I like both, and I am using both for teaching myself Latin. After finishing all 5 books in the CLC I am now reading LLPSI. Latin is a difficult language and you need lots of input. I don't think just using one of them is enough. It's also important to go back and repeat. CLC has great stories and illustrations, one problem however is that they leave out some grammatical stuff that really should be included. For example the supine, gerund, imperative future, and future passive infinitive are left out, if I remember correctly. But it doesn't matter so much as long as one is aware of this and uses other books also.
The aim of LLPSI is to provide a reasonably priced, compact and concentrated one unit Latin course that takes you from zero to hero in a short amount of time. So repetitions are necessary to achieve the kind of saturation required to achieve that goal. The story only need to be interesting enough for people to keep reading. In a sense LLPSI is in essence a "Wheelock's Latin" that is you only need that one book to cover "everything" just like a Wheelock (for grammar) but for reading. It is by no means ideal nevertheless it gets the job done. I believe both Wheelock and LLPSI can be combined to form a combination of intensive grammar and reading which you yourself advocate. Other the hand, Oxford Latin courses or Cambridge Latin courses aim to introduce Latin in a more manageable small bite sized " Latin meals ". So naturally they have all the liberty to create a more sparse quality repetitions across the entire courses. Therefore it is reasonable that the courses required significantly more time to complete and not to mention the exorbitant cost of the entire series. In summary, if you have all the time and money in the world by all means go for Oxford/Latin courses. Otherwise combination of Wheelock's Latin and LLPSI will be a much more time efficient and cost efficient choice with the caveat that it is not for faint of heart. In the end it all depends on what you want to achieve with what resources you have (time, money, will etc ) And that is my humble opinion.
You have to take into account that LLPSI is just one book in the whole series. LLPSI -> Fabulae Syrae -> Epitome Historia Sacra -> Roma Aeterna -> (+7 Adapted readers). After the initial chapters the story gets better. They both are good in their own category. I think the Cambridge Latin Course could be used as a graded reader before Roma Aeterna or you could go through all the LLPSI book series after CLC
Use both and get the advantages of both. I am using LLPSI as a base, the stories can be funny at times, but other times, repeated reading can be somewhat boring. I find supplemental reading of CLC and Fr Most’s LTNM, help keeps it interesting and provides much more comprehensive input at a level appropriate to my learning.
If comparing just the LLPSI Familia Romana book alone VS the first Cambridge book then I agree, overall the stories are more interesting in the Cambridge book. The whole Pompeii theme and it erupting in the end was such a nail biting good tale. Familia Romana does get interesting in the second half though, and the ancillary readers that go along with the series are great. I do think that LLPSI Familia Romana is the better series for really learning and internalizing Latin though. The book being 100% in Latin, plus the workbook having TONS of exercises that ask questions in Latin and must be answered in Latin. The lack of English in this course is a plus, plus words are recycled much more in Familia Romana for greater reinforcement. In one chapter you learn about shop keepers selling gems and pearls and then in another chapter you encounter a wolf whose eyes shine like gems and teeth like pearls for example. Also in a typical chapter of Famila Romana you might have the exact same sentence reused in 5 different ways. This makes makes for less interesting story telling but a plus for internalizing the language. I highly , HiGHLY recommend the book " a companion to familia romana" to use along with it though, otherwise the grammar at points can be a bit confusing trying to learn from the book alone, like the many different uses of the ablative will confuse without any explanation. Both Familia Romana and Cambridge throw a crazy amount of vocab at you which is good that you end up learning so much but it can be a bit overwhelming at times if you try and rush through the books. Books like the Henle series are nice in that you only learn a few words at a time and then drill the heck out of those words until you know them as good as your own language. Smaller bite sized chunks are nicer. However, the material you are reading and translating in Henle is so incredibly dry I had to stop 30% thru before I went insane. Everything in Henle is about 2 topics: the church and war related stuff. After translating sentences like "the sailors praise Mary but do not praise war." Over and over again it gets to be soul crushing . Overall I think Cambridge and LLPSI are the 2 best courses that exist. They both could be made a lot better though.
