbal fluency read it, it can be the beginning of that for a lot of us. A LOT better then trying to find a latin overdub of Peppa Pig or something
I was ready to argue with you, but I finished the video and found most of what you said to be not only fair but quite well reasoned. It's true, LLPSI is not the same as comprehensible input, but as you said, the lack of resources based on CI mean that it's a pretty good resource, especially if read multiple times (which I did) to facilitate acquisition. I feel like a lot of the vitriol in the comments comes from people that had the opposite experience to yours (myself included) where they found the grammar method left them unable to read anything, and LLPSI felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I appreciate the story of your experience with LLPSI, and your discussion of Comprehensible Input and modern research into language acquisition. Learning Latin has made me think a lot about how I've been studying languages - as someone who is used to learning languages by himself, and frequently dead languages, finding stuff that's not Grammar-Translation-based is hard. Grātias tibi agō.
Just stick with what works for you. I speak both English and Spanish natively so even a sample of this book was highly comprehensible to me. Someone else may find it more challenging.
My advice is this: if one is so critical that one cannot see the benefits of a particular teaching method, one should offer something in return to replace what is already in place. And it better be far superior to the highly criticized method. Just as one watches the video, one is under the impression that Ms. Hurt is driven by a desire to disregard Ørberg's method at any cost!
I really appreciate this perspective. All your criticisms sound true to me and are things that I’ve intuited about learning languages. I have just purchased Lingua Latina Pars 1 and will be tryin to learn Latin as my first second language. All the criticisms you have sound right to me.
Hi Carla! You know I use and appreciate LLPSI along with other resources; it's the best textbook I know, although I always thought it's not as effective as a self-study book as it is when used by a (good) teacher in a classroom. However, I agree with most of the points you made, and I definitely don't worship the book, as I'm aware there's room for improvement under many aspects. Speaking of me, now, I wouldn't feel able to come up with a better curriculum overall (although in some years, who knows...), but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some of the gifted teachers I know does it. Your video is accurate, informative, witty and honest, so I'm glad you made it and I'm sure it will help many people make an educated choice about using or not using LLPSI.
Thank you! I appreciate your thoughts on this and I really like how you take LLPSI and add your own beautiful content to it, your tiered readings, your spoken Latin lessons. I think in the future if we do make a new "complete" course from scratch, it would free us up to make it in units for different proficiency levels around themes, keeping the focus on form-meaning connections, rather than planning all chapters in a line on a grammar curriculum. I've been reading Florencia Henshaw's "Common Ground", an SLA based language pedagogy textbook, and it's been giving me a lot of ideas. One day I may have enough time to do something like make a new Latin course... I hope! But who knows, maybe life is too short to make whole courses from scratch, and we're doing well by adapting existing ones.
@@FoundinAntiquity Absolutely! I added Henshaw's book to my reading list. Aleph with Beth are actually making a whole course from scratch, but it's true they are two and probably able to focus on that as their main occupation. Nonetheless, I admire their dedication!
@@SaturaLanx Wait, did you say that Aleph with Beth are making a Latin course? Or did I misread your response and you meant to say they were making an ancient Greek course (Alpha with Angela)?
At 2:45, you say: "Paul Nation in a 2014 article estimates that to acquire a vocabulary of about 5,000 words a student needs to read about 2 million words, and to acquire 9,000 words they need about 11 million words of extensive reading", and at 3:11: "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Familia Romana, for example, contains around 35,000 words". Familia Romana does indeed contain around 35,000 words, and is 300 pages long. Now, 2 million is about 57 times 35,000, and 11 million is about 314 times 35,000. So, is this to say that, with Comprehensible Input, a student is supposed to read the equivalent of 57 books of 300 pages each in order to acquire 5,000 words? Or the equivalent of 314 books of 300 pages each in order to acquire 9,000 words?
Paul Nation has the peer reviewed article, and I'm just a person with opinions, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. But I have a suspicion that Nation's work focuses too hard on just the activity of extensive reading where the learner knows over 95% of the words on a page. There are other kinds of comprehensible input than extensive reading that are often employed alongside an extensive reading program (eg intensive reading, target language film & TV, podcast listening, TPRS, conversation... etc.). In practice almost no one just learns a language from extensive reading to the exclusion of all other forms of language. But his numbers just come from extensive reading data. I think that may be the source of the divergence, as language learners often get a lot of exposure to new words in different contexts than just books. I suspect if you counted up all the words someone is exposed to in conversations or podcast listening it would rack up to a large amount of words of comprehensible input outside of just printed books. By analogy, if someone had to get all their calories from one food item like cabbage or something, they'd have to eat a ridiculous amount of it, but since most people have a varied diet, it doesn't look like a large amount of any one ingredient is necessary... but what is necessary is the nutrition that underpins all human foods. Languages were learned long before printed books. But books are just one form of comprehensible input.
@@FoundinAntiquity I understand what you write for languages in general. As far as Latin is concerned, though, where do we find those 2 (11?!) million words of *good quality* films, podcasts, radio, TV, etc.?
@@FoundinAntiquity As far as I know, Paul Nation has mostly done statistical analysis of vocabulary distribution. I don't think his assumption that 12 repetitions are needed to acquire a word has every been empirically tested. Another factor with Latin is that we get a ton of vocab for "free" due to cognates, so it's not like we have to learn all 9000 words completely from scratch. Plus, spaced repetition can also speed up vocabulary acquisition (at least in my experience).
@@jw7863 As a non-linguist who is familiar with this study and Paul Nation's work, yes you would indeed have to read that much in Latin if you want to learn 100% through extensive reading to the point where you can sight read any Latin text without a dictionary and understand 98% of that text (the minimum percent of words you need to understand to not lose in comprehension of the text). However, extensive reading is not the only way to learn a language, as Paul Nation himself says. You could also do intensive reading: if you reread LLPSI multiple times such that you learn every word, you would already have a vocabulary in the thousands and a good grasp of grammar. If you did that to a few texts in Latin, you would be quite close to the 9,000 mark without having to read hundreds of books.
I’m using llpsi after a year of using an English explained Latin grammar book with no story based input. I basically got my grammar down through traditional memory and recitation and then moved onto the input method afterwards, which has worked for me 😊
We would all like to have the ideal class with an egaged and expert teacher. Some of us just have to make do with what we can get and do our best with what we can afford. Teacher classes can also be dreadful.
Interesting video overall but I don't know why there is such a focus on "the latest research" when we have a method that worked great for centuries: 1) Give the students a basic text of real Latin (not an artificially construed textbook) 2) Have them translate from Latin to English 3) Once they do that well, have them translate from English back to Latin And slowly increase the difficulty over time whilst also have the students produce Latin through essays and orations. And once they have a very solid base of vocabulary (absolutely burned into their minds from doing so much translation back and forth), they are ready to do extensive reading. So many people are quick to dismiss this method but this what was largely done by the BEST AGE OF LATIN (15th-18th centuries) we've had since Augustan Roman times. These guys were fluent in Latin and this is how they learned it. The problem with the reading method (which is how I've largely been learning Latin) is that there such a massive gap between the artificial Latin we get from textbooks and graded readers and the real thing, which is why we all struggle reading something basic like Caesar even if we have a few thousand words under our belt. Whereas with doing the above method, you (depending on the teacher) are dealing with real Latin from an important book from Day 1 and understanding the vocabulary and usage in its native context placed there by a native speaker. There's really no need to experiment with "the latest research" when we have centuries of a tried and proven method that produced the best generations of Latinists since Roman times for literally hundreds of years.
Not a diehard defender of LLPSI, not very compelling content being probably the main issue with it. It's good, nevetheless, to hear this kind of criticism voiced. However, I think some of it is a little disingenuous or criticizes the book on false premises. I understand that the criticism is directed towards Orberg worshippers rather than the book itself, but the way you put things forward seem to reduce LLPSI to something it is not (granted, many orberg worshippers also do that). To the first point, I'd say there's no canonical way of using LLPSI, if not the fact that it is in fact NOT a book made for the classroom. Miraglia says it clearly when he offers his take on it. He clearly says that the book is made for self-learners, not for teaching, so you have to adapt. Which you also have to do with all textbooks. If someone just blindly uses a textbook, they're not real teachers, as you showed, since proper teaching requires a lot of effort and, yes, charisma. Full immersion, for instance, requires that people be properly trained to actually provide pertinent and comprehensible input, which is not the case for many teachers... And... yet another issue, from the student's perspective, is the desire to understand and say everything, and to say perfectly. Your last arguments, I think, are a little skewed since you ask whether Orberg beats everything else and then immediately says it doesn't beat a teacher... Well, neither does any other book, so focusing particularly on LLPSI isn't very interesting. With a good, properly trained teacher, Orberg offers things that no other book does. Basically, I think the criticism boils down to how compelling the material is or isn't. Any good book should know how to keep the reader interesting, and Orberg doesn't always deliver. The good thing is, at least for people enrolling in classes with good instructors, good teachers are always there to take things to the next level!
i think it's the lack of resources that so many hold this book in high regard. the book is good for what it is, i just wish there were more options out there.
@@FoundinAntiquity I'm a self-learner. I couldn't care less about the Roman empire. The only Classical Latin text I'm interested to read in the original is De rerum natura. I'm mostly interested in Renaissance Latin and Neo-Latin texts - Descartes, More, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pontano, Fichino, Campanello ... As I can see there are zero textbooks for people like me. Why there's no philosophical latin textbooks? Am I alone in the universe? I'm bored to death by the texts about Roman soldiers and their hasta, scutum et gladium... Pedagogically, it would be so much better to start with Neo-Latin texts since they are so easier to read - both for linguistic (written by non-native speakers) and non-linguistic reasons (they a closer to us historically). The fetishisation of Classical Latin has to stop.
@@vladimirlukin8969 I feel you, dude. Your stance actually has been talked about in the academic space with a lot of people asking why only a fraction of Latin texts are ever looked at from the Late Republic or Empire when Latin was still used in a variety of fields and cultures up until the 1900s. There are a few Neo Latin societies and institutes gaining attention recently that might appeal to you. Rome and Latin as a whole are crippled by academics focusing almost exclusively on the "Golden Age" and ignoring everything else that it makes both less appealing. How can you claim something has a rich history and culture when you rarely delve into it?
This is extremely interesting. Thank you so much. I started teaching myself Latin about 6 months ago with Wheelock. By CH 4, I realized I was getting frustrated by the heavily glossed readings we were asked to translate and knew that I had to expand my vocabulary beyond that offered by Wheelock. I now supplement Wheelock with LLPSI and some of those old stories (Cornelia, etc.) that you mentioned here. This works great but I now realize I need more exercises to test my knowledge. I need more readings to translate and more exercises to test my understanding of the grammar learned from Wheelock. Also, Latin today is so different from Latin back then. How can I read and understand the ancient stories without going back in time and trying to understand how they lived, who they were? I find it frustrating to try to read and translate stories from the ancient writers (Caesar excepted) as they seem so far above me. I am simply not ready. So like trying to increase my vocabulary, I must now figure out how to improve my understanding of the subtle nuances of the language as used by truly brilliant minds. Ha! Ha! Ha! Argh! Looks like I have a lifetime of study ahead of me. I will plod along, working hard. Never give up! Never surrender! Thank you for being there.
Aleph with Beth has 2 problems: 1. The vocab and grammar is very specific to that language. In Biblical Hebrew: the LORD, Pharaoh, Egypt, the people did not listen/hear in the voice of (= did not obey) Moses, camels, prophet, altar, anoint, “he said” is the same as “and he will say” (both are in past tense!), entire stories such as Sarah kicking out her maidservant (Joshua’s conquests, unlike Caesar’s, appear much later). In “Latin for new millennium”: poet, farmer (no farmers in the Bible! The best job they could get is being a shepherd, or a whore), dative case - X gave to Y (no cases in Hebrew, you just insert “to”). 2. In order to be “communicative”, Beth is: pointing at sheep, bulls and cows, a glass; asking “who are you”, “what’s your name”; commanding using the imperative “Put a cow next to the good house!” (Beth can’t use “THE cow” because there’s an accusative particle before definite nouns, so currently, “A cow”, sounds weird). So yes, for a living language, these are the first things you need to know: introduce yourself, etc. The problem is that you have a limited amount of time at University: you have fewer than 80 academic hours (50 min. each) to prepare the students for independent reading of the ancient text. So the vital, essential capability is to master the past tense, because most of the Bible is narrative, defer introductions/imperative for later (no small talk in the Bible!) and introduce necessary concepts like the heavens, the earth, darkness, walked (not “study” nor “student” or “books”, not “loving” - these are not important!), before introducing all types of domestic animals like Beth does. It reminds me of Duolingo teaching vocab like “parrot” and colors in the first lessons.
I find I engage a lot of «decodology», which is a thing I (a de facto English monolingual - I can speak one other language, whose flag is plain green and has a green star in a white canton, but I don't count that) can do with some Romance languages, mostly French and Italian but also some Spanish and the Latin in the early stages of Familia Romana, where I sort of 50-70% (even higher depending on the usage) understand what's happening, without actually being able to read or speak those languages.
Am I the only one that finds brute force grammar to be better than any other alternative? I have always thought in a very systematic way though. Math was always much more preferable to me than more subjective subjects like literature though. I have to know why we do things the way we do them there has to be a rule set so to speak.
I think, the introduction of some of the grammatical concepts in the language without ever explaining them to the student may be a problem. English doesn't have case systems, for example, so seeing cases in LLPSI in Chapter 2 may divert some students who don't get the usage of the cases fast enough. But, I only can hypothesise
I think, as with everything, it's not wise to follow only one method, just as you can't survive on eating only one thing. Not one method is holy, but many methods can help in many ways and add up. I myself have started with Orbergs Lingua Latina, but will that be the only book I read? Hell no? I use the Legentibus app. But is that the only app I use? Hell no.
