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The Vatican's Website in Latin

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Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#61

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

efskap wrote: post #49
cwnyth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone. It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way.

The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#63

Post by toyg »

throw0101a wrote: post #15
osullivj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.

> Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice. See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum ( Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor ) from 1891: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching Various others over the decades.

It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#65

Post by golem14 »

cwnyth wrote: post #44
efskap wrote: post #11

If anyone is interested in learning it, there's nothing better than Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It's entirely in Latin, including grammar explanations, but it starts out incredibly simple and ramps up gradually with lots of repetition. And that's fun AND effective, since you're immersed rather than grinding tables.

As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone. It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.

As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#66

Post by vintermann »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #61
efskap wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way. The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetit…

If you speak four languages, in most countries you are an outlier, and you should not assume that what works for you would work for others.

Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#67

Post by quasigloam »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #61
efskap wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way. The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetit…

Now I’m curious; what book of grammar was it? What did the exercises look like? What other languages and strategies did you use?

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#68

Post by keybored »

jdw64 wrote: post #7
jquinby wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an AI working group in one of the dicasteries that has produced two excellent publications: Encountering Artificial Intelligence ( https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art... ) Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence ( https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma... )

I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend. The writing is genuinely excellent. In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change. That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious,…

It can be fruitful to consider the potential negative ramifications of one’s work for once. Especially so when the program is busy anyway.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#69

Post by mananaysiempre »

vintermann wrote: post #58
efskap wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.

There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability. I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be a…

On the flip side, Ørberg is a textbook for children, perhaps teenagers at the latest, and like most such textbooks it is in no hurry, so you’ll need to stick with it for quite some time to get results. That by no means makes it bad or unsuitable to whoever is reading this comment, but I can imagine how it wouldn’t work well in a typical introductory college course, where the instructor’s aim is to cram into the students’ heads as much Latin as possible in the semester or two they are given.

If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.

Re: The Vatican's Website in Latin

#70

Post by stbede »

toyg wrote: post #63
throw0101a wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice. See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum ( Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor ) from 1891: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching Various others over the decades.

It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing. Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way throu…

A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
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