Thanks for your insight and recommendations! I do agree that LLPSI Familia Romana recycles vocabulary more than the CLC and introduces fewer new words per length of the chapter, but also that both the CLC and LLPSI Familia Romana could be greatly improved as resources.
I'm from the LLPSI camp, I also follow lessons using that method. But I do like how compact the Cambridge Latin story is. Although I would prefer the translated words not to be on the same page. You can get so much further in translating yourself by studying sentences longer and associating with words you already know somewhat. Familia Romana chapters are long and densely filled with new things to learn (or miss), it can be a bit exhausting at times.
I'm teaching myself Latin I have the Cambridge Latin course textbook so you reading a story . Directly from the text was of enormous help to me ( I must admit pronunciation can sometimes be a bit of a problem ).
Has anyone come up with a good way to stitch together in one plan the storytelling approach (acquisition) with the grammar/learning approach as in Wheelock?
What you're describing is essentially the "reading method" which is taking the grammar curriculum and attaching stories to it which are sheltered to only exhibit grammar explained up to that stage. The CLC, Orberg's Lingua Latina, OLC, Suburani, Ecce Romani, etc. etc. are all examples of that method. Where it falls is that vocabulary is introduced very fast in every one of those courses, so that especially in the first half of the course, studnets are really "stringing together glosses" instead of "reading" (or in the case of Lingua Latina, just going really really slowly and getting 20 new things thrown at you each page) and the stories are not highly comprehensible but are quite laborious to understand in their unadapted form. I currently teach from the OLC but I adapt stories, insert extra stories, draw a picture for every sentence in a story etc. just to make the course more comprehensible, but we're fighting against some ground assumptions made in these courses (eg. that 20+ new vocab items in a new story with totally new context, plus lots of side glosses is ok, and that using a past tense before it's been officially explained is not ok)
Perhaps a better test, although more difficult, would be to track students using both texts, determine their competences after a certain period and also determine the dropout rate. Or even the fluency rate. I speculate that there would be little difference. Both texts are far better than texts 50 years ago or so that interjected a lot of info on how Latin can be found in English, presumably as a carrot for the learner. There was a belief that nobody was really going to speak this stuff and we have to sweeten the program to keep people interested. Now a goal, among others, is to speak this stuff. A lot of the older texts. like "Latin for Americans," still are on Amazon, and they usually can be sampled there.
I guess at the end of the day, a teacher can make a lot of story-based Latin resources more interesting by showing their own enthusiasm for the stories, and encouraging students to cooperatively create their own twists on the stories, with varying levels of support from the teacher. A good teacher could make pretty much any story more enjoyable. The biggest factor is if students are engaging with large amounts of connected Latin which is understandable and meaningful to them. Waffling in English about the etymological links between Latin and English and how fascinating it is to learn a language that is the source of those words, is kind of like telling people in detail how good something tastes instead of giving it to them.
@@FoundinAntiquitythe goal is it not unchanged to read the language and understand the literature not to speak or read conversationally. Misk english kids can read Shakespeare only literature students understand the plays at greater depth. Being able to read fluently at a superficial level will help but not everyone would want to go beyond that no matter how much coach predigests or tells them how wonderful the food will actually become
A comment by someone that has used both for college latin year one both classes of 6 units. Cambridge two book per term or four in a year of two terms(15weeks). The pure number of the vocabulary words was unreal, turning the class into little more than lists of 30+ words a class. The stories may have been better but new Latin student it was unreal in the number of words per class three times a week. All of the students in that class that had not taken Latin before failed but we only made up 10% of the class, the other 90% having had three or four years in high school found the class easy. LLPSI the whole book for the year of 6 units but split in to three terms of 16, 16, and 12 weeks. In using LLPSI we are also using exercitia latina(wookbook), Colloquia Personarum (story story using vocab of chapter), the student manual and in final term "fabulae syrae". This is far better for students as the rate of vocabulary is 30 a week, not a class. I would find your comparison a little better if you looked at both in the chapter about the family and a more enjoyable story for both. I would also love a look at the total number of vocabulary words covered in the five books of Cambridge vs the 1800 in LLPSI, as that is as big a part of the program as the grammar covered.
