Latin begins.

Oscar started Prima Latina last week, and he's still really excited about it. Relatives and family friends always act very impressed, or else confused, when I mention that Oscar is going to study Latin, as if it should be especially difficult or unfeasible to teach in the home. I'll grant that it is less "useful" for life in Minneapolis than, say, Spanish (which we are also studying). But Latin has several distinct advantages that make it an excellent choice for the home school.

First: pronunciation. Because conversational Latin is not really an issue, it simply doesn't matter that we don't have a "native speaker" or an expert pronouncer among our family or friends. We do not have to learn to trill the r's just right or shape the mouth around any diphthongs that don't exist in our native language. As if to reinforce this, the woman who speaks Latin on the CD included with our program has a very strong Southern accent. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini, y'all. Latin study is generally a study of the written language. The only big pronunciation issue is Classical or ecclesiastical?

Second: available curricula. Very, very, very few homeschool curricula for Spanish, or French, or German, or Italian, are specifically designed for a teacher with little background in the new language. It's as if they assume we're just going to teach our kids the language we learned in high school (I took many, many years of French, which I enjoyed and which I still read, but I'm going to require my kids to learn Spanish, so I can't actually help them very much). But several Latin programs are specifically designed for the parent and child to learn together. There are a lot more homeschooling parents who are interested in teaching classical languages than who are fluent in them.

Third: grammar. Latin study is a good place to start talking about grammar. Why, it's almost like being in grammar school! What is a verb? What is a noun? What is a preposition? What is a proper noun? These kinds of first encounters with parts of speech can happen in Latin first, before talking about it in English. The highly inflected nature of Latin makes it clearer, not less clear, how the sentence fits together.

Oscar's still excited to be saying "ambulo" and "salve!" and "luna" and "oremus" -- I think it will be a few weeks before the novelty wears off. He has been trying to make sentences out of the half-dozen vocabulary words from the first lesson -- he shouted "Salve, Deus!" when we drove past the basilica yesterday.

Comments

[Mimi Rothschild]

Thanks for sharing some of your homeschooling experience. Latin is a great language to learn and very helpful.

[Amber]

My husband and I are really enjoying our Latin, and our daughter is chomping at the bit to start it too. She's not too impressed at our vocabulary though - she keeps asking how to say different words and of course none of them are words that we know! I was planning on starting in Sept. with her, but for no real reason. Maybe I'll go ahead and start sooner and see how it goes.

BTW, I very much agree about the grammar aspect of Latin - I have always been shaky on my parts of speech and I finally feel like I'm starting to figure it out now that I've been studying Latin for almost a month.

[maivey3]

We've been doing Prima Latina this summer, too. My almost 4-year-old, who seldom speaks, mimics the CD and it's hysterical. Hopefully, we'll be proficient enough by the end of summer to get the next book in the series.

I agree that the CD narrator's accent left me wondering, Am I pronouncing this stuff right? We have strong southern accents and I assumed that we would have to struggle to sound Italian or something. But to my surprise, the woman on the Cd sounded just like us. Ha.