In the name of Holy Arthur Jensen and Hans Henning Ørberg, you are excommunicated from the sacred circle of lovers of Nature Method Books!! :P Thanks for actually approaching the case critically, as we all strive for the better, which itself is to be used as a ladder for even better. I think, ultimately, it is those who used and talk about these books the most are most aware of their shortcomings, be it because of the very nature of them being books (as books are one of many media of learning languages), or of the principles through which they were prepared and practically how well these principles were applied into actual language learning books, as well as their achivements. I, however, still hope that these discussions help rather unknown pieces of this collection be known to greater amount of people, as the Italian, French, Spanish, German and Danish books are still pretty much unknown to the language learning community. It is often once that which is at hand is worn-out that the need for something superior is felt and this feeling is the possibility of that which is superior in advance.
Thank you for being so nice about me criticising these books and the method while trying to show how they can also be useful! I hope this helps everyone put things in perspective and yet also get a better sense of how the products of the Direct Method and the Nature Method can still be useful in a broader system of learning through comprehensible input. I do think that the Italian by the nature method book is very underrated in the Italian learning space compared to how LLPSI is a bit hyped in the Latin space. The Italian book introduces tenses so much earlier and better than LLPSI and my experience with it has been more positive than my experience with LLPSI, but I am pretty biased against LLPSI so I'm not sure how objective my judgment on that is. I haven't been looking into any of the other European languages in the nature method series but I suspect there are some potentially really valuable resources in there that are lying in obscurity.
Salve, Carla, miror magis, what do you think about the interlinear method for the self-study of Classical languages? The method seems to have been rather more popular during the 19th Century and abandoned in the present age. It is rather easy to search and find interlinear literal translations of Latin works. The Locke, Hamilton, and Clark series seems to my novice eyes as a rather fortunate production were I ever to return to, at any point, a study of the Latin tongue. In all honesty, I really do not foresee doing so, unless I feel called or impelled to study the Vulgate or early Church writings carried out in Latin. However, as I am intent on mastering Biblical Greek and being mastered by the New Testament and Septuagint, I was curious about your opinion on the efficacy of employing interlinears in such study.
I think that the interlinear method works (particularly when the learner is focused on reading the target language with meaning in mind), it's just that not everyone finds it interesting enough for teachers to use it as a main class activity (the repetition of the same reading activity over and over would get boring fast), which is why I think there hasn't been much innovation in the interlinear method in Latin learning. But there is a big exception - the Legentibus app has a lot of interlinear translations that you can turn on and off with the tap of a button, and it also integrates audio which you can play, pause, or restart from the start of any sentence. If you're keen on using the interlinear method for learning Latin, I would highly recommend the Legentibus app. I haven't seen as much being created for Ancient Greek though.
I agree that legentibus is a great app and it also has Familia Romania on it. I have been using it with LLPSI along with a little duolingo for the last 4 months and am very happy with my progress.@@FoundinAntiquity
I stumbled upon LLPSI a couple of years back, went through 5 Chapters and put it aside until recently. It's not the best book for students who lack awareness of some linguistic concepts, for eample cases and declentions. I speak Russian, so the introduction of cases in LLPSI made a lot of sence, cause it's almost identical on a conceptual level. The actual Latin input is also very familiar for every Romance language and English speaker. So, it's not a book for a novice, in my unprofessional opinion, but it's quite good if you're ready for the easily comprehensible content albeit not the most exciting one. Thanks for the vid, btw!
I’ve learnt Latin through Reading Latin, essentially, at university, and I have been testing LLPSI with some pupils... I think it works very very well, better than Reading Latin, but I have to pause from time to time and actually explain what’s happening, and give some lessons in traditional grammar, otherwise it seems far too much to expect for all the grammatical subtleties just to sprout in the reader’s mind without any explanation. Overall I think it’s quite fun, but it doesn’t work by itself, and the pace is way too fast also.
You didn't watch my video. I recommend Orberg as a part of the comprehensible input approach, but with some nuance around not viewing it as the theoretically ideal textbook for comprehensible input, despite containing a lot of CI. I do not recommend a pure grammar translation approach.
And, yeah, I'm also being turned off by the pro-slavery themes in the book. I get it, that is a common part in Roman culture. But it's also the worst form of class oppression that has existed.
And if it were true-hypothetically-that LLPSI is a revered and almost deified book and method, or if it were simply overrated, it must still have some merit. It’s impossible for hundreds of thousands of people around the world to consider it effective for building a strong foundation in Latin if it had no value at all.
LLPSI was written in a different time about a VERY different time... its not surprising that they viewed things very differently... if we still had the same values as we did back then and didnt find slavery and corporal punishment abhorrent... then we wouldnt have made any progress toward a better society... Although i often wonder what might have been if Rome had never fallen and we could have skipped the dark ages...
Salvete, Carla. I'm just starting out to learn the Latin I started with decades ago in school. I was about to buy the first Lingua Latina book, but now I'll hold off until I hear what you have to say. Thanks for all your hard work.
I'll cut to the chase for you - I end up recommending the LLPSI book as probably the best currently available option for self-studying Latin, even though it is not theoretically the best course that could be written. The issue I have is when people think of it as flawlessly perfect or like a silver bullet that fixes all problems with language learning. In the end, it's a good book and worth reading.
@@FoundinAntiquity Gratias tibi Carla. Not sure why I want to learn Latin at my advanced age; partly to keep my brain cells functioning. I just purchased Henle's Latin grammar which looks familiar and may in fact BE my high school Latin book of eons ago. I just checked the Wheelock book out of the library (librarian's comment: "Oh, you're learning Latin? I wish I'd done that!"). My two high school teachers, though hard working, didn't speak the language beyond a few phrases. My second year was largely taken up with Caesar's Gallic Wars, which became a tedious slog with the homework, slowly translating into English with my little Collins dictionary. I gave up seriously trying to learn and just did what I had to to get by. It's a shame because I actually love language learning and later dabbled in French, Spanish and Portuguese (I can more or less read the first two). Anyway, that's my dramatic story as a Latin failure. I've subscribed and plan to make full use of your great videos. Optime facto (teacher wrote this on my test paper when I got the highest mark in the class); gratias.
@@MrRezillo I once owned a copy of Wheelock, for self-study it was too confusing for me to progress. It seemed to make Latin more like a puzzle to be decoded than a language to be read.
@@MrRezillo It is unfortunate. I only took a year of Latin in high school. We used Ecce Romani, which was fairly enjoyable, but at some point the grammar became a confusion for me, probably owing to unfocused study and a lack of effort on my part. Later, when I became more motivated to study the language and enamored with Latin literary classics, I turned to 19th Century interlinear literal translations which I am still partial to although I did not persist in the language as my goals changed. God bless you, and may you be well!
After i listened to this, I wondered how many words were in the psalter of the vulgate. I asked ChatGPT & it was too lazy to count them for me! I definitely do not worship AI!
I like LLPSI a lot (both Familia Romana and the Colloquia) but I have stopped doing the pensa. They're neither fun nor necesarry. I would prefer simple comprehension questions with multiple choice answers (and solutions).
When you mentioned the boring stories point, I couldn't help but go back to Lernu's time-travelling novella. I will never forget about learning a language with time-travelling machines!
LLPSI helped me when I was first learning Latin. Especially in terms of becoming more confident at reading. But I definitely wouldn't use it as the one and only resource. I was reading any Latin textbook I could get my hands on at the time and I was motivated to learn. So that definitely made a difference. I think to get the most out of LLPSI it's best to already have some prior knowledge of Latin, be using other resources as well, and be motivated.
I think we all agree that the best book that could theoretically be made for learning Latin (or any other language or anything else for that matter) is still way more useless that the worse book actually available on the market. And until you, magistri magistraeque linguae Latinae, pull yourselves together and materialize the (for now) theoretically better coursebook, Orberg will rule the scene and rightfully so.
I'm a hobbyist learning Latin on my free time for fun, and I'd say the LLPSI worked just fine for me. Although I didn't use the book "correctly". I skipped the pensa because I'm too impatient to read one chapter dozens of times. I'd re-read a chapter 3-4 times and once I was able to remember all the vocab and read the chapter naturally then I'd move on. I also used a dictionary for certain words and did indeed commit the grave sin of translating at the start. But despite all that I've been able to read Cicero and Caesar at least, so I did make some progress, right? I wouldn't go as far as to say that you can learn Latin just with LLPSI. I used a mix of it, youtube videos and a dictionary. I wasn't smart enough to understand the grammar explanations purely through Latin so I watched someone explain them instead in English (Latintutorial is a godsent) and I was amazed how smoothly everything went as I re-read the chapters. But yeah, like you said I still think it is a very good resource. It helped me immensely at the start of my journey!
I'm in adult dyslexic learner that has failed to learn Latin for several decades. I had 4 years of high school Latin, . I've put a good deal of time on my own into studying Latin, including, Duolingo, grammar textbooks, flashcards, etc. I've always found I can learn vocab, but learning the grammar is impossible. I was attracted to CI because of the idea that you can unconsciously learn grammar. But the grammar seems to just bounce off me. Any wisdom to share?
I think you might find that some items of grammar take longer to sink in than others, and this may have no correlation to the order in which they are introduced in grammar books/textbooks. For example, the accusative case is usually the first thing explained because it's everywhere in the language; but in practice it seems to be the last thing people truly internalise. By contrast, the -issimus ending for the superlative (eg. "īrātissimus", "very angry", in contrast to "īrātus", "angry") tends to get picked up pretty rapidly by students, even though it's introduced much later than the accusative in grammar books. I think a factor might be that the accusative is pretty redundant in most sentences, and it's a feature of a relatively less important word in the sentence, whereas the -issimus carries an emphatic meaning and the word it modifies is often the meaningful focus of the sentence, so the brain treats it as more urgent to learn. So I think part of our perception is that we expect to acquire grammar in the order that the textbook presents it, but actually that's not necessarily the case. But just because we don't learn a "basic" item of grammar, doesn't mean we are learning no grammar. Our brains could be silently working on other grammar topics that are deemed more "advanced" or "out of sequence", but which make more sense to the brain.
I haven't had as much time to properly sit down with Athenaze and read it all the way through in both the UK and Italian editions. I've been working through the UK edition and I'll go to the Italian next, but I figure I wouldn't be the best source to comment on it until I've completely read it. I find Athenaze kind of amusing to read because it's co-authored by the same guy (Maurice Balme) as the Oxford Latin Course that I'm currently teaching from, and it shows in his story writing style and decisions around vocabulary.
Hi! I'm still watching the video, but I have to say that it does really lack some kind of illustrations. Seeing nothing but the only picture annoys and prevents from staying focused.
A new book should be composed by multiple authors with similar language levels to the old Dane, but based on Greek and Roman mythology----even a majority of the myths.
@@RecalledtoLife Then you didn't pay attention, because she explicitly recommends Ørberg in the video. She is criticizing certain attitudes towards Ørberg which tend to create problems, and I say that as someone who teaches Latin using Ørberg. The idea that Carla, who releases all of the Latin learning content she produces for free, is somehow trying to disparage Ørberg in order to sell forthcoming products is shamefully stupid.
I do plan on making some novella reviews at some point, after discussing the issues of Latinitas and editing to do with novellas. When I do reviews, I'll make an affiliate link to the ones I review. But in the mean time, currently this is the most organised list of novellas, which groups them first by author and then by difficulty within each author: docs.google.com/document/d/1bF8hZuxTDtgNMSSdonEX112JJaVYqoPH7w27Oju9ETs/edit?fbclid=IwAR3_EyG3waCL_WwYCG4uricZMMXQXIJzwMdvEUwAov31ncBS9Uv3Jei7d3A
Im reading that book now and I gotta say its awesome. I"ve studied 7 languages and I can conversationally speak in 5 and now reading this book I wish other books take the same example because that book was well thought. However, one should use the other books such as exercitia latina and the others ones.
Perhaps I am a bit late to the game to add a comment here, but have you looked at 'Forum' by Christophe Rico from the Polis Institute? It's another CI Latin text that was designed specifically with addressing perceived short-comings in LLPSI in mind. I haven't read it so I can't comment one way or the other, but Prof. Rico is a mega-brain and his work is generally top-notch.
I've used parts of Forum in my lessons, especially with beginner students. My TPR video series contains 5 short videos of adapted conversations from Forum, if you want to check the method out. It's a good method for classroom use, but a self learner would struggle to get much out of the book because the main source of meaningful input is from live, in-person conversations that are improvised and acted out on the models given in Forum. A reader unfortunately doesn't get that context. But this is not a criticism for the book itself, just a word of caution that it's not very useful for autodidacts (but very useful in classrooms).
Рік тому+1
Gravissimus in linguam discendī ūsus activus est. Solum trānslātiōne et grammāticā ad cognoscentiās passīvās dūcet. Mōdus docendi nōn tam gravis est quam ūsus āctīvus! Crītica semper ūtilis est, et commentāriōs Tuōs libenter audiō.
As one who reveres LLPSI as a grand and audacious achievement, I nevertheless greatly appreciate this critical analysis of the method, the book, and it's adherents. The historical background is much appreciated, as well as the information on recent developments in the field.
I so agree with you! My own path through LLPSI was somewhat of a zigzag--at some point I realized it was too hard for me to continue so I read a bunch of other 1st year textbooks, then went back to LLPSI and go through several more chapters comfortably until I had to take a break again, read a bunch of other stuff, then come back to it, re-read/re-listen to chapters, until I was finally able to finish. So I couldn't agree with ou more that the best approach is to read as much as possible, from as many different resources as possible. But could you also do a similar paper/video on the cult of Stephen Krashen?? His disciples are much worse than the LLPSI cult IMHO. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally in agreement with the importance of CI and mostly agree with his other hypotheses too, but there are also a number of things wrong with the exclusive attachment to this guy and his hypotheses (not the least of which being that almost all of the studies confirming his hypotheses are coauthored by himself, or done by his disciples). And it's weird how any explicit grammar in Krashen circles is completely demonized.