The 1800 llpsi isn't enough to tackle primary sources these days there are sights that offer the 3000+ vocab list provided by Cambridge University at start of term or specific vocab translations for aeneid etc. But unless you memorise and some object to that it doesn't help just to know numbers. And if you have the mindset to cram partitioning the day int ok BB work hours with deadlines and revision days breaking the back by if courses. Then either or both courses before accepting this will involve life long study. Pretty sure most fail that by moving on to something else
@@Aditya-te7oo While British English and Australian English may sound similar to you, perhaps due to your unfamiliarity with them, they are vastly different accents. Native speakers will immediately know which is which, and the more non-native speakers hear them, the more obvious the differences become. It’s possible that if you drew a Venn diagram of both accents’ speakers, there would be a small subset of people who sound similar, but that subset would arguably be a very low percentage of all speakers. And don’t forget that within the two primary accent groups we’re talking about, there will be many differences too. Possibly less so for Australia (although I suspect there are some class/regional/ethnic/geographical differences), but certainly in the UK, there are hundreds of British English accents that will make the wider differences between the way the nations speak English even more pronounced.
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison as LLPSI was of one of the very begging chapters while Oxford was for more advanced learners who know more vocabulary than 50. If you want a fair comparison, you would have compare texts that are based on the same amount of vocabulary.
LLPSI reminds me a lot of the old “Dick and Jane” books designed to teach young English speakers how to read. I think that may be exactly what it was going for.
That does make sense - they both have the goal of using simple language to ease into reading. Although the Dick and Jane examples I've been able to see, while simple and plain, at least stuck to situations that seemed to matter to children, as opposed to going on long digressions talking about geography, towns, rivers, roads, and the relative sizes of islands, the relative position of people in front of or behind a litter who are carrying sacks and walking one direction or another on a road, or about the necessity of breathing for continuing to be alive, etc. I feel like sometimes Oerberg struggles to find the right subject matter for compelling language use, or maybe he really liked geography.
Yes, I've had a brief look at it! I like what it's trying to do, in giving lots of easy content from early on. There are some things about it I wish were different but on the whole I'm really glad it exists and I would recommend it as additional reading material for Latin learners.
I've read a few chapters of it but I haven't had time to do a thorough read-through and review yet. I really like the exercises that accompany each chapter- they're not just fill in the blanks, they are very meaning-focused. There is a good review of it on Seumas Macdonald's blog: thepatrologist.com/2022/06/14/via-latina-a-review/
Hello. Thank you for the video. Don't you think that there are intentionally no interesting stories in LLPS, because they will distract students from the form of words, concentrating a lot of attention on the content?
I think it is partly a result of the cultural context of mid 20th century Direct Method teaching styles - interesting content was considered something which potentially distracted from the study of the language itself or put too much burden on the learner. CLC follows later trends where the inherent interest of stories is meant to help spark curiosity and motivate students to persevere and read for meaning. Most recently, comprehensible input theorists like Krashen are advocating for not just "interesting" input but "compelling" input, where ideally the learner is so absorbed in the story or task that they forget it is in another language. So, yes, partly the uninteresting nature of LLPSI stories is intentional, but it's also a hangover of an older view about language learning that puts the incremental language study in the centre (i.e. moving learners through predetermined grammar goalposts through reading and form-quizzing) rather than focusing on interpreting and conveying meaning in the language (i.e. more communicative approaches).
to read the latina lingua .. you should have some italian or sardinian basis .. to study cambridge's you should know stress shift , intonation away from england .. and forget the germanization norman vulgarisation
Wow thanks for this. the Cambridge one looks way more interesting. I had tried reding lingua Latina but it was so boring. Like it was made for kids. Probably would be helpful to read through it but just felt like I was in school in again.
LLPSI lesson has many Latin Proper names, the dramatis personae so to speak, we wait for the action.. rather unstimulating, we learn 'est' and 'sunt' and the household is presented with a multitude of individuals, centum servi and dominus and domina, ancillae. CLC has an interesting read as there is something happening, suspense, climax, mystery faintly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe LLPSI will gradatim pick up steam. Each has its merits, and story telling is an art, no less the teaching of grammar.
