Comment by jasonjei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonjei | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I took it from 8th grade to 12th grade. In my class of 10 or so students, only one of us got a passing score. Perhaps our teacher didn't adequately challenge us. We had read Cicero and other Latin literature yet Latin grammar always seemed so challenging for me to parse. I could make out enough meaning but never do a literal translation well enough. I took it because I couldn't speak any of the Romance languages ;) I would have taken Japanese or Chinese in a heartbeat if they were offered since I had lived in Taiwan in my middle school years.

I got all the rules (declensions, conjugations, etc) but I always had trouble piecing them collectively. A lot of the declension endings would be the same (such as 4th declension nouns) and it was hard for me to differentiate between a nominative and accusative in the context of a sentence. Hence I never studied Latin in college. I'm sure the world is a much better place for that. Wow, I can't believe I am reopening old wounds from 12 years ago ;)

I genuinely believe the single perfect test score is also empirical proof of the difficulty of Latin in an English-speaking world...

I would much rather parse MIPS assembly all day than read Latin.

It's a really excellent demonstration of how difficult it can be to internalize certain things for people - I was eventually acceptably good at extracting meaning from Latin after years of taking it, but it never became anywhere near an internalized process of digesting the sentences, and my instructors were quite skilled in teaching and Latin.

One of the more interesting hypotheses suggested was that Latin classes, unlike a lot of SL classes, are not nearly as "immersive" as more common ones, and a lot of the language processing hardware we've got is better at digesting from spoken immersion. (Part of that, of course, is that outside of specialized environments, we don't really have any "native" speakers; part of that is also that common "spoken" Latin was a lot simpler than the brick-by-brick construction of Vergil or Cicero.)

I've done spoken Latin stuff as well as taking Latin classes, and I tentatively agree with my friends who are Latin teachers and use immersion in the classroom that it should help and that it's a big gap not to have it.

I also agree that the Vergil and Cicero constructions are harder than what you would hear at a spoken Latin gathering (or probably in a Latin-immersion class). The word order people usually use when speaking is more like modern Romance languages (with some tendency to put the verb at the end, but not, say, chiasmus!). That did make me think that ancient Romans probably didn't talk like Cicero or Vergil either. :-)

I always remember this line from Cicero

Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis, gratia ...

in which "magna" 'great' modifies "gratia" 'thanks', which is the subject of "est habenda" 'should be given'. That's tricky, or at least a lot to keep in your head when trying to parse it.

I agree with everything up until the reading part. I took Latin 8-12th grade and reading it, but with the assistance of our professor, was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. We topped off the last year studying Virgil, book 2 of the Aeneid, and Juvenal. Hard, but so great

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