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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

I studied Latin in high school and did well in JCL competitions.

I’m skeptical that “active” is the way to teach beginners Latin. My daughter took 4 years of Latin in high school with this method, and they never got around to covering all the grammar (which is normally covered in two years).

Spending too much time on the conversational stuff means less time actually being able to read the classics, which is, IMHO, where the real value of Latin is.

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Similar experience in my daughter's high school. In her case I think it was a defect of the teacher rather than the method.

Having learnt Latin through the Cambridge Latin Course I really struggled with reading the classics. That said, I could understand all but three words on the Bayeux tapestry so Cambridge Latin Course was reasonable.

What do you think of reading an English translation of the classics instead of the original?

I think it is like any translation: you get much of the understanding. Still, it is important to understand the social and cultural background of the author, and reading it as the author wrote it is part of that.

It's kind of like reading anything in translation. Goethe loses a lot in English. Shakespeare in German is the same.

Edgar Poe earned a lot in translation to french (translated by Baudelaire).

Thanks, I need to check that out. It's conceivable that Baudelaire made a few improvements. It's certainly not unheard of. Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam is by some accounts close to an original work. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam

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