Yes, storytelling is definitely an art, and I feel that while Oerberg does gradually get to a point where stories exist and are interesting, so often he still relies on infodumps and plots often just barely count as plots. Not that storytelling is the only job of a Latin resource, but it's something well worth doing in communicative language teaching to the extent that the comprehensibility of the text allows it.
You compare a much more advanced-level, developed story in the Cambridge book with a simple beginner-level text in Lingva Latina. That doesn't at all seem a legitimate comparison! You need to compare like with like.
Why does storytelling matter so much? Whichever one teaches Latin better should be considered superior since teaching Latin is the ultimate goal of the books.
This is an absurd comparison and it wates a majority of the time simply reading the story outloud and then rehashing it in English only then does she make a few comments about it. Her only apparent interest is whether the story is intersting to her.
I learned through the grammar-translation method with Shelmerdine. I didn't know about CI until I started teaching two and a half years ago. The school I work at uses LLPSI. There are a lot of things I like about the book, but I have issues with it as well. I think this issue you are showcasing here is one of my biggest problems with the book. It can be such a dry text. Not only that, but the early chapters make it difficult to allow for a lot of things like TPRS. In sixth grade (ages 11-12) which is the grade I teach, we only cover the first 8 chapters. It can be such a slog to get through at times. I remember a student asking me at the end of our chapter three unit why all the stories we did (because I created supplemental stories for TPRS and for extra reading outside of the book) always featured someone sleeping, someone singing, and then someone getting angry about the singing and punching someone else. It's because the first few chapters don't give us much to use for storytelling. Chapter four doesn't add many new things to spice things up for TPRS, nor does chapter five, and the sixth chapter is the road chapter, so of course it's dull, and it isn't until chapter seven that we start to get some more actually interesting things happening in the book. Things like this make me wish I had the ability to abandon the textbook or make one of my own. Thankfully this year I've managed to find a way to keep these early chapters engaging to the students. They never got tired of going over the map in the three or so weeks we covered it. I kept the map up the entire time and asked students about the map and visualized what we were reading about in the book for them on the map. It's like you said in this video, the repetition is, of course, good for helping them master the language, but it needs to be paired with a visual or it becomes dull. I was incredibly surprised at how engaged my students were this year compared to previous years just by doing this (and, of course, I did a few supplemental things like teaching the verbs "amāre," "dēlectāre," and "gerere" (for wearing an article of clothing) at the same time, but the main thing was the map). Anyway, I'm kind of just going off on my own tangent at this point, but I think this is all to say that I really enjoy your video. LLPSI certainly has flaws and the fact that the reading can be so dull is a major one. Thank you for making this video!
It's really great hearing your thoughts and experiences with CI and LLPSI! I agree, there are some problems with the vocabulary choice in LLPSI and the first few chapters of every textbook seems to have some problems with not providing interesting words. I've heard some Latin teachers solve this problem by going untextbooked and using TPRS and novellas as the basis of their curriculum. I'm not quite ready to go there myself but I'm increasingly tempted, and I'm definitely mixing in some TPRS stories for engagement with my current textbook, and novellas for pleasure reading.
The LLPSI uses repetition more than the CLC 'cause it teaches Latin only through Latin unlike the CLC which uses English alongside Latin.
I like both, and I am using both for teaching myself Latin. After finishing all 5 books in the CLC I am now reading LLPSI. Latin is a difficult language and you need lots of input. I don't think just using one of them is enough. It's also important to go back and repeat. CLC has great stories and illustrations, one problem however is that they leave out some grammatical stuff that really should be included. For example the supine, gerund, imperative future, and future passive infinitive are left out, if I remember correctly. But it doesn't matter so much as long as one is aware of this and uses other books also.
I find learning catholic hymns useful to improve Latin
The aim of LLPSI is to provide a reasonably priced, compact and concentrated one unit Latin course that takes you from zero to hero in a short amount of time. So repetitions are necessary to achieve the kind of saturation required to achieve that goal. The story only need to be interesting enough for people to keep reading. In a sense LLPSI is in essence a "Wheelock's Latin" that is you only need that one book to cover "everything" just like a Wheelock (for grammar) but for reading. It is by no means ideal nevertheless it gets the job done.
