LECTURE GIVEN BY HANS H.

ORBERG ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS (conferences

in Europe and USA)

Lingua Latina per se illustrata

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to inform Latin teachers and students of my
rather unorthodox ideas about Latin teaching. It would perhaps be a good idea to
begin by giving you an illustrative example of the way we can all agree that Latin
should not be taught. I have taken my example from a book by Winston S. Churchill
entitled My Early Life. He tells us how, when seven years old, he was taken to a
private boarding school to be taught ‘the classics’ by the very best teachers. Here is
his report:
I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of
doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown,
covered book filled with words in different types of print.

‘You have never done any Latin before, have you?’ he said.

‘No, sir.’

‘This is a Latin grammar.’ He opened it at a well-thumbed page. ‘You must learn

this’, he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. ‘I will come back in
half an hour and see what you know.’

Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the
First Declension:
Mensa a table

Mensa O table

Mensam a table

Mensae of a table

Mensae to or for a table

Mensa by, with or from a table

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole
to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I
thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the
acrostic-looking task which had been set me.

In due course the Master returned.

 ‘Have you learned it?’ he asked.

‘I think I can say it, sir’, I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

‘What does it mean, sir?’

‘I means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension.
There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.’

‘But’, I repeated, ‘what does it mean?’

‘Mensa means a table’, he answered.

‘The why does mensa also mean O table’, I enquired, ‘and what does O table
mean?’

‘Mensa O table is the vocative case’, he replied.

‘But why O table?’ I persisted in genuine curiosity.

’O table, you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.’ And then
seeing he was not carrying me with him, ‘You would use it in speaking to a table.’

‘But I never do’, I blurted out in honest amazement.

‘If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very
severely’, was his conclusive rejoinder.

Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many
of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
After learning the 1st declension, the next task set poor little Churchill would
certainly be to parse and translate sentences like

Scriba poeta est. Puella nautas spectat. Filia reginae cenam parat agricolae...

I know that this sort of inane disconnected sentences have long ago been removed
from Latin primers, but even in modern textbooks you may still find ridiculous stories
in what is often doubtful Latin, and in any case pupils have to begin by learning
grammatical forms and looking up every word in a glossary before they can go on to
analyse the parts of a sentence and translate word for word – a procedure that can best
be described as ‘deciphering’, not reading.
 There is no reason why Latin should be taught by methods totally different from
those used in the teaching of modern languages. Latin is a foreign language like other
foreign languages and should be taught by similar methods.

Foreign language teachers have always taken a great interest in the process by
which a young child acquires a second language when placed in new linguistic
surroundings. The speed and accuracy with which a child who has been moved to
another country picks up the new language spoken by his or her playfellows and
classmates is often quite astonishing; in their limited sphere children may become
quite fluent in a new language within a few months. It may be rather a depressing
experience for a language teacher to watch the rapid progress of such a child in a
foreign language which the teacher’s own pupils are very slow in learning. But it must
be borne in mind that the teacher is at a great disadvantage being unable to reproduce
for the students the ideal situation of the child in a foreign country who is exposed to
the foreign language and compelled to communicate in that language from morning to
night day in and day out. We have to realize that the “natural” way of learning a
foreign language can never be repeated in the classroom.

However, it is worth noticing that there is a great deal of wasted effort especially in
the early stages of “natural” language learning, because the learners are exposed to a
large number of sentences and words that they do not understand; in fact, at the
beginning they do not understand a single word, and only gradually do they begin to
make sense of some of the things they hear. There is rather a long passive listening
period.

Considering the limited time allowed to the language teacher, something must be
done to cut away the passive period and to expose the students from the very start to
statements in the foreign language that they understand and no others. One way of
doing this is to provide the students with a vocabulary and with rules and explanations
about the grammar and structure so as to enable them to translate every sentence into
their native language. This is the traditional “grammar-translation” method, by which
numerous generations of children have been taught both modern and ancient
languages. But this is not nature’s way. Children learning their mother tongue or a
second language in a foreign country have nobody to translate or to explain
grammatical rules; they have to pick up the meaning of words and phrases and the
functioning of grammatical forms and structures from what they hear in actual use,
directly from linguistic practice, and this does not prevent them from understanding
and learning words and structures precisely.

