How do I teach another language? How did I learn English? Are there better methods than others? What is the best method?
There questions I’ve been asking myself since I’ve decided to teach Latin.
I start with the how I learned English. Well, both my parents spoke it; no one spoke any other language in my family other than a few Greek sayings. So I guess a form of immersion would be a likely culprit. Though how I learned to form sentences without understanding the rules of grammar that blows my mind. But that’s how we all learn with our native language. We understand because that’s the way it is. If you know no different then that’s it. But what about people who learn two or more languages how do they do it?
According to pickthebrain.com those who wish to learn a new language need to, spend time with it, read and listen to it often, learn words and phrases, take responsibility for your own learning and enjoy it. Also from how-to-learn-any-language.com they suggest a willingness to learn and some intelligence. But they also suggest ways not to learn the phonebook method of vocabulary learning, after learning the first 100, words or so it’s all based on context. Also taking the approach on grammar with learning conjugations is not the best approach. Grammar can be best used by inference when approached or seen in examples. What those at how-to-learn-any-language.com suggest not to do is the way most teachers teach Latin.
In taking Japanese and watching a Spanish class or two, they work much more on basic vocabulary and reference kinds of teaching. An example would be cat, in Japanese it neko and in Spanish its gato, but they go back and reference the common language or show a picture. Also with learning grammar, you learn as you go. They don’t have full class lessons on conjugations and other parts of speech.
In a typical Latin class I go over how words are arranged in the sentence. I have to pick out what part of speech they come from. I have to find the adjective noun pairs. Explain why something is not a direct object yet it takes the Dative case. I have to understand that the verb is the verb for this specific subject because of its ending and so on. It can be more like a prescriptive linguistics class than another language. I’m not saying it bad, because it fills in those English grammar blanks. I remember when they tried to teach this stuff in my English class and nobody understood it. Most didn’t care, they understood what they were speaking and if most people understood them then they were fine.
I think that Latin is a language like the rest. I’ve only had one teacher teach it differently. He believed in immersion. Nothing else being spoke but that language. He didn’t completely teach it in immersion; he’d give us a brief grammar lecture and then have us figure it out in translation. Another problem with Latin is that it is not spoken in the classroom. It is just taught. I’m horrible at making up my own sentences.
I guess I feel that if Latin is just another language then it should be taught more like other languages. It would also bring a new life to Latin; it wouldn’t just be a long grammar lesson.
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