I believe both Wheelock and LLPSI can be combined to form a combination of intensive grammar and reading which you yourself advocate.
Other the hand, Oxford Latin courses or Cambridge Latin courses aim to introduce Latin in a more manageable small bite sized " Latin meals ". So naturally they have all the liberty to create a more sparse quality repetitions across the entire courses. Therefore it is reasonable that the courses required significantly more time to complete and not to mention the exorbitant cost of the entire series.
In summary, if you have all the time and money in the world by all means go for Oxford/Latin courses. Otherwise combination of Wheelock's Latin and LLPSI will be a much more time efficient and cost efficient choice with the caveat that it is not for faint of heart. In the end it all depends on what you want to achieve with what resources you have (time, money, will etc )
And that is my humble opinion.
You can find the Cambridge course online, read it and solve all the exercises for exactly zero cents. I’ve been doing it and enjoying it thoroughly
I'm very glad you are back uploading videos. You're one of my favourite channels.
Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying them!
You have to take into account that LLPSI is just one book in the whole series. LLPSI -> Fabulae Syrae -> Epitome Historia Sacra -> Roma Aeterna -> (+7 Adapted readers). After the initial chapters the story gets better. They both are good in their own category. I think the Cambridge Latin Course could be used as a graded reader before Roma Aeterna or you could go through all the LLPSI book series after CLC
Use both and get the advantages of both. I am using LLPSI as a base, the stories can be funny at times, but other times, repeated reading can be somewhat boring. I find supplemental reading of CLC and Fr Most’s LTNM, help keeps it interesting and provides much more comprehensive input at a level appropriate to my learning.
If comparing just the LLPSI Familia Romana book alone VS the first Cambridge book then I agree, overall the stories are more interesting in the Cambridge book. The whole Pompeii theme and it erupting in the end was such a nail biting good tale. Familia Romana does get interesting in the second half though, and the ancillary readers that go along with the series are great.
I do think that LLPSI Familia Romana is the better series for really learning and internalizing Latin though. The book being 100% in Latin, plus the workbook having TONS of exercises that ask questions in Latin and must be answered in Latin. The lack of English in this course is a plus, plus words are recycled much more in Familia Romana for greater reinforcement. In one chapter you learn about shop keepers selling gems and pearls and then in another chapter you encounter a wolf whose eyes shine like gems and teeth like pearls for example. Also in a typical chapter of Famila Romana you might have the exact same sentence reused in 5 different ways. This makes makes for less interesting story telling but a plus for internalizing the language.
I highly , HiGHLY recommend the book " a companion to familia romana" to use along with it though, otherwise the grammar at points can be a bit confusing trying to learn from the book alone, like the many different uses of the ablative will confuse without any explanation.
Both Familia Romana and Cambridge throw a crazy amount of vocab at you which is good that you end up learning so much but it can be a bit overwhelming at times if you try and rush through the books. Books like the Henle series are nice in that you only learn a few words at a time and then drill the heck out of those words until you know them as good as your own language. Smaller bite sized chunks are nicer. However, the material you are reading and translating in Henle is so incredibly dry I had to stop 30% thru before I went insane. Everything in Henle is about 2 topics: the church and war related stuff. After translating sentences like "the sailors praise Mary but do not praise war." Over and over again it gets to be soul crushing .
Overall I think Cambridge and LLPSI are the 2 best courses that exist. They both could be made a lot better though.
Thanks for your insight and recommendations! I do agree that LLPSI Familia Romana recycles vocabulary more than the CLC and introduces fewer new words per length of the chapter, but also that both the CLC and LLPSI Familia Romana could be greatly improved as resources.
I'm from the LLPSI camp, I also follow lessons using that method. But I do like how compact the Cambridge Latin story is. Although I would prefer the translated words not to be on the same page. You can get so much further in translating yourself by studying sentences longer and associating with words you already know somewhat. Familia Romana chapters are long and densely filled with new things to learn (or miss), it can be a bit exhausting at times.