Yes, we should be careful not to also worship Krashen as gospel, but weigh up his findings according to the evidence. I find that Krashen's theories focus most on the engine on language acquisition and comprehension, and on treating the human brain in isolation from social interaction. Swain's output hypothesis and Long's Interaction hypothesis also need to be seriously considered and scrutinised. As for the role of explicit grammar, Krashen himself admits of being a grammar nerd and enjoying reading grammar textbooks for fun, but we have to be careful that as language teachers, we are a very weird unrepresentative subset of human beings. I think it is healthy to be sceptical of the role of explicit grammar when the cultural process of transmission has been "4% of students like grammar and do well in grammar at school" → "these students become language teachers" → "they then teach grammar the way they were taught because it worked for them as students" → "4% of the next generation become grammar teachers and continue to make all the education curriculum decisions". Not that it's ok to completely demonise explicit grammar, but there is reason for scepticism as to its effectiveness when humans were learning languages without teachers or grammar curricula globally for thousands of years.
@@FoundinAntiquity I think we can be skeptical of the predominant role grammar has played in language classrooms for a long time, but have to admit I find the argument that we shouldn't teach grammar because students don't like it somewhat problematic. ANd I think the reason they often don't do well with it is because it is taught in complete isolation. I've seen students who can rattle down a-ae-ae-am-a etc. but have no clue what any of those forms mean in a sentence. THat's of course immensely problematic. But I find the other extreme, immensely problematic too (in FL as well as their native language). One of my goals as a language teacher is to help students understand language better, how language works, and I have found that students with at least a decent grasp of grammar do tend to write better and also typically pick things up ("acquire") language faster. Fostering a good intuition through input coupled with comprehension and understanding seems to be more powerful than just input by itself. There are also all those studies about the importance of noticing or paying attention to input. At any rate, why keep learners from something that can help them make sense of the input they're receiving?
@@lauraeidt1214 I remember an occasion when I was attending an intensive summer language course and there was a structure we had just learnt that I couldn’t make sense of. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use and generalize it because I just didn’t get what was going on, why one form was being used rather than another. I went from teacher to teacher trying to get an explanation, and got some form of “Oh, just accept it for now”, till I found one crusty woman who practically swore me to secrecy and then in hushed tones gave me a 30-second grammatical explanation that solved everything.
Salve! Firstly, I wanted to add that I think your assessment in this video is dead on. LLPSI, though indeed a good book and a far cry better than most language textbooks (including modern ones) is still indeed deficient in offering what is necessary for language acquisition. Additionally, the following of any grammatical syllabus or curriculum is somewhat antithetical to acquisition as well. I am glad you brought up the glaring social issues in the textbook that arise from both a 1950s perspective on Roman mores and a book written with the purpose of showing these things from a Roman perspective. I also want to note that, as I have seen, those who are the biggest advocates for the book often went through some other sort of GT trauma (not to say, as you mentioned, Oerberg trauma does not exist) and found Oerberg to be the complete opposite experience. What you highlighted about those students left behind in a LLPSI classroom is definitely something I too have witnessed and is detrimental just as much as a GT classroom. I can understand the complete opposite hyper positive reaction after such a negative experience. Any worship, as you said, of one resource alone is dangerous and harmful. Thank you for putting out this video and for the work you do in Latin and ancient Greek.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness on this! Yes, I didn't touch on it in the video, but structuring a course around a grammar sequence is antithetical to offering what is most relevant for language acquisition. I mean, grammar can definitely be worked into the exploration of topical content, and a sequencing of one thing before another is inevitable, but the way Latin textbooks including LLPSI are structured fundamentally around grammar goalposts isn't reflective of what we now know about how people acquire languages. Thank you also for your active and continuing work in making Latin and Ancient Greek language content that isn't all built around grammar lessons, but around having fun in the language! It's really valuable that you're making all this communicative material.
Another critique that I have which has little to do with the content of the video but I want to say: the lack of macrons on the Latin Library and Bibliotheca Augustana. Extensive reading with the available compelling material out there gets compromised for beginners and intermediate learners because without macrons we cannot know how to pronounce the words!! It drives me nuts. We shouldn't be relaying on dictionaries to find right pronunciation of words!
I agree. Macrons help us to properly distinguish vowel quantity, essential for fully appreciating Latin, whether you use Classical or Ecclesiastical pronunciation.
Many excellent points. For myself, I studied Latin for 6 years at a Dutch gymnasium which was purely traditional grammar training and translation. I loved it, but my reading skills were very low after all this time, but my grammar/translation skills were pretty good. After going through all that and then - as more of a hobby - picking up books in the LLPSI series it definitely boosted my reading comprehension by a lot. I did always wonder however about all those people that start out with LLPSI. I saw it recommended everywhere and always felt the instructions should've been to first go through a basic grammar book and then start on that journey, but I couldn't undo my learning so maybe I was just wrong in how approachable the text was to a novice. I stand by that it's an excellent textbook, but I think even Orberg himself would argue that one needs more grammar training besides using his method.
It is totally fine to start out in language with communication as the central focus, rather than grammar. People don't need to learn the accusative case immediately, or all the noun case endings immediately, to be able to functionally use the language and make progress in it. I think the problem is that people are allergic to seeing beginners' output riddled with mistakes like "mihi est John" (for "ego sum John") and are worried that mistakes are going to fossilise. In any human language that kind of thing eventually sorts itself out as the learner gets more used to the patterns of the language. For Latin it takes longer to get to that higher level of competency - not because Latin is a particularly grammar-heavy language, but simply because a learner is less likely to be exposed to mass amounts of comprehensible input in it compared to a modern language. THe solution is not necessarily to get students memorising grammar rules, unless early accuracy in output is a goal in itself; the solution can simply be to adjust your expectations of what is normal for a language learner to achieve in a certain time frame with certain resources, and create & distribute more comprehensible input resources that will help learners get further.
@@FoundinAntiquity I think you make excellent points and I’m learning a lot from you and the different teaching methods; it’s very interesting. I would like to add to my own remark that the Dutch system of learning Latin and Ancient Greek that I went through might have a bit of a different aim compared to the aim in other countries. Even though the subject is called Latin, it might as well be called “grammar training” since that’s what it was and Latin was merely its tool. In tests this went as far that the student would get all points for the right use of tense/ case/ number etc. of a word even if they chose the wrong translation (i.e. meaning) of said word. I’ve often thought they actively avoided giving comprehensible input as that might tempt the student to start getting an intuition for the language and that wasn’t really the point. We were very strictly instructed to scan a line for a verb (usually starting near the end to get it quicker), then go for a subject, then go for an accusative etc. Central to these studies was learning an algorithm and sticking to it and often we got huge wordlists attached to a tests since our dictionary skills weren’t as important as our translation skills. In the end I don’t feel these studies were a waste of time because it definitely boosted my skills in getting a good grasp for Latin/Dutch grammar/syntax and it made me a better writer in Dutch for sure (which I think was more of the point). It however didn’t make me a good reader of Latin at all. In some way this was really the opposite of the natural method. Later when I started using LLPSI and many of the novellas that I found along the way I obviously never struggled with grammar or translation or simple exercises etc. so I’m quite grateful to having been taught grammar as well as I did since it feels quite intuitive at this point. The only thing I struggle with now is that I actively have to avoid “scanning” when I read Latin. Reading it the natural way can ironically feel very unnatural once you’ve been taught Latin as this tool of grammar in stead of as a language. Anyway, thanks again for you video. I think the most important lesson we can all take is perhaps the most obvious one: to learn a language there exists no one size fits all and we probably would all do well with a bit of variety in teaching methods. Making LLPSI dogma is as big of a mistake as only learning the grammar. We need a bit of both if we want to truly learn Latin.
@@j.r.faasen9707 I like how you describe the grammar skills as following an algorithm. I remember trying to program code to process Latin (in this case to produce Latin sentences) but it had no way of knowing meaning like a human, and I was trying to tell it not to put nonsense together like "the water sees the anger" by giving it preferences for certain verb & noun combinations, so the complexity increased as the possible interactions of vocabulary increased in a way that quickly got out of hand. I think a lot of the grammar method is about making a human deploy an algorithm with only a little more attention to meaning than a computer, with the belief that meaning will make itself most easily apparent when words are processed one by one in that algorithmic order and that the grammatical relationships of items in a sentence can be reliably solved before knowing what it means. I'm sure it gives a lot of insight into the mechanism of some grammar features, but other pragmatic grammar features - eg. the use of word order to move from the known to the unknown, the raising of a topic to give it special prominence, how discourse works... these more large scale things are not emphasised as grammar knowledge of the same utility as knowing the more localised rules of agreement, what verb takes the dative, uses of the ablative, etc. But I'm glad you've been having a good experience with using LLPSI and novellas and the grammar feels intuitive!
@@j.r.faasen9707 by the way, one way I've found that helps with getting out of the habit of scanning the sentence for the main verb, is to watch videos or listen to podcasts in Latin without the subtitles. If your eyes can't see the sentence, you can't possibly jump around it, but in practice when you hear a sentence rapidly, every two second chunk of the sentence (every phrase or clause) gets processed as its own meaningful contribution to the sentence as it builds up.
I agree with you. A novice (one who doesn’t know much grammar even in their own language) will certainly have a difficult time getting through LLPSI without a teacher guiding them. LLPSI is more for autodidacts who already know grammar pretty well (i.e. someone who already graduated from high school or even college). I can’t imagine most primary and secondary students getting through LLPSI on their own.
39:45 This is my main sticking point with LLPSI, especially since even after the non-present tenses are introduced the present tense is still used more often than it should, not to mention how bloody long it takes to get to the subjunctive. That's such a useful mood for communication that I really don't get why it take so long to get there.
This is a truly excellent video essay! Half the reason I started learning Latin was that I bought into the hype of LLPSI. As I went through it, I started to realize it was not quite the magical book that it had been praised to be. 😄 I really like your observation about how the PENSA are (unintentionally) more about protecting the reputation of Familia Romana rather than helping with a student's progress. Only the students who are crazy enough to reread the text enough to memorize the answers will actually progress to more input and "succeed". Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, since the entire LLPSI-sphere insist on the necessity of mastering these exercises. I enjoyed hearing about the history of the Direct Method and the Nature method. I somehow have never heard of Latin through Ovid. I guess I'll throw that on my reading pile for extensive reading at some point. 😅
I'm glad you stuck with Latin even after it was clear that LLPSI wasn't going to be all it was hyped to be. It's been great seeing you document your progress in Latin through different comprehensible input sources and I should have credited you in the video for using the word count statistics - the numbers for familia romana and the CLC came from your spreadsheets. Yeah, the pensa are quite problematic in relation to communcative language teaching. Pensum C is the best, but it's still fairly artificial as a kind of classroom "display your knowledge" question as opposed to "communicate to an audience" task. There can be a role for output practice in increasing the accessibility of the language system, but in a language like Latin output is not necessarily everyone's goal. I think that output is a good skill to encourage even just for the possibilities of getting to take part in interaction, which will open the door to receiving more input. But it's not like your language progress should only be measured in how accurately you can answer the pensa, which is the only exercise offered by vanilla LLPSI and the only standard "attainment test" inside the LLPSI sphere. It'd be interesting if mastery or progress could be measured more independently with optional reading comprehension assessments, if people want to stick a label on their progress.
I will be the first to admit that if I didn't skip over the pensa I wouldn't have continued reading. I found it much more productive to supplement LLPSI:FR with the colloquia and other resources than to struggle through the pensa.
Hearing you mention Aleph with Beth in another video I jumped on it, as I was struggling to learn Biblical Hebrew. As you mentioned, it is an incredible resource. I would LOVE for you to do Aleph with Beth style content or a series in Latin and I would definitely contribute to patreon for material like this. Your content is amazing, and even if you don't do that I need to contribute. My whole family has fallen in love with your Minecraft series, and every time we are at the store everyone starts yelling "serpetor" when we see it.
in the French speaking space, there's the assimil Latin textbook. It's far from perfect: the difficulty curve is very steep, words are introduced too fast, the exercices aren't very interesting and at the end harder than the actual content of each chapter, etc. But its structure of 6 chapters + 1 revision makes its use very simple and entertaining: you read one chapter a day starting on Monday for example, and on Sunday you have the weekly revision. The texts are consistently interesting, usually isolated when it comes to content from one another, but some spend multiple chapters. It has notes, all of the texts are translated, it's thorough... I recommend it but, but I recognise that it's not easy textbook to get through
Rectissime mones, magistra. The LLPSI *series* of books by themselves are not enough comprehensible input to learn Latin, let alone Familia Rōmāna. I'm tired of re-reading. Most of my progress has come by means of re-listening podcast episodes such as those by Satura Lanx, Legio XIII and Litterae Christianae. Content that has nothing to do with LLPSI; I, being at chapter XXX, still learn new things when reading chapter XIV. LLPSI is a good recommendation, that's for sure, but it can't end there. The Latin community needs quantity and quality of content to allow new learners the painless progress they deserve. Valē!
Yes, I definitely feel that we need to make it easier for people to get large amounts of comprehensible input from all kinds of sources - not just resources chained to LLPSI chapters, but resources with no connection to it too, in a variety of authors and media types.
Excellent! I use LLPSI but not all alone. I'm forced to create my own grammatical component combining several texts to formulate a combined method. It's working so far.
I think a mix of all methods is the best route. The vocabulary, grammar, exposure, idioms, syntax, etc. all need to be ironed out. Relying on just LLPSI is just far fetched and has been put on a pedestal recently at the expense of exploring other materials alongside it. None of the books for example ever looked in-depth on how word order works, usually they write it off as being free and/or usually SOV, but none explain why that is. Oddly enough, Wikipedia has a rather interesting page dedicated to this topic, showing examples and explaining why word order is a certain way, even Dickinson College has a really good webpage about it too.
Yes - word order is very under-explained as a concept. I've been trying to nut it out with my students too, by showing them examples where a person might answer a question using a different word order. The OLC has a tendency to use the verb-first word order construction when the suddenness of an action is emphasised, which is nice. But it doesn't explain that choice, and there isn't a whole lot else of word order play going on.
