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Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
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Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#12> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as…
#2 you could read, "[He] tells the sailor's story to the mistresses, because mistresses love stories", which does have a possessive genitive.
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#13> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as…
Looking at your second example...that's just a mistake, sorry. I figured a couple of those were bound to slip in. I'll get it fixed. And again, I really appreciate your taking a look at the site.
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#14It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.
One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up.
But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important:
1. reading Latin texts
2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies
3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc
4. listening to that Finnish radio station that is in Latin
5. work conversations at the Vatican
I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation. I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin, and the signalling function of using Latin tags actually requires that you use the incorrect "classically educated Englishman" pronunciation.
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#15> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as…
That particular sentence is a really tough knot pedagogically too. As a teacher, you want a short simple sentence that includes a nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and verb to habituate students to thinking about cases. Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of tho…
> That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar.
Surely this is a feature of all languages :)
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the feedback! As you noticed, the drills are more about syntax than reading comprehension, and your understanding of syntax is solid. It might be challenging to come up with multiple correct translations of each Latin exercise, but I will give some thought to how it might be done.
One way I've done that in the past is asking explicit questions about the syntax, like: > "If filiae is nominative, how would you translate the sentence?" or > What cases could agricolae be here? if you want to introduce the context sensitivity of the grammar.
Those are two great ideas for question formats. I will likely try to work those into future quizzes. Thanks for checking out the site!
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#17It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.
One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station…
Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way I've done that in the past is asking explicit questions about the syntax, like: > "If filiae is nominative, how would you translate the sentence?" or > What cases could agricolae be here? if you want to introduce the context sensitivity of the grammar.
Those are two great ideas for question formats. I will likely try to work those into future quizzes. Thanks for checking out the site!
Sure! It's good stuff.
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#19> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as…
#2 you could read, "[He] tells the sailor's story to the mistresses, because mistresses love stories", which does have a possessive genitive.
Fair enough. I might have thought more about that if nautae had been one of the options for "which word is genitive?"
Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
#20Are you interested in helping with the LibreLingo project? https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo Although the concept is a little bit different and the book content cannot be so directly adapted, I think it could still be used a nice starting point
Great project! At first glance it looks like the differences in approach are substantial, but I'll think about it some more and see if there are ways I might be able to contribute.