Another way of rationalizing and accelerating the learning process, without

departing from the direct method followed by nature, is to make every sentence
presented to the students immediately intelligible perse, or self-explanatory, by
grading and organizing the introduction of vocabulary and grammar. That means that
there is no need to translate or explain grammatical points in the students’ own
language, they are enabled to discover for themselves directly the meaning of the
words and sentences and the functioning of the grammatical rules. This is the teaching
procedure to which the term “nature method” or “naturae ratio” has been applied. It
represents a rationalization of what may be called the natural learning process. The
“nature method” is, to use the words of Alexander Pope, “Nature still, but Nature
methodiz’d”.

The problem is to “methodize” nature in such a way that there is no waste of time
over unintelligible words and sentences, so that every minute of the time at the
teacher’s disposal is used to teach the students something that they really comprehend
and nothing that is beyond them or that they are not supposed to remember. What is
needed is an elementary text in this case a Latin text that is so organized that the
meaning and function of every new word and every new grammatical form or
structure, and thus the meaning of every sentence, is made perfectly clear to the
students.

How is this possible if nothing is translated or explained in the students’ own

language? Here again we can learn form observing nature: if children who have to
learn a language secundum naturam are so quick to grasp the meaning of what is said
to them, it is because they are helped by the situation or the context. I think the most
important lesson a study of “nature” can teach the language teacher is that words and
grammatical forms only come to make sense in ontext and therefore should be learned
in context.

As a writer of Latin textbooks my task has been to create a variety of contexts or

situations in which the words and structures that are to be learned make sense in such
a way that the meaning and function of all new words and grammatical forms appear
unambiguously from the context in which they occur, or, if necessary, from
illustrations or marginal notes using vocabulary already learned. This demands a very
carefully graded text. The progressive introduction of words, inflections, and
structures, with due regard to their frequency in Latin writers, should conform to a
well-defined program which not only ensures immediate comprehension, but also
assimilation and consolidation owing to the constant recurrence in new surroundings
of words and forms already introduced and understood.

This is a purely inductive method. Through the observation of a large number of

practical examples which form part of a continuous text, the students automatically
recognize the meaning of words and sentences, and while familiarizing themselves
with the living structure and mechanism of the language they are enabled to work out
for themselves, that is to induce, the rules of grammar. The text of my Latin course is
based on this principle, which might be called the principle of contextual induction.

From the beginning I claimed that the strict observation of this principle need not
detract form the readability of the text. In order to hold the attention of the students, to
make them benevolos, attentos, dociles, they must be offered a text that gives them
some kind of relevant information or tells a story that interests them. In fact, if
learning from context is to be really effective, the content of the text must help to
stimulate interest and curiosity and make it easy for readers to visualize the scenes
and situations described and to identify with the characters. Ideally the elementary
text should be a connected narrative the content of which captivates the students to
such a degree that they look forward to reading the continuation of the story. At the
same time, in a Latin course the reading of the text should serve as an introduction to
some important aspects of Roman culture.

In the course Lingva Latina per se illvstrata I have endeavored to provide an

elementary Latin text that combines these qualities with the systematic presentation of
vocabulary and grammar that enables the students to understand and learn everything
per se, from the context alone. This direct method, based on understanding from
context, or contextual induction, is, I believe, more efficient and rewarding than the
traditional grammar-translation method. The decisive factor is the satisfaction felt by
the students when they discover that they can find out the meaning of everything on
their own without having to look up words in vocabularies or rules and paradigms in
grammars: they can actually understand the Latin passage that is put before them or
that the teacher reads aloud to them. This comes as a pleasant surprise to the students,
especially if they find that the text really makes sense, that there is an exciting story to
follow and that they learn interesting facts about the ancient Romans, not least the fact
that they are truly human beings like the students themselves.

The direct understanding from context gives the students self-confidence and
stimulates concentration. It sharpens their faculties of observation and reasoning,
faculties that will be greatly needed as the sentences grow more complex. Reading in
this way they move on step-by-step towards the ultimate object of Latin teaching: the
reading of Latin literature in Latin with real understanding and appreciation.

Hans H. Ørberg