I'm teaching myself Latin I have the Cambridge Latin course textbook so you reading a story . Directly from the text was of enormous help to me ( I must admit pronunciation can sometimes be a bit of a problem ).
Has anyone come up with a good way to stitch together in one plan the storytelling approach (acquisition) with the grammar/learning approach as in Wheelock?
What you're describing is essentially the "reading method" which is taking the grammar curriculum and attaching stories to it which are sheltered to only exhibit grammar explained up to that stage. The CLC, Orberg's Lingua Latina, OLC, Suburani, Ecce Romani, etc. etc. are all examples of that method. Where it falls is that vocabulary is introduced very fast in every one of those courses, so that especially in the first half of the course, studnets are really "stringing together glosses" instead of "reading" (or in the case of Lingua Latina, just going really really slowly and getting 20 new things thrown at you each page) and the stories are not highly comprehensible but are quite laborious to understand in their unadapted form. I currently teach from the OLC but I adapt stories, insert extra stories, draw a picture for every sentence in a story etc. just to make the course more comprehensible, but we're fighting against some ground assumptions made in these courses (eg. that 20+ new vocab items in a new story with totally new context, plus lots of side glosses is ok, and that using a past tense before it's been officially explained is not ok)
@@FoundinAntiquity Thanks for that detailed response!
Perhaps a better test, although more difficult, would be to track students using both texts, determine their competences after a certain period and also determine the dropout rate. Or even the fluency rate. I speculate that there would be little difference. Both texts are far better than texts 50 years ago or so that interjected a lot of info on how Latin can be found in English, presumably as a carrot for the learner. There was a belief that nobody was really going to speak this stuff and we have to sweeten the program to keep people interested. Now a goal, among others, is to speak this stuff. A lot of the older texts. like "Latin for Americans," still are on Amazon, and they usually can be sampled there.
I guess at the end of the day, a teacher can make a lot of story-based Latin resources more interesting by showing their own enthusiasm for the stories, and encouraging students to cooperatively create their own twists on the stories, with varying levels of support from the teacher. A good teacher could make pretty much any story more enjoyable. The biggest factor is if students are engaging with large amounts of connected Latin which is understandable and meaningful to them. Waffling in English about the etymological links between Latin and English and how fascinating it is to learn a language that is the source of those words, is kind of like telling people in detail how good something tastes instead of giving it to them.
@@FoundinAntiquitythe goal is it not unchanged to read the language and understand the literature not to speak or read conversationally. Misk english kids can read Shakespeare only literature students understand the plays at greater depth. Being able to read fluently at a superficial level will help but not everyone would want to go beyond that no matter how much coach predigests or tells them how wonderful the food will actually become
I must say that the "Familia Romana" stories get better and more interesting as you progress in the book, but it does start a bit slow.
Why wouldn’t you just use both?
Yes! Definitely use both! The more the merrier.
A comment by someone that has used both for college latin year one both classes of 6 units.
Cambridge two book per term or four in a year of two terms(15weeks). The pure number of the vocabulary words was unreal, turning the class into little more than lists of 30+ words a class. The stories may have been better but new Latin student it was unreal in the number of words per class three times a week. All of the students in that class that had not taken Latin before failed but we only made up 10% of the class, the other 90% having had three or four years in high school found the class easy.
LLPSI the whole book for the year of 6 units but split in to three terms of 16, 16, and 12 weeks. In using LLPSI we are also using exercitia latina(wookbook), Colloquia Personarum (story story using vocab of chapter), the student manual and in final term "fabulae syrae". This is far better for students as the rate of vocabulary is 30 a week, not a class.
I would find your comparison a little better if you looked at both in the chapter about the family and a more enjoyable story for both.
I would also love a look at the total number of vocabulary words covered in the five books of Cambridge vs the 1800 in LLPSI, as that is as big a part of the program as the grammar covered.
The 1800 llpsi isn't enough to tackle primary sources these days there are sights that offer the 3000+ vocab list provided by Cambridge University at start of term or specific vocab translations for aeneid etc. But unless you memorise and some object to that it doesn't help just to know numbers. And if you have the mindset to cram partitioning the day int ok BB work hours with deadlines and revision days breaking the back by if courses. Then either or both courses before accepting this will involve life long study. Pretty sure most fail that by moving on to something else
I love your voice and accent, no matter what.