Although I'm something of a casual, I've personally never heard of this textbook. We used the Cambridge Latin Course series in class, and I still have a soft spot for it. But I recently decided to pick up Wheelock's Latin for reference, brushing up on the basics. I'm no authority on linguistic pedagogy, but I can see an inherent value in trying different methods and sources to find out what works for the class. Unlike "living" languages like Spanish or French, I think Latin poses an interesting set of challenges when it comes to immersion outside the classroom - the closest I've been able to find is a local Sunday mass conducted entirely in Ecclesiastical Latin.
I think it's nice to approach grammar rules after you've had a chance to internalise more of the language - going from Cambridge to reading Wheelock's for fun is a different experience from, say, being forced to memorise isolated elements of the language from Wheelock's from the beginning as the only mode of learning. As for immersion outside of the classroom - I'm hoping that the many different podcasts and video options that are getting produced are making it easier to do the equivalent of listening to the radio or turning on the news, but in Latin.
I had Latin classes in 6th and 7th grade, my teacher used Ecce Romani and this was in the mid nineties. While learning other languages on my own, I always found it most helpful to have a variety of sources, and that doesn't change when it comes to Latin. The more, the merrier. None of them can teach you everything you need, they should be treated as stepping stones on your way. When I was learning German, I watched films in German and listened to German music. I bought German novels to read. I read Nietzsche in German. When I was in Germany, I only spoke German and did not use any tourist materials in English, because that was the point of me being there, and yet many think that one textbook or one class will magically make them "fluent" in a language. That being said, LLPSI has helped me quite a bit, but one needs to already know what to expect and that you need to have exposure to other things in the language. I went for 20+ years of not doing anything in Latin and pretty much forgetting it, so it's been interesting to see things like this popping up while I was trying to re-teach myself Latin. I used to be pretty good, but my teacher used a conversational teaching method in addition to using Ecce Romani, and he had extra curricular things going on about the Aeneid as well, and some of us did things like writing each other notes in Latin (that way, your parents couldn't figure out what you were writing!). I think it's just the modern culture of wanting everything to happen instantly and with apps and without any/much work, and considering things to be the greatest and best rather than just one book among many. I think it's also black and white thinking, you go from "using the target language is good!" and from that, "using the native language should be verboten!" Too much enthusiasm for using the language, whereas sometimes it helps to use the native language.
Yes, the more the merrier! Use all the resources! Sometimes I think that the insistence upon the purity of "Latin immersion at all costs" can be a reason for people to harshly restrict themselves to LLPSI and the LLPSI-related resources, being scared that all glossing is "bad". I mean, overreliance on English glossing isn't great, but if the story is captivating and you can read it mostly in Latin, it's going to be beneficial for your learning, and it certainly won't do any harm.
@@FoundinAntiquity Yes, I imagine that's so, a "purity" kind of thing. "Can't use English (or whatever else one's native language is), and the other texts have English!" which is not helpful. When LLPSI started to bore me I took that as a sign to use a different book or other materials for a while, exactly as I did with other languages when a text either lost my attention or if I felt I needed a different approach. For teachers, I'd imagine it's what works for the students that would be best, not just insistence on just using this text. And different students have different needs, as you stated in the video, and some are more self-motivated. I remember some of us checking out Catullus from the public library as school kids 20+ years ago, we were motivated to read the stuff we weren't allowed to read in class there! But I think that's it, restricting oneself is bad in any case. Learning Latin should not be a cult of certain textbook, but rather, a general interest in and love of the language itself. But errare humanum est! lol. Sadly there are students I've talked to who got bored with a book, a method, a class, whatever, and decided this meant they hate Latin. It's possible they don't hate Latin, they just were frustrated with a particular book or method. On the other hand though, I feel like, because I had a good teacher then, who made class fun and made things interesting, that's one reason I ended up getting back into Latin again. And also why I studied foreign languages in university, but I mean to say, a good teacher and a good experience can have a profound lifelong impact.
I’m using Pharrs Homeric Greek. Plus Schoder Homeric Greek and Athenaze (English and Italian) Combined. Also reading Rouses greek boy and picked up some old Ancient Greek books plus the New Testament. I memorized paradigms also.
I've posted a written version of the essay on my blog, if that's what you're after! foundinantiquity.com/2022/09/20/why-the-cult-of-the-one-true-textbook-has-to-stop/
If there is a better method for self learners, please let me know of it! LLPSI may not be perfect but it is fairly cost effective, comprehensive and has an online community, which makes a big difference. One day I might pay for online lessons but in the meantime all of the methods you promote are not available to me. As for the use of novellas for CI - I bounce hard off them. I think it may be the illustrations but every time I look at spending my own money on one of them I cringe at the cute kiddie appearance. Yes, I'm sure the material may be OK but compelling? I can't see it. I agree that LLPSI may not be the most exciting story but at least I can take it just as a textbook and not feel that I have to enjoy it. In the meantime I do look at Latin videos intended for a general audience and do my best to carry on. As an adult, independent learner I suppose I am the intended audience for LLPSI and I can use my own judgement on how to use the material. I just wish there was more CI material I would like out there.
I'm curious - what kind of things would you find interesting to read as Latin novellas? Daniel Petterson's novella "Pugio Bruti" strikes me as a more mature looking, stylish, detective mystery novel in tone. His materials tend to be marketed with more of a "Renaissance man" ornate aesthetic rather than a kid friendly vibe. Would you find his stuff more appealing?
@@FoundinAntiquity I do intend to read this book as well as "Ad Alpes", once I've progressed further with LLPSI. It looks OK, although the child protagonist is not a draw card for me. But the presentation is more appealing. I do understand that these books are written for schools and young Latin learners and not independent adult students, so I accept that my choices are limited. What would I find interesting to read in Latin? I'm here mostly for the ancient history but I would read fantasy set in "ancient times" (but not Harry Potter rip offs). I'd be keen to read nonfiction as well as fiction. I'd probably give anything a go, but not something cutesy.
@@gillian932 properly speaking, the protagonist in pugio Bruti is not a child, but more like a young adult woman. Also she may be the official main character, but the adult man who helps her out seems a better fit as the real protagonist of the story. I don't think you'll find it cutesy. That is good to know, what your preferences are.
Having used LLPSI on my own, none of this came as a surprise. I hit all of the shortcomings you describe. LLPSI sparked an interest in learning Latin that the GT approach did not, but it was discovering and reading novellas as CI that kept me going. The sheltered grammar of LLPSI and it's steep curve had me constantly putting it down and picking it up again. I definitely find LLPSI to be a valuable resource, but it's through extensive reading and listening that I do the majority of my acquisition. One thing that puzzled me about recommendations of LLPSI is that it's pitched as compelling. Some of it is. A lot really isn't. I couldn't muster the sheer internal drive to persist through the middle of the book and was thankful to have novellas available. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, the quantity and quality of materials isn't enough. I either end up re-reading materials below my level or materials above my level and, as you said, flipping through the dictionary far too often. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the currently available novellas.
I do need to make some novella reviews! I've been meaning to, but I first need to write a talk about Latinitas and how we can fix certain shortcomings of novellas because every time a novella comes up, that's what dominates the discussion. Novellas aren't as polished as big-budget textbooks but they are still very good sources of compelling extensive reading. (Not that a given novella will be compelling to everyone, but the presence of multiple choices makes it more likely you can find material you personally find compelling)
@@publiusvergiliusmaro1125 I have enjoyed many of the novellas based on mythology (familia mala series, labyrinthus etc) by Andrew Olimpi (via Amazon). They gave me a grasp of the present and perfect tense long before LLPSI. Their biggest shortcoming is the very obvious use of English cognates and regularly use of English word order. I have also read some by Emily Vanderpool and Rachel Beth Cunning. I tried a couple by Lance Piantaggini. The ones I ordered were a bit below my level so the repetition of known words made for poor engagement on my part. That's entirely on me.
@@FoundinAntiquity I'm keen to hear your thoughts on that as well. Knowing what habits I might pick up from various authors is worth knowing. Something that makes choosing the right supplemental content difficult is the inconsistent grading of novellas. What one author considers beginner is another's intermediate and anything in between. I've picked up many that were above and below my level. If they're below my level and compelling I breeze through them and it's all good. If they're too hard I put them on the shelf and check them out every once and a while. It would be awesome to have a better idea of what type of challenge to expect from a given book. Something that's affected my engagement is the frequency and method of repetition. Some books depend upon very tedious repetition of near identical phrases within a chapter while others achieve repetition over multiple chapters. The former has lead to me dropping a few books early on. What I found is if the phrase didn't make sense the first time the repetition was ineffective and if it was understood, the repetition made for dull content. In both cases I put down the book in frustration.
Dear Carla Hurt, I can assure you, my father did not want anybody to worship him, so don't worry about your not doing so. Neither would he have liked to be the leader of a cult.....😉 Did you know, he never ever intended teaching students to SPEAK latin? He did not speak Latin himself. He only spoke Danish, English, French, German - and Spanish. The latter he learnt, when he was 80 years old to be able to communicate with the Spanish teachers, who taught Latin using his method.
His intention with his course was to make students able to READ Latin and ultimately read the original texts such as Virgil, Petronius etc.
I am actually Iulia, although I was born after he wrote about the Roman family. I guess he wanted a girl after two boys. And Aemilia is expecting identical twin boys, and so did my parents. They were born i 1960.
My father was a very kind man, and it is a little strange to listen to the passionate negative way in which you talk about his course.
He was just a talented teacher, who wanted students to have a good experience learning Latin.
He was a wonderful father, and I still love him.
Yours sincerely Trine Ørberg 🙂
What a condescending comment lmao
Love from Brazil! God blessed your father!
Great big hugs to you.
I keep on wondering why anyone who is pronouncing Latin so badly and wrong with such an intense English accent dares to judge about this wonderful book.
The book is so much fun for many people and I learned so much in a very short period of time from it and it made my dream to learn at least a little Latin come true.
There is no simple template for language learning as certain unexperienced greenhorns driven by some theory they have read or heard about somewhere seem to assume. Some learners may benefit from a certain method, others may not. Ideology and envy must never be the benchmark.
I am convinced that most of the people who clicked on this video adore your father's work.
Your father's book is the best Latin textbook I've ever read. Disregard these comments. "Laudari a bonis e vituperari a malis unum atque idem est."
I've been learning various languages for years, and llpsi is the best introduction to a language and greatest comprehensible input resource I've ever found. I love it, and there's a reason so many people praise this book
tell me you were too lazy to listen without telling me you were too lazy to listen
@erythrodysesthesia ok well what's the opportunity cost? Listening to this video essay for an hour vs putting forth an hour of instruction into something highly esteemed and tested by many?
I taught classes in mathematics for about fifty years, and when students asked me which book they should read, I told them of my own experience. I said "I read them all." Naturally, I didn't really mean it. More precisely I ment that approaching a subject I would look at many dozens of books and then eventually aquire a few that I hoped would hold my attention. I have never learned from any book that did not please me --- and pleasing me was always sine qua non. I found LLPSI enjoyable, explored topics that interested me in other souces, focused on vocabulary, and skipped most of the exercises. This was fun and the experience served my purpose.
After ten years of thirst, I stumbled upon this little oasis of a book and finally got proficient in reading the language. We know it's not paradise, but it's still water after all... Please don't fault us for being elated with this tiny oasis in a huge desert!
She does recommend using it, the video is really only about people who think it’s perfect or who don’t think better resources could be developed.
I think that's fair! I hope that as we make more resources and make them easier to find for everyone, there will be more and more oases, with even more refreshing water!
@@YnEoS10 if you read the blog thoroughly, you'll find that the author has just been jealous of the book
30 more years and they would have written a book about you
LLPSI works for me because I don't approach it as a story book. To me it's more of a repetition book. The stories repeat the same grammar rules so much that you just end up learning them without realising. By the end of chapter one I knew the nominative, accusative and ablative forms of the first declension feminine and the second declension masculine and neuter without having to memorise them. And also the nominative plural of those declensions. I repeated them so many times in the story and in the exercises that now I can automatically say them without giving it much thought. That being said, different people need different approaches. LLPSI to me is a quick way to acquire it naturally. I can even understand a few sentences now when I watch Luke's videos.
It works best when thought of as a "repetition book" as you put it, I agree!
No one's really claiming that Hans Orberg's LLPSI can't be improved upon. Rather, until then, it's probably the best we have for learning to read Latin. I understand the logic behind wanting people to learn to speak it to acquire it better. But the harsh reality is that Latin is primarily for academic purposes. And academics, for the most part, couldn't care less if they can speak it. Also, this idea that you've got it all figured out more than all textbooks has to stop. Most of the creators of those textbooks have been teaching Latin for decades, and not simply teaching it to kids.
Hear. Hear. There is a LOT of arrogance on display.
Nos omnes Latine loqui et scribere possumus, non tantum qui in universitatibus linguam latinam docent. Pulchrum et utile est linguam latinam discere. Cavete ut valeatis
@@marcougenti30 Not all are able nor desire to speak it. For most of academia learning Latin is merely a tool to be able to read and interpret source-material. Dialoging is usually of much less importance. Though not disputing that it is beautiful and useful.
Thank you for taking the time to write and record this essay!
I'm teaching myself Latin using mostly resources on the internet and I find LLPSI to be a useful supplementary resource for practising things I've already learnt, but it doesn't give enough explanation to use it on its own, and I find it a little jarring how much people rave about it. I also find I can't spend too much time reading it at a stretch because the stories make me irrationally angry too! I find the whole attitude of it horrible, and not in the same way that classical texts are sometimes horrible, but in a midcentury way.
I really appreciate you taking the time to express these things so clearly, since I was beginning to feel like a periah for having these kinds of thoughts/experiences
Maybe you are too fragile for this language? Perhaps Sinhalese?
Are you freaking kidding me? I've been an English teacher for more than 25 years now and, of course, I've practically lived (or at least, been a very close witness) all the post-crazy-70s SLA evolution and revolutions of the 80s and 90s (Krashen's comprehensible input, Tarone's variationism, Anderson's connectivism, Gardner's motivation theory, White's specific nativism, Quintero's general nativism, Schumann environmentalism, Gile's social studies, McLeod's psycnolinguistics, Schumann's creole and pidgin studies, CALL, CLIL, SIOP, you name it!) and, believe me, HO's LLPSI is the BEST language learning/teaching book ever. Give us a break and start by considering that Latin is a DEAD language, and therefore the purpose of any Latin teaching book cannot be making students fluent in it. Having said that, if one book is able to go well beyond its original intent, that book is Hans Orberg's LINGUA LATINA PER SE ILLUSTRATA. 🙂
The 😊
Clearly you didn't even bother to watch the video.
