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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect many Latin teachers might be uncomfortable with their students getting into Latin that enthusiastically.

Many high school Latin teachers are actually not very proficient in Latin, they are merely capable of teaching from a syllabus that is usually quite modest. Except for some elite schools, Latin is taught just to give students a taste of the language and expand their vocabulary in their native language by recognizing Latin borrowings. The pupils aren’t intended to actually master the language and read non-set texts comfortably, let alone follow Neo-Latin materials or practice spoken Latin. If the students surpass the syllabus, that makes things difficult for the teachers. If a student has taken up the language so enthusiastically, the teacher may simply demand that he/she simply test out of the course instead of continuing to come to class.

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This is a remarkably uncharitable view of teachers’ motivations and abilities!

You’re not wrong that most Latin classes have somewhat different goals than modern language classes, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less rigorous, as you seem to be suggesting. Deprioritizing speaking, for example, makes sense for s language where students are...unlikely...to encounter a native speaker in the wild. We did eventually get there when doing poetry and other stuff meant to be heard, rather than read.

I also can’t imagine many teachers getting upset or uncomfortable with interested students. All of mine would have been over the moon if they discovered us studying more outside of class. I think this especially true for Latin, since it is such a niche field that people are certainly not in for the money!

Source: 3 years of Latin at a public high school, followed by a linguistics and CS degree.

I took 8 years of Latin through Catholic school. By the second year of High School, we were required to read history texts written in Latin.

> I took 8 years of Latin through Catholic school.

This just proves my point. Catholic schools in the US are private institutions, and one that would teach Latin with vigor is a rare case. However:

> we were required to read history texts written in Latin.

It is common for Caesar’s Gallic War to be assigned early on, but students working through it with the support of a tailor-made glossary and commentary is not a particularly impressive achievement. De bello gallico (like Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek) is assigned precisely because it is an extremely easy text, and it is not very representative of Latin literature in general.

If your school expected you to read Livy, or even Tacitus, that definitely puts it into the “elite” category.

> If your school expected you to read Livy, or even Tacitus, that definitely puts it into the “elite” category.

Yes to both :D

Livy, Seneca, Cicero, Virgil also featured in my Latin classes. I'm not sure of the relative difficulty levels anymore, though. All of these were fascinating for different reasons: Livy for the narrative, Seneca for the wisdom (see also Montaigne who heavily quotes Seneca in his essays), Cicero for his personal involvement in Caesarian politics and Virgil for his role as Augustus' propagandist and continuation of the Homeric tradition.

I should read more of these texts, I remember being really fond of Latin classes.

Edit: to concur with GP, Caesar's writings (de bello Gallico) were somewhere in the first half of the curriculum and were definitely regarded as relatively easy.

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