Any Language Learning Method Can Work
Article by Ryan Hammill
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In the long run any language learning method can work.
However, as John Maynard Keynes once said: “In the long run we are all dead.”
The question for teachers of classical languages, then, is not “which method works?” but “which method gets the most students reading and understanding ancient literature the fastest?”
At the Ancient Language Institute, we have made our opposition to “the Grammar-Translation Method” well known. Our previous statements, though, require this addendum: the Grammar-Translation Method can work. And it will work for the same reason that the “direct” or “active use” or “nature” methods work.
Let’s confine, for now, our discussion to Latin. No matter which textbook you study— whether it’s Sir William Smith’s hoary Principia Latina, the omnipresent Wheelock’s, or internet-favorite Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata—you will read Latin words arranged into sentences according to the rules of Latin grammar. If you study one of these books closely enough, and for long enough, you will understand the Latin sentences in it. There are many different Latin textbooks to choose from, and most of them have lots and lots of English that explain the Latin sentences they present to students. A few, of course, have no English at all (it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds). If, after you’ve finished studying one of these textbooks, you go do the same thing again with another textbook, you will have read and understood even more Latin.
And eventually, and depending on quite a few things (such as: which Latin textbooks you’ve chosen to study, how smart and disciplined you are, whether you know any other languages, whether you have a good teacher), you will put down the textbooks and read a Latin book that someone wrote because they wanted to tell a story, or argue about something, or report on why the extermination of the Gauls was very legal and very cool. Most importantly, this will not be a book that was written in order to help a Latin student learn Latin.
And it will be very hard. You will wonder whether you actually know any Latin at all. And once again, if you are determined enough, and depending on who you are, what kind of experience you’ve had, and what book you’ve picked up, you will eventually get through it. And then you’ll do it again. And again. And again. Eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) you’ll be spending more time looking at the actual Latin you want to read than you will at the dictionary, or the English translation on the recto, or the Delphini paraphrase in the footer.
Once you are doing that, you’ll be reading in Latin and a line will take your breath away.
Upon seeing the new city of Carthage laid out in the Libyan plain, you’ll hear Aeneas exclaim: “O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!” And you’ll think of the $100 you have left in your business bank account after making payroll at the end of the month, and of the $15,000 in stale accounts receivable, and of the overdue invoices in your email inbox that you’ve put on snooze, and you will feel what Aeneas feels in that moment. It’d be better for me to be washed up on the shores of Africa with everything in tatters than where I am now. Why can’t the walls of this city that I’m building tower up above me?
Sir William, Professor Wheelock, and Mr. Ørberg all had the same goal in writing their textbooks. They, and all the other Latin textbook authors, want you to have this experience. They differ from each other in quite a few respects—some have more and some fewer charts, some ask for double-translation of simple sentences, some present adapted excerpts of Latin primary sources to beginners for translation into English, some are graded readers without any English explanations.
What should you do? Ørberg’s strongest soldiers tell you to avoid grammar drills and English-language explanations altogether, and just read. There are now many, many beginner-level Latin novellas out there to help you do just that. My friend The Philologer Crocodile recommends you work through one of these dusty grammar textbooks first and then read Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata afterwards.
At the Ancient Language Institute, our mentality is that you should probably just do everything everywhere all at once: learn a bunch of vocabulary terms, learn a new grammar concept or two, do some spoken and written exercises to practice the words and the forms, and then read a level-appropriate Latin narrative that uses those words and grammar forms. Picta Dicta‘s digital tools have enabled us to do this in tandem with a wide variety of level-appropriate readers (everyone should check out Gesta Egberti and Iter Alexandri), so that by the time that students are studying the tenses of the subjunctive, they’ve not only read and understood thousands upon thousands of words of Latin narrative, they’ve also studied tons of vocabulary and grammar in Latine tantum micro-contexts, with images, audio, and simple Latin sentences that elucidate meaning. But they’ve also listened to short and simple lectures in English about grammar, completed exercises identifying and producing correct case and verb endings, and of course spent a bunch of time in class speaking in Latin.
I have been careful so far to avoid the C-word: comprehensible input. Too many discussions of language acquisition refer to comprehensible input (CI for short) as a method. This is an error. CI is not a method; CI is just words. Or to put it a bit more scientifically (and here I’m paraphrasing my colleague Colin Gorrie): Comprehensible input is exposure to language, that you can understand, within the context of communication.
Think about it with a bodybuilding analogy. If, like me, you were always a skinny distance runner, but you now want to get strong and put on mass, you need to start consuming a lot more calories. You inform your Signal groupchat, and the advice starts coming in: Dirty bulk! Clean bulk! Body recomp! Protein shake and creatine! Lots of ice cream! Red meat for every meal! No carbs! All carbs! Carrot salad!
All of these methods presume that you are going to consume more calories. But “calories” are not a method. The “method” comes in when people start giving you advice about how and what kind of calories to consume.
Comprehensible input is like calories. The only way to put on weight is to start consuming a lot more calories. In a similar way, the only way to acquire a language is to consume tons of input in that language. A natural method reader like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata foregrounds this concern, by serving you big helpings of Latin that you can digest relatively easy (or at least, more easily than you can digest Cicero), and then speeding along with the same approach through all the cases and declensions, all the tenses, and all the moods.
A more “traditional” grammar-translation textbook will dose out the comprehensible input much more parsimoniously. But even if it gives you little excerpts from Caesar to translate, it is still supplying you with Latin input. And that is why it is not wrong to say that the grammar-translation method can work. Like a nature method textbook, it supplies the student with Latin input. Over a long enough timeline, with enough repetition (let the reader understand these caveats), the student will acquire enough of the language to start reading primary sources successfully.
