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Comment by Quillbert182 | Hacker News Reader

One thing commonly recommended is the textbook Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It uses illustrations to help you learn only in Latin.

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Is there a name for this kind of book? I have one, titled "Mein Erstes Buch", that, in one small and slim volume, takes you from "Dick & Jane" and "See Spot Run" levels, to an ~3rd or 4th grade reading level, entirely in German. I picked it up because it looked neat but tried reading it one day, made it about a third of the way through, and sure enough, I could follow along. Doesn't teach you pronunciation and it doesn't replace focused practice & drilling, but it was pretty damn cool. I'd like one in French, especially, but I don't know what term to search for. "The Natural Method" from that link yields some promising results, but are there other terms?

(just checked archive.org, and sure enough, they've got a scan of the book I have, but it's a limited preview: https://archive.org/details/meinerstesbuch0000unse/mode/2up)

In LLPSI's marketing materials, they call it the "natural method." (I've also seen "nature method.")

Another term is "comprehensible input" -- but I am not certain precisely how the two relate to each other. But hopefully they're enough for you to go on.

Yes, the terms I've seen are "natural method", "comprehensible input", and "extensive reading."

The latter two refer more to a large volume of simple reading materials which let you work up on your own, practicing and slowly learning more grammar and vocabulary.

Here's a website with a list of such textbooks for various languages:

https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio...

This is amazing, thank you!

For French I liked https://www.amazon.com/Mon-premier-dictionnaire-Roger-Pillet... which I picked up after some basic grounding with Duolingo. It's not a textbook but it is all in French yet for second-language learners.

That and Wheelock's Latin are the main book recommendations. Other than that, there are a bunch of subreddits and a large discord which might be nice if you want to get some daily active practice in (including voice chat). Or just see if there are any courses running near you - active training can be handy, but the style of course is very country-specific - every country has their own tradition for teaching Latin (or multiple), and the style/goal may not suit you.

It's super low-effort, but I had fun with the (modern) light novellas by Andrew Olympi and kin - in some sense they're too easy above a certain level and made me over-confident in a way that was damaging to my confidence when I looked at actual classical latin texts, on the other hand it's nice to just be able to pick up a small book and read some beginner-level Latin without requiring any effort/strain.

[ note: I've only been learning Latin for about a year, with very mixed success - I'm very much a beginner still and can't read any classical texts with any fluency/comfort, nor write without a dictionary to help with inflections ]

What's interesting is that the book is 100% Latin - you need to figure everything out from context and examples. It's almost a logic puzzle, and learning Latin is a side effect.

I really tried but ultimately found it frustrating - I think I honestly do learn best with a good amount of structured tables, going through grammar etc. Certainly that's how I've been learning Hindi (via Wiktionary & Snell, supplementing Duolingo) in which I've progressed far beyond where I ever got to with Latin via LLI.

Just hit too many blocks where I sort of have the understanding of what it must mean, but I want to ask someone 'why is it inflected in this way here but different there?', and of course there's no explanation of that. (By design, I just don't like it.)

Perhaps my ideal would be something like LLI but interspersed with grammar-oriented explanation between chapters.

It's just not a grammar book, it's a language book in the sense that it teaches how the language is used rather than "constructed".

I always recommend people learn the use of a language before the grammar at the beginning, and then transition into much more intensive grammar study later, likely exactly at the point when you got frustrated is when introducing grammar would be perfect. This is especially true when the written grammar of a language can look very different than the sound of a language (especially if written differences are hidden by identical sounds in the language, like in French).

Yes exactly, but I think the trouble is that it's too popular to say 'people learn by immersion, not by grammar and tables, immersion is how we learnt our first language after all'; when actually, some people do prefer (or at least benefit from additionally) such rigid grammarian teaching.

I've learnt so much more from studying conjugation/declension tables on Wiktionary than I have from trying to converse with fluent/native speakers, who can't explain to me why or tell me how to spell it (sounding/typing it in the English alphabet).

Is it even possible to learn exclusively by immersion as an adult? I was under the impression that roughly around puberty, we lose a good part of our ability to just pick up languages and a combination of study and experimentation was required afterwards.

Is this a sensible approach to learning any language from a book? Or does it only make sense with a "dead" language that we mostly know from literature and inscriptions?

It does make more sense with Latin, because while Latin has always been and still is spoken, much of the value of the language comes from its literature (of which 90% has never been translated).

BUT, the natural method plays well with extensive reading/comprehensible input, where you just read a lot at a simple, pleasurable level, allowing it to ramp up gradually.

This is how I learned much of English as a native speaker, after all!

So I intend to use this approach with other languages in the future as well.

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