The Case for Classical Languages | Tim Griffith
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- Опубліковано 28 лип 2024
- Tim Griffith delivered a compelling case for studying and learning classical languages to the student body.
Tim Griffith is the Senior Fellow of Classical Languages at New Saint Andrews College. He teaches Latin, oversees the college’s language program, and is director of both the Institute for Classical Languages and the Universal Latin Exam. He has dedicated the last 20 years to learning how to teach Latin better in a modern context, drawing heavily on the work of the great Latin educators of history.
Learn more about New Saint Andrews College at: nsa.edu
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00:00 Beginning
01:52 Language holds a unique importance
02:40 The first human task was a linguistic activity
03:47 Language gives form to thoughts
06:43 What does it mean?
14:38 Did great authors study Latin?
18:21 The English language
21:15 Knowing two languages
26:13 What if we're not very good at it?
29:33 What's going on? What are the obstacles?
36:47 Theory and imitation
38:16 Study classical languages
38:35 Q & A
#timgriffith #classicallanguages #languages #classicalchristianeducation #classical #newsaintandrewscollege #disputatio #latin #phaedrus #greek #hebrew #theory #lecture #nsa #moscowidaho #newstandrewscollege #culturebuilding #christianculture #highereducation #moscowidaho #highereducation #languagesdepartment #latinlanguage
I enjoyed Long Live Latin but found this to be a much more helpful apologia. What a great teacher!
So excellent. Thank you!
yes
wowsa! I want to learn latin....
The speaker exudes great confidence and a seemingly informed understanding of classical learning, but his criticisms of learning approaches are vague and misinformed. He would have us believe that students mechanically translate things they don't understand in the Grammar Translation method; they just output meaningless code that has undergone certain transformations using rules. This is to wrongly confound the approach of many college professors, a holdover from the pre-GT "grammar first" days, which is to have students memorize the grammar, before throwing them into authentic texts that are far beyond their level of comprehension, armed only with a giant dictionary. This is not GT per se, and GT was developed to remedy this. The essence of GT is to teach grammar points in simplified blocks and to practice these concepts over and over. This was all clearly stated in the 1924 report of the Classical Investigation, where the principals of GT, and the reasons for them, were enunciated. It is a popular misconception that GT involves endless memorization and abstract decoding. What he describes as GT is simply bad pedagogy, usually from college professors, not GT, which grew out of the methodology of Ollendorff and others, and which culminated with Jenney's Latin.
The Natural Method and Comprehensible Input are similarly misunderstood and, in this instance, he makes the common mistake of confounding them, as though they were one and the same method. Actually, he seems to conflate the Natural Method with immersive spoken methods also, and he makes the natural method an invention of the 70s (a bad thing per se, apparently). Actually William Most came out with his book in the early 1960s. It's peculiar though, because he later names the great Oerberg (perhaps the most prominent natural method teacher) as an example of the "correct" way of teaching. He is also apparently unaware of the criticisms of immersive learning by proponents of comprehensible input. And, for that matter, CI criticisms of Oerberg.
The well proven way is through grammatical instruction and copious examples. Wait! This is the GT method. Don't believe me, get First Greek Course of Rouse, one of those whom he says teaches the languages correctly. It has copious grammar with lots of examples. It is as much GT as D'Ooge, or Wilding, or Minnie Smith, or Breslove's GT books. Interestingly, Rouse provides the Greek vocabulary with English definitions, so this would be "decoding" according to Griffith's definition of GT. Presumably he thinks we are to learn our definitions solely from pictures, as Distler does (another name he associates with "correct" teaching).
Ironically, then, I come more or less to the conclusion, though I wouldn't mischaracterize everyone else along the way.
The speaker has no issue with teaching explicit grammar. His program Picta Dicta has about 5-10 minutes of grammar instruction associated with each Familia Romana chapter. So about 4 hours of grammar instruction is associated with the whole textbook. The method by which he teaches vocabulary has English definitions on the back of online flashcards.