Thank you! :)
@@FoundinAntiquity Me too especially that British accent!!! 😍😍
@@Aditya-te7oo Lol, it's not British, it's clearly Australian ya prize galah!
@@thadtuiol1717 Then I didn't realise, 'cause British English and Australian English are very similar (in pronunciation).
@@Aditya-te7oo While British English and Australian English may sound similar to you, perhaps due to your unfamiliarity with them, they are vastly different accents. Native speakers will immediately know which is which, and the more non-native speakers hear them, the more obvious the differences become.
It’s possible that if you drew a Venn diagram of both accents’ speakers, there would be a small subset of people who sound similar, but that subset would arguably be a very low percentage of all speakers.
And don’t forget that within the two primary accent groups we’re talking about, there will be many differences too. Possibly less so for Australia (although I suspect there are some class/regional/ethnic/geographical differences), but certainly in the UK, there are hundreds of British English accents that will make the wider differences between the way the nations speak English even more pronounced.
It’s a bit of an unfair comparison as LLPSI was of one of the very begging chapters while Oxford was for more advanced learners who know more vocabulary than 50. If you want a fair comparison, you would have compare texts that are based on the same amount of vocabulary.
That lady is prejudiced obviously, she mentioned she studied with the Cambridge method.
@@ericwierzbinski4993i believe the correct term is she has provided full disclosure
You should pay more attention to the length of the vowels
LLPSI reminds me a lot of the old “Dick and Jane” books designed to teach young English speakers how to read. I think that may be exactly what it was going for.
That does make sense - they both have the goal of using simple language to ease into reading. Although the Dick and Jane examples I've been able to see, while simple and plain, at least stuck to situations that seemed to matter to children, as opposed to going on long digressions talking about geography, towns, rivers, roads, and the relative sizes of islands, the relative position of people in front of or behind a litter who are carrying sacks and walking one direction or another on a road, or about the necessity of breathing for continuing to be alive, etc. I feel like sometimes Oerberg struggles to find the right subject matter for compelling language use, or maybe he really liked geography.
Did you ever have a look on the "Latin by the natural method" by Willian Most?
Yes, I've had a brief look at it! I like what it's trying to do, in giving lots of easy content from early on. There are some things about it I wish were different but on the whole I'm really glad it exists and I would recommend it as additional reading material for Latin learners.
It will be interesting to see your review on "VIA LATINA
DE LINGVA ET VITA ROMANORVM».
I've read a few chapters of it but I haven't had time to do a thorough read-through and review yet. I really like the exercises that accompany each chapter- they're not just fill in the blanks, they are very meaning-focused. There is a good review of it on Seumas Macdonald's blog: thepatrologist.com/2022/06/14/via-latina-a-review/
Can I learn latin from 0 with these books? So can I learn words and grammer?
Maybe if you are good at teaching yourself grammar, but I think it's better to take an introductory course in Latin grammar first. That's what I did.
Hello. Thank you for the video. Don't you think that there are intentionally no interesting stories in LLPS, because they will distract students from the form of words, concentrating a lot of attention on the content?
I think it is partly a result of the cultural context of mid 20th century Direct Method teaching styles - interesting content was considered something which potentially distracted from the study of the language itself or put too much burden on the learner. CLC follows later trends where the inherent interest of stories is meant to help spark curiosity and motivate students to persevere and read for meaning. Most recently, comprehensible input theorists like Krashen are advocating for not just "interesting" input but "compelling" input, where ideally the learner is so absorbed in the story or task that they forget it is in another language. So, yes, partly the uninteresting nature of LLPSI stories is intentional, but it's also a hangover of an older view about language learning that puts the incremental language study in the centre (i.e. moving learners through predetermined grammar goalposts through reading and form-quizzing) rather than focusing on interpreting and conveying meaning in the language (i.e. more communicative approaches).
LL is not for storytelling UNFAIR FIGHT!