LLPSI is a great work of art, standing for it's own. But learning a language is like sculpting your own work of art, fighting your own battle, go on a journey without return. I learned spanish starting with 6 weeks of duolingo, then starting to read a zombie-novel "Apocalypsis Z" looking up almost every word of the first 28 pages word by word, the it clicked. I still had to look up 10 words per page, but it was fun.
47:40 "If aleph with beth had been made in latin" -> it has been, ever heard of scorpio martianus?
I understand your opinion but I don’t think it’s a waste of time . LLPSI has a progressive method of learning and it is really a gradual learning. I know it has limitation but it is a useful method of learning.
No cult at all, simply it's still the best book to teach Latin from the scratch. Other good books have been written, but not at LLPSI level yet. If and when in future something better appear, we will happily change.
I wonder if it's really possible to create a "textbook" for comprehensible input. It woud require practically a whole library of graded reading material written to reflect natural speech.
Maybe we can get bill gates to sponsor say, a translation of the entire scholastic collection into Latin? Si faceret, esset cool 😁
i think LLPSI is the closest we have to comprehensible input: it is input that is understandable without needing your normal language. it builds in difficulty. when you read it and then listen to someone with verbal fluency read it, it can be the beginning of that for a lot of us. A LOT better then trying to find a latin overdub of Peppa Pig or something
I was ready to argue with you, but I finished the video and found most of what you said to be not only fair but quite well reasoned. It's true, LLPSI is not the same as comprehensible input, but as you said, the lack of resources based on CI mean that it's a pretty good resource, especially if read multiple times (which I did) to facilitate acquisition. I feel like a lot of the vitriol in the comments comes from people that had the opposite experience to yours (myself included) where they found the grammar method left them unable to read anything, and LLPSI felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Any advice for Ancient Greek resources?😊
I appreciate the story of your experience with LLPSI, and your discussion of Comprehensible Input and modern research into language acquisition. Learning Latin has made me think a lot about how I've been studying languages - as someone who is used to learning languages by himself, and frequently dead languages, finding stuff that's not Grammar-Translation-based is hard. Grātias tibi agō.
I have LL and I don’t expect it to cover everything. Just as far ad it goes then on to something else.
If you can do better, then do it. Write a better book than LLPSI.
Just stick with what works for you. I speak both English and Spanish natively so even a sample of this book was highly comprehensible to me. Someone else may find it more challenging.
Not sure why you went with that clumsy dwarf analogy when we have the perfectly serviceable Latin phrase "in regione caecorum rex est luscus".
My advice is this: if one is so critical that one cannot see the benefits of a particular teaching method, one should offer something in return to replace what is already in place. And it better be far superior to the highly criticized method. Just as one watches the video, one is under the impression that Ms. Hurt is driven by a desire to disregard Ørberg's method at any cost!
I really appreciate this perspective. All your criticisms sound true to me and are things that I’ve intuited about learning languages. I have just purchased Lingua Latina Pars 1 and will be tryin to learn Latin as my first second language. All the criticisms you have sound right to me.
same profile pic brother
Hi Carla! You know I use and appreciate LLPSI along with other resources; it's the best textbook I know, although I always thought it's not as effective as a self-study book as it is when used by a (good) teacher in a classroom. However, I agree with most of the points you made, and I definitely don't worship the book, as I'm aware there's room for improvement under many aspects. Speaking of me, now, I wouldn't feel able to come up with a better curriculum overall (although in some years, who knows...), but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before some of the gifted teachers I know does it. Your video is accurate, informative, witty and honest, so I'm glad you made it and I'm sure it will help many people make an educated choice about using or not using LLPSI.
Thank you! I appreciate your thoughts on this and I really like how you take LLPSI and add your own beautiful content to it, your tiered readings, your spoken Latin lessons.
I think in the future if we do make a new "complete" course from scratch, it would free us up to make it in units for different proficiency levels around themes, keeping the focus on form-meaning connections, rather than planning all chapters in a line on a grammar curriculum. I've been reading Florencia Henshaw's "Common Ground", an SLA based language pedagogy textbook, and it's been giving me a lot of ideas. One day I may have enough time to do something like make a new Latin course... I hope! But who knows, maybe life is too short to make whole courses from scratch, and we're doing well by adapting existing ones.
@@FoundinAntiquity Absolutely! I added Henshaw's book to my reading list. Aleph with Beth are actually making a whole course from scratch, but it's true they are two and probably able to focus on that as their main occupation. Nonetheless, I admire their dedication!
@@SaturaLanx Wait, did you say that Aleph with Beth are making a Latin course? Or did I misread your response and you meant to say they were making an ancient Greek course (Alpha with Angela)?
@@FoundinAntiquity No no, I was thinking about the Hebrew course!
At 2:45, you say: "Paul Nation in a 2014 article estimates that to acquire a vocabulary of about 5,000 words a student needs to read about 2 million words, and to acquire 9,000 words they need about 11 million words of extensive reading", and at 3:11: "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Familia Romana, for example, contains around 35,000 words".
Familia Romana does indeed contain around 35,000 words, and is 300 pages long. Now, 2 million is about 57 times 35,000, and 11 million is about 314 times 35,000.
So, is this to say that, with Comprehensible Input, a student is supposed to read the equivalent of 57 books of 300 pages each in order to acquire 5,000 words? Or the equivalent of 314 books of 300 pages each in order to acquire 9,000 words?
Paul Nation has the peer reviewed article, and I'm just a person with opinions, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. But I have a suspicion that Nation's work focuses too hard on just the activity of extensive reading where the learner knows over 95% of the words on a page. There are other kinds of comprehensible input than extensive reading that are often employed alongside an extensive reading program (eg intensive reading, target language film & TV, podcast listening, TPRS, conversation... etc.). In practice almost no one just learns a language from extensive reading to the exclusion of all other forms of language. But his numbers just come from extensive reading data. I think that may be the source of the divergence, as language learners often get a lot of exposure to new words in different contexts than just books. I suspect if you counted up all the words someone is exposed to in conversations or podcast listening it would rack up to a large amount of words of comprehensible input outside of just printed books. By analogy, if someone had to get all their calories from one food item like cabbage or something, they'd have to eat a ridiculous amount of it, but since most people have a varied diet, it doesn't look like a large amount of any one ingredient is necessary... but what is necessary is the nutrition that underpins all human foods. Languages were learned long before printed books. But books are just one form of comprehensible input.
@@FoundinAntiquity I understand what you write for languages in general. As far as Latin is concerned, though, where do we find those 2 (11?!) million words of *good quality* films, podcasts, radio, TV, etc.?
@@FoundinAntiquity As far as I know, Paul Nation has mostly done statistical analysis of vocabulary distribution. I don't think his assumption that 12 repetitions are needed to acquire a word has every been empirically tested. Another factor with Latin is that we get a ton of vocab for "free" due to cognates, so it's not like we have to learn all 9000 words completely from scratch. Plus, spaced repetition can also speed up vocabulary acquisition (at least in my experience).
@@jw7863 As a non-linguist who is familiar with this study and Paul Nation's work, yes you would indeed have to read that much in Latin if you want to learn 100% through extensive reading to the point where you can sight read any Latin text without a dictionary and understand 98% of that text (the minimum percent of words you need to understand to not lose in comprehension of the text). However, extensive reading is not the only way to learn a language, as Paul Nation himself says. You could also do intensive reading: if you reread LLPSI multiple times such that you learn every word, you would already have a vocabulary in the thousands and a good grasp of grammar. If you did that to a few texts in Latin, you would be quite close to the 9,000 mark without having to read hundreds of books.
I love Ørberg =')
I’m using llpsi after a year of using an English explained Latin grammar book with no story based input. I basically got my grammar down through traditional memory and recitation and then moved onto the input method afterwards, which has worked for me 😊
"would you like it if I tried dubbing Aleph with Beth straight into Latin?"
An unequivocal *yes*.
We would all like to have the ideal class with an egaged and expert teacher. Some of us just have to make do with what we can get and do our best with what we can afford. Teacher classes can also be dreadful.
Interesting video overall but I don't know why there is such a focus on "the latest research" when we have a method that worked great for centuries:
1) Give the students a basic text of real Latin (not an artificially construed textbook)
2) Have them translate from Latin to English
3) Once they do that well, have them translate from English back to Latin
And slowly increase the difficulty over time whilst also have the students produce Latin through essays and orations. And once they have a very solid base of vocabulary (absolutely burned into their minds from doing so much translation back and forth), they are ready to do extensive reading.
So many people are quick to dismiss this method but this what was largely done by the BEST AGE OF LATIN (15th-18th centuries) we've had since Augustan Roman times. These guys were fluent in Latin and this is how they learned it.
The problem with the reading method (which is how I've largely been learning Latin) is that there such a massive gap between the artificial Latin we get from textbooks and graded readers and the real thing, which is why we all struggle reading something basic like Caesar even if we have a few thousand words under our belt. Whereas with doing the above method, you (depending on the teacher) are dealing with real Latin from an important book from Day 1 and understanding the vocabulary and usage in its native context placed there by a native speaker.
There's really no need to experiment with "the latest research" when we have centuries of a tried and proven method that produced the best generations of Latinists since Roman times for literally hundreds of years.
Not a diehard defender of LLPSI, not very compelling content being probably the main issue with it. It's good, nevetheless, to hear this kind of criticism voiced. However, I think some of it is a little disingenuous or criticizes the book on false premises. I understand that the criticism is directed towards Orberg worshippers rather than the book itself, but the way you put things forward seem to reduce LLPSI to something it is not (granted, many orberg worshippers also do that).
To the first point, I'd say there's no canonical way of using LLPSI, if not the fact that it is in fact NOT a book made for the classroom. Miraglia says it clearly when he offers his take on it. He clearly says that the book is made for self-learners, not for teaching, so you have to adapt. Which you also have to do with all textbooks. If someone just blindly uses a textbook, they're not real teachers, as you showed, since proper teaching requires a lot of effort and, yes, charisma. Full immersion, for instance, requires that people be properly trained to actually provide pertinent and comprehensible input, which is not the case for many teachers... And... yet another issue, from the student's perspective, is the desire to understand and say everything, and to say perfectly. Your last arguments, I think, are a little skewed since you ask whether Orberg beats everything else and then immediately says it doesn't beat a teacher... Well, neither does any other book, so focusing particularly on LLPSI isn't very interesting. With a good, properly trained teacher, Orberg offers things that no other book does.
Basically, I think the criticism boils down to how compelling the material is or isn't. Any good book should know how to keep the reader interesting, and Orberg doesn't always deliver. The good thing is, at least for people enrolling in classes with good instructors, good teachers are always there to take things to the next level!
i think it's the lack of resources that so many hold this book in high regard. the book is good for what it is, i just wish there were more options out there.
There would probably be more impulse to make more options if people weren't so content with LLPSI dominating the CI Latin space as the one core text.
@@FoundinAntiquity I'm a self-learner. I couldn't care less about the Roman empire. The only Classical Latin text I'm interested to read in the original is De rerum natura. I'm mostly interested in Renaissance Latin and Neo-Latin texts - Descartes, More, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pontano, Fichino, Campanello ... As I can see there are zero textbooks for people like me. Why there's no philosophical latin textbooks? Am I alone in the universe? I'm bored to death by the texts about Roman soldiers and their hasta, scutum et gladium... Pedagogically, it would be so much better to start with Neo-Latin texts since they are so easier to read - both for linguistic (written by non-native speakers) and non-linguistic reasons (they a closer to us historically). The fetishisation of Classical Latin has to stop.
@@vladimirlukin8969 You should try out the "Arena Palaestrarum" by Arcadius Avellanus. It might be the exact thing you're looking for.
@@vladimirlukin8969 I feel you, dude. Your stance actually has been talked about in the academic space with a lot of people asking why only a fraction of Latin texts are ever looked at from the Late Republic or Empire when Latin was still used in a variety of fields and cultures up until the 1900s. There are a few Neo Latin societies and institutes gaining attention recently that might appeal to you.
Rome and Latin as a whole are crippled by academics focusing almost exclusively on the "Golden Age" and ignoring everything else that it makes both less appealing. How can you claim something has a rich history and culture when you rarely delve into it?
This is extremely interesting. Thank you so much. I started teaching myself Latin about 6 months ago with Wheelock. By CH 4, I realized I was getting frustrated by the heavily glossed readings we were asked to translate and knew that I had to expand my vocabulary beyond that offered by Wheelock. I now supplement Wheelock with LLPSI and some of those old stories (Cornelia, etc.) that you mentioned here. This works great but I now realize I need more exercises to test my knowledge. I need more readings to translate and more exercises to test my understanding of the grammar learned from Wheelock. Also, Latin today is so different from Latin back then. How can I read and understand the ancient stories without going back in time and trying to understand how they lived, who they were? I find it frustrating to try to read and translate stories from the ancient writers (Caesar excepted) as they seem so far above me. I am simply not ready. So like trying to increase my vocabulary, I must now figure out how to improve my understanding of the subtle nuances of the language as used by truly brilliant minds. Ha! Ha! Ha! Argh! Looks like I have a lifetime of study ahead of me. I will plod along, working hard. Never give up! Never surrender! Thank you for being there.
Aleph with Beth has 2 problems:
1. The vocab and grammar is very specific to that language.
In Biblical Hebrew: the LORD, Pharaoh, Egypt, the people did not listen/hear in the voice of (= did not obey) Moses, camels, prophet, altar, anoint, “he said” is the same as “and he will say” (both are in past tense!), entire stories such as Sarah kicking out her maidservant (Joshua’s conquests, unlike Caesar’s, appear much later).
In “Latin for new millennium”: poet, farmer (no farmers in the Bible! The best job they could get is being a shepherd, or a whore), dative case - X gave to Y (no cases in Hebrew, you just insert “to”).