On the one hand, I think it should be obvious that having beginner-level students read lengthy and entertaining narratives in level-appropriate Latin is better than having them trudge through very short excerpts that are too hard for them to understand without literal translation into English. If you accept that comprehensible input is the indispensable caloric intake for language acquisition, this is the inescapable conclusion.
Putting single-sentence excerpts from De bello gallico in front of students and telling them to translate word-for-word into English, without any regard for the message of the sentence as a whole—to say nothing of the broader context of the passage—does not prepare you to read Latin literature successfully. If you never do anything but this, your method will not work. Your eyes will see Latin words, yes, but those words will never become actual comprehensible input because you are not actually comprehending any Latin words. You’re simply comprehending the English which you transformed the Latin into.
On the other hand, saying “comprehensible input” and leaving it at that is not a method, especially since full immersion into a community of native Latin speakers is impossible. Immersion works best when the language learner is actually immersed—when he spends at least a majority, if not all, of his waking hours hearing and reading and speaking the target language and relies on communicating with native speakers in that language for his survival. An hour a day of spoken Latin class is not that; it is not even close to that. Immersion will not save you.
So we cannot blow off those opponents of the natural method who point out that for most students learning Latin is, in fact, nothing like learning your mother tongue. You don’t hear nearly enough of it. You don’t depend on learning to speak it in order to be fed or get your diaper changed. You don’t hear it from every single person around you.
Purely on the grounds of the importance of comprehensible input, we can see that some English-language instruction in grammar can be helpful. If my students have learned the words canis, vir, and mordet already, they still won’t understand the sentence canem mordet vir. By the habits of English syntax, as well as intuition of what kinds of creatures tend to be biters in the real world, they’ll squint at the weird thing that happened to canis, ignore the ending, and conclude that the sentence means “dog bites man.” But of course this sentence means the reverse, and they will only know that if you tell your students that in the Latin language, nouns change their ending when they’re the direct object, but stay the same when they’re the subject.
Of course, you could pantomime and give this explanation in Latin that is largely too advanced for the students to understand, until they eventually come to the realization that canem is the one getting bit, and they should know that because the ending is different, and that the man is the biter, which they should know because vir didn’t change at all. How long will that Latine tantum explanation take? 1 minute? For beginners? No way. 5 minutes? Maybe. And how clear will all that be at the end of it? Or will your students still be seeing the accusative case through a glass darkly, and still be on the fence as to who, exactly, bit whom?
Or you could explain it in one English sentence, like I just did above, and then go on to read 20 more Latin sentences with your students, sentences that all use the accusative case to say silly and surprising things, sentences they understand perfectly (and indeed, much better than they understand your attempt to explain subjects and objects and case endings all in Latin). Moral of the story: A little bit of English just made a lot of Latin perfectly comprehensible to your students.
Grammar explanations in English can turn incomprehensible input into comprehensible input. For this reason, even teachers totally convinced of the paramount importance of CI in the classroom should consider the ways in which using English-language grammar explanations and even drills will make their teaching better. And on the flip side, teachers who are used to grammar-translation but who are weighing a transition to an approach that prizes extensive reading and spoken Latin need not take a vow against the English language.
I would really like to see the temperature on the Latin teaching methodology debates get turned way down. It would be better to view different strategies, different classroom activities, quite simply as tools. Explaining in English what a direct object is, and what the accusative case is, is simply a tool that a teacher can pick up, even if only for 30 seconds, and then put back down again. “Circling” a Latin narrative with Latin paraphrasing and asking comprehension questions is another tool. Pick it up. Put it back down. Asking students to change a present tense sentence into the perfect is another tool. You don’t need to join anyone’s Party in order to use all of these tools. They are all available at anytime to anyone who teaches Latin. The wise teacher is the one who knows which tools to pick, and when, and for whom.
Now, simply swapping out the word “method” for the word “tool” would be cosmetic. Keep “method” if it works for you; but I would like to transcend it, and I think all Latin teachers—especially Latin teachers—should transcend it. After all, we are not the true teachers of the language to our students. At best, we are foster teachers. Just as Jesus was entrusted, for a time, to Joseph, so our beginner students are entrusted to us, but only for a time.
We are not the true teachers of Latin to our students.
Unlike modern languages which continue to change and develop, Latin is a fixed, historical language. While it is most decidedly not a dead language, Latin’s rules are not in flux or subject to ongoing revision. Its core vocabulary is enshrined forever. While we should not treat it as narrowly as the Ciceronian fetishists of early modern Europe did, at the end of the day, it is Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, and Terence (and Caesar and Livy and Ovid and so many more) who are your students’ teachers.
Your students will (hopefully!) graduate from beginner textbooks and begin reading, painfully at first, primary sources. Maybe you will have the privilege to help them along as they do so. But as their reading improves, and as they acquire more and more Latin, they will pick up vocabulary and get comfortable with syntax, above all, from reading the canonical authors. To call these writers “canonical” is not just to say they are important for understanding the content of Latin literature and Roman history; calling them “canonical” means that the very words they wrote down crystallized the texture and shape of the Latin language forever, and it is only in absorbing their words that a student can truly be said to have learned Latin. In the meantime, you are just trying to deliver your students up to their true teachers as quickly as possible. You have many tools at your disposal.
Ryan Hammill is Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Ancient Language Institute and its publishing imprint Vergil Press. He was introduced to Hans Ørberg’s work and to active methods in ancient language instruction back in 2017 as a student in a Latin class run by Jonathan Roberts. Ryan received an A.B. in History from Occidental College in 2015, where he also studied French and Russian. He has experience in journalism and digital marketing, and co-hosts the podcast New Humanists with Jonathan. Get in touch with Ryan on X (@hammillryan).