This is true 🤣
@@FoundinAntiquity So you have your answer xD
to read the latina lingua .. you should have some italian or sardinian basis .. to study cambridge's you should know stress shift , intonation away from england .. and forget the germanization norman vulgarisation
Wow thanks for this. the Cambridge one looks way more interesting. I had tried reding lingua Latina but it was so boring. Like it was made for kids. Probably would be helpful to read through it but just felt like I was in school in again.
LLPSI lesson has many Latin Proper names, the dramatis personae so to speak, we wait for the action.. rather unstimulating, we learn 'est' and 'sunt' and the household is presented with a multitude of individuals, centum servi and dominus and domina, ancillae. CLC has an interesting read as there is something happening, suspense, climax, mystery faintly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe LLPSI will gradatim pick up steam. Each has its merits, and story telling is an art, no less the teaching of grammar.
Yes, storytelling is definitely an art, and I feel that while Oerberg does gradually get to a point where stories exist and are interesting, so often he still relies on infodumps and plots often just barely count as plots. Not that storytelling is the only job of a Latin resource, but it's something well worth doing in communicative language teaching to the extent that the comprehensibility of the text allows it.
You compare a much more advanced-level, developed story in the Cambridge book with a simple beginner-level text in Lingva Latina. That doesn't at all seem a legitimate comparison! You need to compare like with like.
Quid Est? quid Dicissss?
Why does storytelling matter so much? Whichever one teaches Latin better should be considered superior since teaching Latin is the ultimate goal of the books.
This is an absurd comparison and it wates a majority of the time simply reading the story outloud and then rehashing it in English only then does she make a few comments about it. Her only apparent interest is whether the story is intersting to her.
"crazy-arse ghost stories". Who needs Latin when you've got Australian? 😅
festina Werunt
terrible .. non callidus .. es
I learned through the grammar-translation method with Shelmerdine. I didn't know about CI until I started teaching two and a half years ago. The school I work at uses LLPSI. There are a lot of things I like about the book, but I have issues with it as well. I think this issue you are showcasing here is one of my biggest problems with the book. It can be such a dry text. Not only that, but the early chapters make it difficult to allow for a lot of things like TPRS.
In sixth grade (ages 11-12) which is the grade I teach, we only cover the first 8 chapters. It can be such a slog to get through at times. I remember a student asking me at the end of our chapter three unit why all the stories we did (because I created supplemental stories for TPRS and for extra reading outside of the book) always featured someone sleeping, someone singing, and then someone getting angry about the singing and punching someone else. It's because the first few chapters don't give us much to use for storytelling. Chapter four doesn't add many new things to spice things up for TPRS, nor does chapter five, and the sixth chapter is the road chapter, so of course it's dull, and it isn't until chapter seven that we start to get some more actually interesting things happening in the book. Things like this make me wish I had the ability to abandon the textbook or make one of my own.
Thankfully this year I've managed to find a way to keep these early chapters engaging to the students. They never got tired of going over the map in the three or so weeks we covered it. I kept the map up the entire time and asked students about the map and visualized what we were reading about in the book for them on the map. It's like you said in this video, the repetition is, of course, good for helping them master the language, but it needs to be paired with a visual or it becomes dull. I was incredibly surprised at how engaged my students were this year compared to previous years just by doing this (and, of course, I did a few supplemental things like teaching the verbs "amāre," "dēlectāre," and "gerere" (for wearing an article of clothing) at the same time, but the main thing was the map).
Anyway, I'm kind of just going off on my own tangent at this point, but I think this is all to say that I really enjoy your video. LLPSI certainly has flaws and the fact that the reading can be so dull is a major one. Thank you for making this video!
It's really great hearing your thoughts and experiences with CI and LLPSI! I agree, there are some problems with the vocabulary choice in LLPSI and the first few chapters of every textbook seems to have some problems with not providing interesting words. I've heard some Latin teachers solve this problem by going untextbooked and using TPRS and novellas as the basis of their curriculum. I'm not quite ready to go there myself but I'm increasingly tempted, and I'm definitely mixing in some TPRS stories for engagement with my current textbook, and novellas for pleasure reading.