2. In order to be “communicative”, Beth is: pointing at sheep, bulls and cows, a glass; asking “who are you”, “what’s your name”; commanding using the imperative “Put a cow next to the good house!” (Beth can’t use “THE cow” because there’s an accusative particle before definite nouns, so currently, “A cow”, sounds weird).
So yes, for a living language, these are the first things you need to know: introduce yourself, etc. The problem is that you have a limited amount of time at University: you have fewer than 80 academic hours (50 min. each) to prepare the students for independent reading of the ancient text. So the vital, essential capability is to master the past tense, because most of the Bible is narrative, defer introductions/imperative for later (no small talk in the Bible!) and introduce necessary concepts like the heavens, the earth, darkness, walked (not “study” nor “student” or “books”, not “loving” - these are not important!), before introducing all types of domestic animals like Beth does. It reminds me of Duolingo teaching vocab like “parrot” and colors in the first lessons.
Would you recommend Via Latina for beginner Latin as opposed to LLPSI?
I find I engage a lot of «decodology», which is a thing I (a de facto English monolingual - I can speak one other language, whose flag is plain green and has a green star in a white canton, but I don't count that) can do with some Romance languages, mostly French and Italian but also some Spanish and the Latin in the early stages of Familia Romana, where I sort of 50-70% (even higher depending on the usage) understand what's happening, without actually being able to read or speak those languages.
i also find the LLPSI story itself with the slavery and physical punishment _problematic_.
@@ellenorbjornsdottir1166 ohh yes the corporal punishment and casually owning a hundred slaves really ick me as I read it
Am I the only one that finds brute force grammar to be better than any other alternative?
I have always thought in a very systematic way though. Math was always much more preferable to me than more subjective subjects like literature though. I have to know why we do things the way we do them there has to be a rule set so to speak.
I think, the introduction of some of the grammatical concepts in the language without ever explaining them to the student may be a problem. English doesn't have case systems, for example, so seeing cases in LLPSI in Chapter 2 may divert some students who don't get the usage of the cases fast enough. But, I only can hypothesise
I’m with you. Wheelock and Hansen and Quinn worked great for me. After that was massive vocabulary acquisition. I hate working in the dark.
Eye reading is probably something akin to skim reading
I think, as with everything, it's not wise to follow only one method, just as you can't survive on eating only one thing. Not one method is holy, but many methods can help in many ways and add up.
I myself have started with Orbergs Lingua Latina, but will that be the only book I read? Hell no? I use the Legentibus app. But is that the only app I use? Hell no.
Yes! Thank you!!
In the name of Holy Arthur Jensen and Hans Henning Ørberg, you are excommunicated from the sacred circle of lovers of Nature Method Books!! :P
Thanks for actually approaching the case critically, as we all strive for the better, which itself is to be used as a ladder for even better. I think, ultimately, it is those who used and talk about these books the most are most aware of their shortcomings, be it because of the very nature of them being books (as books are one of many media of learning languages), or of the principles through which they were prepared and practically how well these principles were applied into actual language learning books, as well as their achivements.
I, however, still hope that these discussions help rather unknown pieces of this collection be known to greater amount of people, as the Italian, French, Spanish, German and Danish books are still pretty much unknown to the language learning community.
It is often once that which is at hand is worn-out that the need for something superior is felt and this feeling is the possibility of that which is superior in advance.
Thank you for being so nice about me criticising these books and the method while trying to show how they can also be useful! I hope this helps everyone put things in perspective and yet also get a better sense of how the products of the Direct Method and the Nature Method can still be useful in a broader system of learning through comprehensible input.
I do think that the Italian by the nature method book is very underrated in the Italian learning space compared to how LLPSI is a bit hyped in the Latin space. The Italian book introduces tenses so much earlier and better than LLPSI and my experience with it has been more positive than my experience with LLPSI, but I am pretty biased against LLPSI so I'm not sure how objective my judgment on that is. I haven't been looking into any of the other European languages in the nature method series but I suspect there are some potentially really valuable resources in there that are lying in obscurity.
All hail LLPSI, the ultimate TUXTAXTBOOK
The ancient Hebrew language course into Latin would be interesting I think.
Salve, Carla, miror magis, what do you think about the interlinear method for the self-study of Classical languages? The method seems to have been rather more popular during the 19th Century and abandoned in the present age. It is rather easy to search and find interlinear literal translations of Latin works. The Locke, Hamilton, and Clark series seems to my novice eyes as a rather fortunate production were I ever to return to, at any point, a study of the Latin tongue. In all honesty, I really do not foresee doing so, unless I feel called or impelled to study the Vulgate or early Church writings carried out in Latin. However, as I am intent on mastering Biblical Greek and being mastered by the New Testament and Septuagint, I was curious about your opinion on the efficacy of employing interlinears in such study.
I think that the interlinear method works (particularly when the learner is focused on reading the target language with meaning in mind), it's just that not everyone finds it interesting enough for teachers to use it as a main class activity (the repetition of the same reading activity over and over would get boring fast), which is why I think there hasn't been much innovation in the interlinear method in Latin learning. But there is a big exception - the Legentibus app has a lot of interlinear translations that you can turn on and off with the tap of a button, and it also integrates audio which you can play, pause, or restart from the start of any sentence. If you're keen on using the interlinear method for learning Latin, I would highly recommend the Legentibus app. I haven't seen as much being created for Ancient Greek though.
@@FoundinAntiquity Thank you for the response, Carla. I was not aware of the app.
I agree that legentibus is a great app and it also has Familia Romania on it. I have been using it with LLPSI along with a little duolingo for the last 4 months and am very happy with my progress.@@FoundinAntiquity
I stumbled upon LLPSI a couple of years back, went through 5 Chapters and put it aside until recently. It's not the best book for students who lack awareness of some linguistic concepts, for eample cases and declentions. I speak Russian, so the introduction of cases in LLPSI made a lot of sence, cause it's almost identical on a conceptual level. The actual Latin input is also very familiar for every Romance language and English speaker. So, it's not a book for a novice, in my unprofessional opinion, but it's quite good if you're ready for the easily comprehensible content albeit not the most exciting one. Thanks for the vid, btw!
Don't use a book that was written for autodidacts in the classroom.
I'd say the opposite. A book that already is fairly intuitive for an autodidact benefits even more from teacher support.
I’ve learnt Latin through Reading Latin, essentially, at university, and I have been testing LLPSI with some pupils... I think it works very very well, better than Reading Latin, but I have to pause from time to time and actually explain what’s happening, and give some lessons in traditional grammar, otherwise it seems far too much to expect for all the grammatical subtleties just to sprout in the reader’s mind without any explanation. Overall I think it’s quite fun, but it doesn’t work by itself, and the pace is way too fast also.
What llpsi needs is a couple 5000 word readers to match every single chapter like the colloquia but 15 times longer
Thank you for this! I for one would love for you to adapt the Hebrew text into Latin. 🙂
I learned german via a grammar book and german rap.
Ørbergs method simply gives better results Carla. Sorry but Wheelock just sucks.
You didn't watch my video. I recommend Orberg as a part of the comprehensible input approach, but with some nuance around not viewing it as the theoretically ideal textbook for comprehensible input, despite containing a lot of CI. I do not recommend a pure grammar translation approach.
And, yeah, I'm also being turned off by the pro-slavery themes in the book. I get it, that is a common part in Roman culture. But it's also the worst form of class oppression that has existed.
Mine arrives tomorrow
And if it were true-hypothetically-that LLPSI is a revered and almost deified book and method, or if it were simply overrated, it must still have some merit. It’s impossible for hundreds of thousands of people around the world to consider it effective for building a strong foundation in Latin if it had no value at all.
LLPSI was written in a different time about a VERY different time... its not surprising that they viewed things very differently... if we still had the same values as we did back then and didnt find slavery and corporal punishment abhorrent... then we wouldnt have made any progress toward a better society...
Although i often wonder what might have been if Rome had never fallen and we could have skipped the dark ages...
Excellent video! Thanks!
Orberg is SO good!
Salvete, Carla. I'm just starting out to learn the Latin I started with decades ago in school. I was about to buy the first Lingua Latina book, but now I'll hold off until I hear what you have to say. Thanks for all your hard work.
I'll cut to the chase for you - I end up recommending the LLPSI book as probably the best currently available option for self-studying Latin, even though it is not theoretically the best course that could be written. The issue I have is when people think of it as flawlessly perfect or like a silver bullet that fixes all problems with language learning. In the end, it's a good book and worth reading.
@@FoundinAntiquity Gratias tibi Carla. Not sure why I want to learn Latin at my advanced age; partly to keep my brain cells functioning. I just purchased Henle's Latin grammar which looks familiar and may in fact BE my high school Latin book of eons ago. I just checked the Wheelock book out of the library (librarian's comment: "Oh, you're learning Latin? I wish I'd done that!").
My two high school teachers, though hard working, didn't speak the language beyond a few phrases. My second year was largely taken up with Caesar's Gallic Wars, which became a tedious slog with the homework, slowly translating into English with my little Collins dictionary. I gave up seriously trying to learn and just did what I had to to get by. It's a shame because I actually love language learning and later dabbled in French, Spanish and Portuguese (I can more or less read the first two).
Anyway, that's my dramatic story as a Latin failure. I've subscribed and plan to make full use of your great videos. Optime facto (teacher wrote this on my test paper when I got the highest mark in the class); gratias.
@@MrRezillo I once owned a copy of Wheelock, for self-study it was too confusing for me to progress. It seemed to make Latin more like a puzzle to be decoded than a language to be read.
@@RyanHReviews I agree. That's the way it was taught a few decades ago. No wonder most students avoided Latin.
@@MrRezillo It is unfortunate. I only took a year of Latin in high school. We used Ecce Romani, which was fairly enjoyable, but at some point the grammar became a confusion for me, probably owing to unfocused study and a lack of effort on my part. Later, when I became more motivated to study the language and enamored with Latin literary classics, I turned to 19th Century interlinear literal translations which I am still partial to although I did not persist in the language as my goals changed. God bless you, and may you be well!
After i listened to this, I wondered how many words were in the psalter of the vulgate. I asked ChatGPT & it was too lazy to count them for me!
I definitely do not worship AI!
I like LLPSI a lot (both Familia Romana and the Colloquia) but I have stopped doing the pensa. They're neither fun nor necesarry. I would prefer simple comprehension questions with multiple choice answers (and solutions).
Calling it "lipsy" sounds pretty affected to me - "let's give the book a (diminishing) nickname" sort of stuff.
Sounds more like a reasonably phonetic pronunciation of LLPSI to me
When you mentioned the boring stories point, I couldn't help but go back to Lernu's time-travelling novella. I will never forget about learning a language with time-travelling machines!
LLPSI helped me when I was first learning Latin. Especially in terms of becoming more confident at reading. But I definitely wouldn't use it as the one and only resource. I was reading any Latin textbook I could get my hands on at the time and I was motivated to learn. So that definitely made a difference. I think to get the most out of LLPSI it's best to already have some prior knowledge of Latin, be using other resources as well, and be motivated.
Yes, read all the Latin you can get your hands on!
You got your views.
I think we all agree that the best book that could theoretically be made for learning Latin (or any other language or anything else for that matter) is still way more useless that the worse book actually available on the market. And until you, magistri magistraeque linguae Latinae, pull yourselves together and materialize the (for now) theoretically better coursebook, Orberg will rule the scene and rightfully so.
it is not worship .. it's love
I'm a hobbyist learning Latin on my free time for fun, and I'd say the LLPSI worked just fine for me. Although I didn't use the book "correctly". I skipped the pensa because I'm too impatient to read one chapter dozens of times. I'd re-read a chapter 3-4 times and once I was able to remember all the vocab and read the chapter naturally then I'd move on. I also used a dictionary for certain words and did indeed commit the grave sin of translating at the start. But despite all that I've been able to read Cicero and Caesar at least, so I did make some progress, right? I wouldn't go as far as to say that you can learn Latin just with LLPSI. I used a mix of it, youtube videos and a dictionary. I wasn't smart enough to understand the grammar explanations purely through Latin so I watched someone explain them instead in English (Latintutorial is a godsent) and I was amazed how smoothly everything went as I re-read the chapters. But yeah, like you said I still think it is a very good resource. It helped me immensely at the start of my journey!
Yes, I think if you take LLPSI as a resource to be used for the learner's benefit among other resources, it really does work well.
I'm in adult dyslexic learner that has failed to learn Latin for several decades. I had 4 years of high school Latin, . I've put a good deal of time on my own into studying Latin, including, Duolingo, grammar textbooks, flashcards, etc. I've always found I can learn vocab, but learning the grammar is impossible. I was attracted to CI because of the idea that you can unconsciously learn grammar. But the grammar seems to just bounce off me. Any wisdom to share?
I think you might find that some items of grammar take longer to sink in than others, and this may have no correlation to the order in which they are introduced in grammar books/textbooks. For example, the accusative case is usually the first thing explained because it's everywhere in the language; but in practice it seems to be the last thing people truly internalise. By contrast, the -issimus ending for the superlative (eg. "īrātissimus", "very angry", in contrast to "īrātus", "angry") tends to get picked up pretty rapidly by students, even though it's introduced much later than the accusative in grammar books. I think a factor might be that the accusative is pretty redundant in most sentences, and it's a feature of a relatively less important word in the sentence, whereas the -issimus carries an emphatic meaning and the word it modifies is often the meaningful focus of the sentence, so the brain treats it as more urgent to learn. So I think part of our perception is that we expect to acquire grammar in the order that the textbook presents it, but actually that's not necessarily the case. But just because we don't learn a "basic" item of grammar, doesn't mean we are learning no grammar. Our brains could be silently working on other grammar topics that are deemed more "advanced" or "out of sequence", but which make more sense to the brain.
Prōfectō motivātiō gravis est.
Will you be making a similar video about Athenaze?
