I took latin in High School and loved it, thanks for posting this, it reminds me to get back into it
The Vatican's Latinist
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#22I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
I wish I did, too, but I think instruction in all the other languages was even worse, at least in my school. While my class was memorizing charts like -r -ris -tur, -mur -mini -ntur the students taking Spanish and French were learning the "better" way, but their results were worse. Language instruction in the U.S. is just shit all around.
(I remember one of the smartest kids in my school took four years of Spanish, and by his senior year, he was the only kid taking Spanish who wasn't a native Spanish speaker. So the teacher spoke English with him and Spanish with the rest of the kids....)
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
Go for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster: "Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."
I have a fondness for Latin myself, but this is absurd. There are lots of languages with a similar case-driven grammar and nobody makes such claims about those. Russian is about as case-driven as Latin and non-indo-european languages like Finnish and Estonian actually have more cases.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
Go for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster: "Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."
Would love to hear details on why this is true compared to other languages.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#25Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More .[2] An excerpt from the Introduction: "...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Malte…
At what point do you cross from polyglot to hyperglot?
I would enjoy being a programming hyperglot I think...
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#26I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
My favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#27I wish I had had a teacher like that when Latin was being shoved down my throat. I so rebelled, I knew less Latin in my sixth year than I did in my fourth. The wasted hours of rosa, rosam, rosae, rosa . However, it did enable me to become fluent in Spanish in two months. Fluent enough to teach high school physics, in Spanish, at the Instituto Americano of La Paz.
My favorite teacher ever was my high school latin teacher. I took latin for 3 years, each class was packed as everyone loved being there. In a public US high school at that. Today I doubt there is a single public high school in the US teaching latin.
Northside College Prep in Chicago has Latin (and my nephews actually took it at the K-8 level in public schools as well). If you read the story, you'll find that many of Foster's former students are teaching Latin, and Santa Monica High School (another public school) is given as an example of where his graduates teach. My local public high school also offers Latin (as does the Catholic high school half a mile down the street). There's been a bit of a renaissance of Latin in the schools of late.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#28My favorite quote:
About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in.”
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#29My favorite quote: About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in. ”
I agree completely. Language is alive, and learning words is much easier for me if they're in context.
I'm not learning Latin, but I am learning Chinese. I wrote http://pingtype.github.io to put spaces between words, colours for tones, pinyin romanisation, and a literal translation on the line below.
I could probably do the same for Latin. First I'm doing English-to-Chinese (the other way), then I might try Taiwanese and Japanese, but the structure of the program is all the same. I just have to gather the data for each new language.
Comment if you're interested, and I'll let you know when I finally get around to working on it. There have been a few Latin/Greek posts on HN that get upvoted a lot, so I think there's some demand.
Re: The Vatican's Latinist
#30Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More .[2] An excerpt from the Introduction: "...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Malte…
I assume at then Gregory turned to some other Cardinal and handed over a handful of scudo saying "I was sure we had him this time..."