I haven't had as much time to properly sit down with Athenaze and read it all the way through in both the UK and Italian editions. I've been working through the UK edition and I'll go to the Italian next, but I figure I wouldn't be the best source to comment on it until I've completely read it. I find Athenaze kind of amusing to read because it's co-authored by the same guy (Maurice Balme) as the Oxford Latin Course that I'm currently teaching from, and it shows in his story writing style and decisions around vocabulary.
the good thing in orberg's is his natural method .. easy by repeating no vulgar language
Hi! I'm still watching the video, but I have to say that it does really lack some kind of illustrations. Seeing nothing but the only picture annoys and prevents from staying focused.
A new book should be composed by multiple authors with similar language levels to the old Dane, but based on Greek and Roman mythology----even a majority of the myths.
This book would produce in the reader fluency in both Latin and Mythology.
Looking for the Ranieri comment lol
Why do I get the distinct impression that this is really a sells pitch for YOUR in-the-works textbooks and video products. But to each his own.
Did you even bother to watch the video?
@@Philoglossos Yes. That's why I wrote what I wrote.
@@RecalledtoLife Then you didn't pay attention, because she explicitly recommends Ørberg in the video. She is criticizing certain attitudes towards Ørberg which tend to create problems, and I say that as someone who teaches Latin using Ørberg. The idea that Carla, who releases all of the Latin learning content she produces for free, is somehow trying to disparage Ørberg in order to sell forthcoming products is shamefully stupid.
I'd love a list of CI novella's grouped by difficulty level. If you have an amazon associates link I'd be happy to buy them through that.
I do plan on making some novella reviews at some point, after discussing the issues of Latinitas and editing to do with novellas. When I do reviews, I'll make an affiliate link to the ones I review. But in the mean time, currently this is the most organised list of novellas, which groups them first by author and then by difficulty within each author: docs.google.com/document/d/1bF8hZuxTDtgNMSSdonEX112JJaVYqoPH7w27Oju9ETs/edit?fbclid=IwAR3_EyG3waCL_WwYCG4uricZMMXQXIJzwMdvEUwAov31ncBS9Uv3Jei7d3A
@@FoundinAntiquity That's great thank you. A would find a review interesting.
You say Illustrara. :)
I failed my first Latin class, but after reading Familia Romana I ended up taking three more semesters of Latin getting all As
Im reading that book now and I gotta say its awesome. I"ve studied 7 languages and I can conversationally speak in 5 and now reading this book I wish other books take the same example because that book was well thought. However, one should use the other books such as exercitia latina and the others ones.
Perhaps I am a bit late to the game to add a comment here, but have you looked at 'Forum' by Christophe Rico from the Polis Institute? It's another CI Latin text that was designed specifically with addressing perceived short-comings in LLPSI in mind. I haven't read it so I can't comment one way or the other, but Prof. Rico is a mega-brain and his work is generally top-notch.
I've used parts of Forum in my lessons, especially with beginner students. My TPR video series contains 5 short videos of adapted conversations from Forum, if you want to check the method out. It's a good method for classroom use, but a self learner would struggle to get much out of the book because the main source of meaningful input is from live, in-person conversations that are improvised and acted out on the models given in Forum. A reader unfortunately doesn't get that context. But this is not a criticism for the book itself, just a word of caution that it's not very useful for autodidacts (but very useful in classrooms).
Gravissimus in linguam discendī ūsus activus est. Solum trānslātiōne et grammāticā ad cognoscentiās passīvās dūcet. Mōdus docendi nōn tam gravis est quam ūsus āctīvus! Crītica semper ūtilis est, et commentāriōs Tuōs libenter audiō.
As one who reveres LLPSI as a grand and audacious achievement, I nevertheless greatly appreciate this critical analysis of the method, the book, and it's adherents. The historical background is much appreciated, as well as the information on recent developments in the field.
I'm glad you found it informative!
I so agree with you! My own path through LLPSI was somewhat of a zigzag--at some point I realized it was too hard for me to continue so I read a bunch of other 1st year textbooks, then went back to LLPSI and go through several more chapters comfortably until I had to take a break again, read a bunch of other stuff, then come back to it, re-read/re-listen to chapters, until I was finally able to finish. So I couldn't agree with ou more that the best approach is to read as much as possible, from as many different resources as possible.
But could you also do a similar paper/video on the cult of Stephen Krashen?? His disciples are much worse than the LLPSI cult IMHO. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally in agreement with the importance of CI and mostly agree with his other hypotheses too, but there are also a number of things wrong with the exclusive attachment to this guy and his hypotheses (not the least of which being that almost all of the studies confirming his hypotheses are coauthored by himself, or done by his disciples). And it's weird how any explicit grammar in Krashen circles is completely demonized.
Yes, we should be careful not to also worship Krashen as gospel, but weigh up his findings according to the evidence. I find that Krashen's theories focus most on the engine on language acquisition and comprehension, and on treating the human brain in isolation from social interaction. Swain's output hypothesis and Long's Interaction hypothesis also need to be seriously considered and scrutinised. As for the role of explicit grammar, Krashen himself admits of being a grammar nerd and enjoying reading grammar textbooks for fun, but we have to be careful that as language teachers, we are a very weird unrepresentative subset of human beings. I think it is healthy to be sceptical of the role of explicit grammar when the cultural process of transmission has been "4% of students like grammar and do well in grammar at school" → "these students become language teachers" → "they then teach grammar the way they were taught because it worked for them as students" → "4% of the next generation become grammar teachers and continue to make all the education curriculum decisions". Not that it's ok to completely demonise explicit grammar, but there is reason for scepticism as to its effectiveness when humans were learning languages without teachers or grammar curricula globally for thousands of years.
@@FoundinAntiquity I think we can be skeptical of the predominant role grammar has played in language classrooms for a long time, but have to admit I find the argument that we shouldn't teach grammar because students don't like it somewhat problematic. ANd I think the reason they often don't do well with it is because it is taught in complete isolation. I've seen students who can rattle down a-ae-ae-am-a etc. but have no clue what any of those forms mean in a sentence. THat's of course immensely problematic. But I find the other extreme, immensely problematic too (in FL as well as their native language). One of my goals as a language teacher is to help students understand language better, how language works, and I have found that students with at least a decent grasp of grammar do tend to write better and also typically pick things up ("acquire") language faster. Fostering a good intuition through input coupled with comprehension and understanding seems to be more powerful than just input by itself. There are also all those studies about the importance of noticing or paying attention to input. At any rate, why keep learners from something that can help them make sense of the input they're receiving?
@@lauraeidt1214 I remember an occasion when I was attending an intensive summer language course and there was a structure we had just learnt that I couldn’t make sense of. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use and generalize it because I just didn’t get what was going on, why one form was being used rather than another. I went from teacher to teacher trying to get an explanation, and got some form of “Oh, just accept it for now”, till I found one crusty woman who practically swore me to secrecy and then in hushed tones gave me a 30-second grammatical explanation that solved everything.
@@ailblentyn 🤣That is hilarious. Grammar, the best kept secret of language teachers.... Great story, thanks for sharing!
Salve! Firstly, I wanted to add that I think your assessment in this video is dead on. LLPSI, though indeed a good book and a far cry better than most language textbooks (including modern ones) is still indeed deficient in offering what is necessary for language acquisition. Additionally, the following of any grammatical syllabus or curriculum is somewhat antithetical to acquisition as well. I am glad you brought up the glaring social issues in the textbook that arise from both a 1950s perspective on Roman mores and a book written with the purpose of showing these things from a Roman perspective.
I also want to note that, as I have seen, those who are the biggest advocates for the book often went through some other sort of GT trauma (not to say, as you mentioned, Oerberg trauma does not exist) and found Oerberg to be the complete opposite experience. What you highlighted about those students left behind in a LLPSI classroom is definitely something I too have witnessed and is detrimental just as much as a GT classroom. I can understand the complete opposite hyper positive reaction after such a negative experience. Any worship, as you said, of one resource alone is dangerous and harmful.
Thank you for putting out this video and for the work you do in Latin and ancient Greek.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness on this! Yes, I didn't touch on it in the video, but structuring a course around a grammar sequence is antithetical to offering what is most relevant for language acquisition. I mean, grammar can definitely be worked into the exploration of topical content, and a sequencing of one thing before another is inevitable, but the way Latin textbooks including LLPSI are structured fundamentally around grammar goalposts isn't reflective of what we now know about how people acquire languages.
Thank you also for your active and continuing work in making Latin and Ancient Greek language content that isn't all built around grammar lessons, but around having fun in the language! It's really valuable that you're making all this communicative material.
Ave Ørberg! redditor linguae aeternae
Another critique that I have which has little to do with the content of the video but I want to say: the lack of macrons on the Latin Library and Bibliotheca Augustana. Extensive reading with the available compelling material out there gets compromised for beginners and intermediate learners because without macrons we cannot know how to pronounce the words!! It drives me nuts. We shouldn't be relaying on dictionaries to find right pronunciation of words!
I agree. Macrons help us to properly distinguish vowel quantity, essential for fully appreciating Latin, whether you use Classical or Ecclesiastical pronunciation.
YES. We should have printed macrons in everything. And there should be v's. j's are not quite as necessary but also cool.
latina pura res
Many excellent points. For myself, I studied Latin for 6 years at a Dutch gymnasium which was purely traditional grammar training and translation. I loved it, but my reading skills were very low after all this time, but my grammar/translation skills were pretty good. After going through all that and then - as more of a hobby - picking up books in the LLPSI series it definitely boosted my reading comprehension by a lot. I did always wonder however about all those people that start out with LLPSI. I saw it recommended everywhere and always felt the instructions should've been to first go through a basic grammar book and then start on that journey, but I couldn't undo my learning so maybe I was just wrong in how approachable the text was to a novice. I stand by that it's an excellent textbook, but I think even Orberg himself would argue that one needs more grammar training besides using his method.
It is totally fine to start out in language with communication as the central focus, rather than grammar. People don't need to learn the accusative case immediately, or all the noun case endings immediately, to be able to functionally use the language and make progress in it. I think the problem is that people are allergic to seeing beginners' output riddled with mistakes like "mihi est John" (for "ego sum John") and are worried that mistakes are going to fossilise. In any human language that kind of thing eventually sorts itself out as the learner gets more used to the patterns of the language. For Latin it takes longer to get to that higher level of competency - not because Latin is a particularly grammar-heavy language, but simply because a learner is less likely to be exposed to mass amounts of comprehensible input in it compared to a modern language. THe solution is not necessarily to get students memorising grammar rules, unless early accuracy in output is a goal in itself; the solution can simply be to adjust your expectations of what is normal for a language learner to achieve in a certain time frame with certain resources, and create & distribute more comprehensible input resources that will help learners get further.
@@FoundinAntiquity I think you make excellent points and I’m learning a lot from you and the different teaching methods; it’s very interesting. I would like to add to my own remark that the Dutch system of learning Latin and Ancient Greek that I went through might have a bit of a different aim compared to the aim in other countries.
Even though the subject is called Latin, it might as well be called “grammar training” since that’s what it was and Latin was merely its tool. In tests this went as far that the student would get all points for the right use of tense/ case/ number etc. of a word even if they chose the wrong translation (i.e. meaning) of said word.
I’ve often thought they actively avoided giving comprehensible input as that might tempt the student to start getting an intuition for the language and that wasn’t really the point. We were very strictly instructed to scan a line for a verb (usually starting near the end to get it quicker), then go for a subject, then go for an accusative etc. Central to these studies was learning an algorithm and sticking to it and often we got huge wordlists attached to a tests since our dictionary skills weren’t as important as our translation skills.
In the end I don’t feel these studies were a waste of time because it definitely boosted my skills in getting a good grasp for Latin/Dutch grammar/syntax and it made me a better writer in Dutch for sure (which I think was more of the point). It however didn’t make me a good reader of Latin at all.
In some way this was really the opposite of the natural method. Later when I started using LLPSI and many of the novellas that I found along the way I obviously never struggled with grammar or translation or simple exercises etc. so I’m quite grateful to having been taught grammar as well as I did since it feels quite intuitive at this point. The only thing I struggle with now is that I actively have to avoid “scanning” when I read Latin. Reading it the natural way can ironically feel very unnatural once you’ve been taught Latin as this tool of grammar in stead of as a language.
Anyway, thanks again for you video. I think the most important lesson we can all take is perhaps the most obvious one: to learn a language there exists no one size fits all and we probably would all do well with a bit of variety in teaching methods. Making LLPSI dogma is as big of a mistake as only learning the grammar. We need a bit of both if we want to truly learn Latin.
@@j.r.faasen9707 I like how you describe the grammar skills as following an algorithm. I remember trying to program code to process Latin (in this case to produce Latin sentences) but it had no way of knowing meaning like a human, and I was trying to tell it not to put nonsense together like "the water sees the anger" by giving it preferences for certain verb & noun combinations, so the complexity increased as the possible interactions of vocabulary increased in a way that quickly got out of hand. I think a lot of the grammar method is about making a human deploy an algorithm with only a little more attention to meaning than a computer, with the belief that meaning will make itself most easily apparent when words are processed one by one in that algorithmic order and that the grammatical relationships of items in a sentence can be reliably solved before knowing what it means. I'm sure it gives a lot of insight into the mechanism of some grammar features, but other pragmatic grammar features - eg. the use of word order to move from the known to the unknown, the raising of a topic to give it special prominence, how discourse works... these more large scale things are not emphasised as grammar knowledge of the same utility as knowing the more localised rules of agreement, what verb takes the dative, uses of the ablative, etc.
But I'm glad you've been having a good experience with using LLPSI and novellas and the grammar feels intuitive!
@@j.r.faasen9707 by the way, one way I've found that helps with getting out of the habit of scanning the sentence for the main verb, is to watch videos or listen to podcasts in Latin without the subtitles. If your eyes can't see the sentence, you can't possibly jump around it, but in practice when you hear a sentence rapidly, every two second chunk of the sentence (every phrase or clause) gets processed as its own meaningful contribution to the sentence as it builds up.
I agree with you. A novice (one who doesn’t know much grammar even in their own language) will certainly have a difficult time getting through LLPSI without a teacher guiding them. LLPSI is more for autodidacts who already know grammar pretty well (i.e. someone who already graduated from high school or even college). I can’t imagine most primary and secondary students getting through LLPSI on their own.
39:45 This is my main sticking point with LLPSI, especially since even after the non-present tenses are introduced the present tense is still used more often than it should, not to mention how bloody long it takes to get to the subjunctive. That's such a useful mood for communication that I really don't get why it take so long to get there.
Yes! The tenses and the subjunctive should have been introduced earlier!
This is a truly excellent video essay! Half the reason I started learning Latin was that I bought into the hype of LLPSI. As I went through it, I started to realize it was not quite the magical book that it had been praised to be. 😄
I really like your observation about how the PENSA are (unintentionally) more about protecting the reputation of Familia Romana rather than helping with a student's progress. Only the students who are crazy enough to reread the text enough to memorize the answers will actually progress to more input and "succeed". Sometimes I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, since the entire LLPSI-sphere insist on the necessity of mastering these exercises.
I enjoyed hearing about the history of the Direct Method and the Nature method. I somehow have never heard of Latin through Ovid. I guess I'll throw that on my reading pile for extensive reading at some point. 😅
Latin Via Ovid is a fantastic book, but it's learning curve is steeper than LLPSI, CLC, et. al.
I'm glad you stuck with Latin even after it was clear that LLPSI wasn't going to be all it was hyped to be. It's been great seeing you document your progress in Latin through different comprehensible input sources and I should have credited you in the video for using the word count statistics - the numbers for familia romana and the CLC came from your spreadsheets.
Yeah, the pensa are quite problematic in relation to communcative language teaching. Pensum C is the best, but it's still fairly artificial as a kind of classroom "display your knowledge" question as opposed to "communicate to an audience" task. There can be a role for output practice in increasing the accessibility of the language system, but in a language like Latin output is not necessarily everyone's goal. I think that output is a good skill to encourage even just for the possibilities of getting to take part in interaction, which will open the door to receiving more input. But it's not like your language progress should only be measured in how accurately you can answer the pensa, which is the only exercise offered by vanilla LLPSI and the only standard "attainment test" inside the LLPSI sphere. It'd be interesting if mastery or progress could be measured more independently with optional reading comprehension assessments, if people want to stick a label on their progress.
I will be the first to admit that if I didn't skip over the pensa I wouldn't have continued reading. I found it much more productive to supplement LLPSI:FR with the colloquia and other resources than to struggle through the pensa.
Hearing you mention Aleph with Beth in another video I jumped on it, as I was struggling to learn Biblical Hebrew. As you mentioned, it is an incredible resource. I would LOVE for you to do Aleph with Beth style content or a series in Latin and I would definitely contribute to patreon for material like this. Your content is amazing, and even if you don't do that I need to contribute. My whole family has fallen in love with your Minecraft series, and every time we are at the store everyone starts yelling "serpetor" when we see it.
in the French speaking space, there's the assimil Latin textbook. It's far from perfect: the difficulty curve is very steep, words are introduced too fast, the exercices aren't very interesting and at the end harder than the actual content of each chapter, etc. But its structure of 6 chapters + 1 revision makes its use very simple and entertaining: you read one chapter a day starting on Monday for example, and on Sunday you have the weekly revision. The texts are consistently interesting, usually isolated when it comes to content from one another, but some spend multiple chapters. It has notes, all of the texts are translated, it's thorough... I recommend it but, but I recognise that it's not easy textbook to get through
Thanks for your thoughts on the assimil Latin course! I don't know French so it's not easy for me to gauge how well the course works.
It's best with the audio. The French in the book could be thrown into Google Translate for comprehension.
Rectissime mones, magistra. The LLPSI *series* of books by themselves are not enough comprehensible input to learn Latin, let alone Familia Rōmāna. I'm tired of re-reading. Most of my progress has come by means of re-listening podcast episodes such as those by Satura Lanx, Legio XIII and Litterae Christianae. Content that has nothing to do with LLPSI; I, being at chapter XXX, still learn new things when reading chapter XIV. LLPSI is a good recommendation, that's for sure, but it can't end there. The Latin community needs quantity and quality of content to allow new learners the painless progress they deserve. Valē!
Yes, I definitely feel that we need to make it easier for people to get large amounts of comprehensible input from all kinds of sources - not just resources chained to LLPSI chapters, but resources with no connection to it too, in a variety of authors and media types.
Excellent! I use LLPSI but not all alone. I'm forced to create my own grammatical component combining several texts to formulate a combined method. It's working so far.
I think a mix of all methods is the best route. The vocabulary, grammar, exposure, idioms, syntax, etc. all need to be ironed out. Relying on just LLPSI is just far fetched and has been put on a pedestal recently at the expense of exploring other materials alongside it.
None of the books for example ever looked in-depth on how word order works, usually they write it off as being free and/or usually SOV, but none explain why that is. Oddly enough, Wikipedia has a rather interesting page dedicated to this topic, showing examples and explaining why word order is a certain way, even Dickinson College has a really good webpage about it too.
Yes - word order is very under-explained as a concept. I've been trying to nut it out with my students too, by showing them examples where a person might answer a question using a different word order. The OLC has a tendency to use the verb-first word order construction when the suddenness of an action is emphasised, which is nice. But it doesn't explain that choice, and there isn't a whole lot else of word order play going on.
Although I'm something of a casual, I've personally never heard of this textbook. We used the Cambridge Latin Course series in class, and I still have a soft spot for it. But I recently decided to pick up Wheelock's Latin for reference, brushing up on the basics. I'm no authority on linguistic pedagogy, but I can see an inherent value in trying different methods and sources to find out what works for the class. Unlike "living" languages like Spanish or French, I think Latin poses an interesting set of challenges when it comes to immersion outside the classroom - the closest I've been able to find is a local Sunday mass conducted entirely in Ecclesiastical Latin.
I think it's nice to approach grammar rules after you've had a chance to internalise more of the language - going from Cambridge to reading Wheelock's for fun is a different experience from, say, being forced to memorise isolated elements of the language from Wheelock's from the beginning as the only mode of learning. As for immersion outside of the classroom - I'm hoping that the many different podcasts and video options that are getting produced are making it easier to do the equivalent of listening to the radio or turning on the news, but in Latin.
I had Latin classes in 6th and 7th grade, my teacher used Ecce Romani and this was in the mid nineties. While learning other languages on my own, I always found it most helpful to have a variety of sources, and that doesn't change when it comes to Latin. The more, the merrier. None of them can teach you everything you need, they should be treated as stepping stones on your way.
When I was learning German, I watched films in German and listened to German music. I bought German novels to read. I read Nietzsche in German. When I was in Germany, I only spoke German and did not use any tourist materials in English, because that was the point of me being there, and yet many think that one textbook or one class will magically make them "fluent" in a language.
That being said, LLPSI has helped me quite a bit, but one needs to already know what to expect and that you need to have exposure to other things in the language. I went for 20+ years of not doing anything in Latin and pretty much forgetting it, so it's been interesting to see things like this popping up while I was trying to re-teach myself Latin. I used to be pretty good, but my teacher used a conversational teaching method in addition to using Ecce Romani, and he had extra curricular things going on about the Aeneid as well, and some of us did things like writing each other notes in Latin (that way, your parents couldn't figure out what you were writing!).
I think it's just the modern culture of wanting everything to happen instantly and with apps and without any/much work, and considering things to be the greatest and best rather than just one book among many.
I think it's also black and white thinking, you go from "using the target language is good!" and from that, "using the native language should be verboten!" Too much enthusiasm for using the language, whereas sometimes it helps to use the native language.
Yes, the more the merrier! Use all the resources! Sometimes I think that the insistence upon the purity of "Latin immersion at all costs" can be a reason for people to harshly restrict themselves to LLPSI and the LLPSI-related resources, being scared that all glossing is "bad". I mean, overreliance on English glossing isn't great, but if the story is captivating and you can read it mostly in Latin, it's going to be beneficial for your learning, and it certainly won't do any harm.
@@FoundinAntiquity Yes, I imagine that's so, a "purity" kind of thing. "Can't use English (or whatever else one's native language is), and the other texts have English!" which is not helpful.
When LLPSI started to bore me I took that as a sign to use a different book or other materials for a while, exactly as I did with other languages when a text either lost my attention or if I felt I needed a different approach. For teachers, I'd imagine it's what works for the students that would be best, not just insistence on just using this text. And different students have different needs, as you stated in the video, and some are more self-motivated. I remember some of us checking out Catullus from the public library as school kids 20+ years ago, we were motivated to read the stuff we weren't allowed to read in class there!
But I think that's it, restricting oneself is bad in any case. Learning Latin should not be a cult of certain textbook, but rather, a general interest in and love of the language itself. But errare humanum est! lol.
Sadly there are students I've talked to who got bored with a book, a method, a class, whatever, and decided this meant they hate Latin. It's possible they don't hate Latin, they just were frustrated with a particular book or method. On the other hand though, I feel like, because I had a good teacher then, who made class fun and made things interesting, that's one reason I ended up getting back into Latin again. And also why I studied foreign languages in university, but I mean to say, a good teacher and a good experience can have a profound lifelong impact.
I’m using Pharrs Homeric Greek. Plus Schoder Homeric Greek and Athenaze (English and Italian) Combined. Also reading Rouses greek boy and picked up some old Ancient Greek books plus the New Testament. I memorized paradigms also.
Halfway through this, and stopped to compliment you on the quality of this essay.
Also, to ask that you please post the written essay in your patreon.
I've posted a written version of the essay on my blog, if that's what you're after! foundinantiquity.com/2022/09/20/why-the-cult-of-the-one-true-textbook-has-to-stop/
If there is a better method for self learners, please let me know of it! LLPSI may not be perfect but it is fairly cost effective, comprehensive and has an online community, which makes a big difference. One day I might pay for online lessons but in the meantime all of the methods you promote are not available to me.
As for the use of novellas for CI - I bounce hard off them. I think it may be the illustrations but every time I look at spending my own money on one of them I cringe at the cute kiddie appearance. Yes, I'm sure the material may be OK but compelling? I can't see it. I agree that LLPSI may not be the most exciting story but at least I can take it just as a textbook and not feel that I have to enjoy it.
In the meantime I do look at Latin videos intended for a general audience and do my best to carry on. As an adult, independent learner I suppose I am the intended audience for LLPSI and I can use my own judgement on how to use the material. I just wish there was more CI material I would like out there.
I'm curious - what kind of things would you find interesting to read as Latin novellas? Daniel Petterson's novella "Pugio Bruti" strikes me as a more mature looking, stylish, detective mystery novel in tone. His materials tend to be marketed with more of a "Renaissance man" ornate aesthetic rather than a kid friendly vibe. Would you find his stuff more appealing?
@@FoundinAntiquity I do intend to read this book as well as "Ad Alpes", once I've progressed further with LLPSI. It looks OK, although the child protagonist is not a draw card for me. But the presentation is more appealing. I do understand that these books are written for schools and young Latin learners and not independent adult students, so I accept that my choices are limited.
What would I find interesting to read in Latin? I'm here mostly for the ancient history but I would read fantasy set in "ancient times" (but not Harry Potter rip offs). I'd be keen to read nonfiction as well as fiction. I'd probably give anything a go, but not something cutesy.
@@gillian932 properly speaking, the protagonist in pugio Bruti is not a child, but more like a young adult woman. Also she may be the official main character, but the adult man who helps her out seems a better fit as the real protagonist of the story. I don't think you'll find it cutesy.
That is good to know, what your preferences are.
Having used LLPSI on my own, none of this came as a surprise. I hit all of the shortcomings you describe.
LLPSI sparked an interest in learning Latin that the GT approach did not, but it was discovering and reading novellas as CI that kept me going. The sheltered grammar of LLPSI and it's steep curve had me constantly putting it down and picking it up again. I definitely find LLPSI to be a valuable resource, but it's through extensive reading and listening that I do the majority of my acquisition.
One thing that puzzled me about recommendations of LLPSI is that it's pitched as compelling. Some of it is. A lot really isn't. I couldn't muster the sheer internal drive to persist through the middle of the book and was thankful to have novellas available. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, the quantity and quality of materials isn't enough. I either end up re-reading materials below my level or materials above my level and, as you said, flipping through the dictionary far too often.
I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the currently available novellas.
Salvē, bone vir! Could you share the names of those novellas with me?
I do need to make some novella reviews! I've been meaning to, but I first need to write a talk about Latinitas and how we can fix certain shortcomings of novellas because every time a novella comes up, that's what dominates the discussion. Novellas aren't as polished as big-budget textbooks but they are still very good sources of compelling extensive reading. (Not that a given novella will be compelling to everyone, but the presence of multiple choices makes it more likely you can find material you personally find compelling)
@@publiusvergiliusmaro1125 I have enjoyed many of the novellas based on mythology (familia mala series, labyrinthus etc) by Andrew Olimpi (via Amazon). They gave me a grasp of the present and perfect tense long before LLPSI. Their biggest shortcoming is the very obvious use of English cognates and regularly use of English word order.
I have also read some by Emily Vanderpool and Rachel Beth Cunning.
I tried a couple by Lance Piantaggini. The ones I ordered were a bit below my level so the repetition of known words made for poor engagement on my part. That's entirely on me.
@@FoundinAntiquity I'm keen to hear your thoughts on that as well. Knowing what habits I might pick up from various authors is worth knowing.
Something that makes choosing the right supplemental content difficult is the inconsistent grading of novellas. What one author considers beginner is another's intermediate and anything in between. I've picked up many that were above and below my level. If they're below my level and compelling I breeze through them and it's all good. If they're too hard I put them on the shelf and check them out every once and a while. It would be awesome to have a better idea of what type of challenge to expect from a given book.
Something that's affected my engagement is the frequency and method of repetition. Some books depend upon very tedious repetition of near identical phrases within a chapter while others achieve repetition over multiple chapters. The former has lead to me dropping a few books early on. What I found is if the phrase didn't make sense the first time the repetition was ineffective and if it was understood, the repetition made for dull content. In both cases I put down the book in frustration.