Language capstone: the big picture.

My Saturday morning project, to be completed (maybe) between dropping my oldest off for the SAT and picking him up again, is to dash out a plan for his fourth year of Latin instruction. And maybe a plan for the half-credit's worth of my little study group that will span sixth through ninth grades.

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I bring my own particular weirdness to homeschooling; I think too much, I like things to make sense and not be too messy and confusing, and -- worst of all -- I crave understanding things myself. Which means that before I facilitate my own kids through a subject, I need at least to tell myself a story about it that makes sense. Even if it is something I have never really studied before.

Foreign languages are a good example of that. I have a strong background in French, and used that experience to teach myself enough Latin to pass it on, by the "just stay a few steps ahead of the students" method.

I got out in front and managed to stay ahead all through middle school and until the third year of high school Latin, when my pupils (who put in more time drilling than I did) got better at, for example, rattling off the third person singular ending of perfect subjunctive active verbs in the third conjugation. I am still ahead of them in the ability to turn a translated sentence from Yoda-speak into good, sturdy English, and often in parsing a complicated sentence with many subordinate clauses and parentheticals; but I often have to point at such-and-such a verb on the whiteboard and ask them "uh, is this the subjunctive?" or bluff my way through a parsing by putting up a sentence and telling them, "Okay, kids, pick out all the participles for me."

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I still have things to teach them about the big picture, so to speak. And as I prepare for the final year of high school language instruction -- most likely the final year of instruction at all in this particular language -- I'd better start by deciding what my goals are. Because there are a few different directions I can take it.

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What is the point of all this? What do we want our kids to take away from high school language learning? There are lots of potential goals, and you don't have to shoot for all of them. Hitting a few targets well, while spending much less time aiming for others, might be a better approach.

Potential language learning goals include:

• conversational fluency while immersed in the target culture (say, in travel or business abroad)
• conversational fluency with speakers of the target language who are immersed in your own culture (say, a clinic nurse in our home city having the necessary Spanish or Somali to communicate with patients)
• to communicate more deeply with a particular person in his or her mother tongue (an adopted child, a friend, a partner)
• enough reading and writing to conduct business or friendly correspondence at the slower pace of email
• lifetime appreciation and enjoyment of literature (of any particular genre) in the target language
• lifetime appreciation and enjoyment of audiovisual media in the target language
• enhancement of the study of the sociology, politics, or history of populations who use or are immersed in the target language
• acquiring the tools of metalanguage
• an enhanced vocabulary
• a foundation for learning a different language later (for example, learning Latin now in order to learn French, Spanish, or Italian later on)
• laying a foundation for certain studies in linguistics, child development, neurology, and other fields
• better understanding of one's own mother tongue, by contrast and comparison
• better understanding of human cognition itself, by broadening one's sense of how language can work
• analytical skills and other forms of logic
• some or all of the technical skills of the translator, either of texts or of spoken words
• some or all of the creative skills of the translator, finding just the right turn of phrase to express the translated meaning, even doing so with meter, rhyme, alliteration, puns, and other tricks from the literary bag
• exploration of the philosophy of translation, whether "equivalent meaning" is possible, and if it is not possible, what does the translator actually seek to produce; contemplation of the whole notion of equivalence, and whether even speakers of the same language can really achieve understanding; and so forth
• the pure delight of playing with words and phrases and texts and sounds, not restricted to one's own native tongue

I would be amiss not to mention these box-checking goals as well:

 

• to obtain the required credits for high school graduation and/or admission into a particular college
• to acquire enough skills in language learning that one will be able to get a decent grade in the minimum number of required college language courses

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The first thing to notice is that when time is limited, you can't meet all these goals (except in a very broad and shallow sense). Although there is some overlap in the basic skills that are developed during both activities, every hour spent translating written text is an hour not spent developing one's conversational fluency; every hour spent reading poetry is an hour not spent listening to the language in films or lyrical music. And languages themselves compete for your time: a future linguist might do better to acquire a basic grasp of the syntax several languages from different language families than to spend much time developing fluency in only one.

 

The second is that some languages are better suited for certain goals than others. Conversational spoken Latin exists these days only in highly contrived circumstances, such as classrooms, or the classical-Latin news reports broadcast by Finnish state radio, or perhaps (I like to imagine) in papal conclaves. Almost any modern language will do instead if conversation is the student's goal -- but which language to concentrate on will be guided by a prediction of the populations they'll come in contact with. Conversely, if the main goal is enhancement of English vocabulary, Latin will be a workhorse -- certainly compared with even widely populated modern languages from which English has acquired little vocabulary, like Mandarin, or with languages that have so many everyday words and word-parts in common with English -- say Dutch -- that there simply isn't much bang for the buck in terms of vocabulary building.

 

So my goals will be guided first by the limitations and strengths of the already-selected language, which is Latin; and second by the best interest of my students; and third by my own limitations, interests, and strengths.

 

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Let's start with limitations. As major goals for ordinary people, we can rule out conversation, we can rule out business and personal communication, we can rule out real-time translation into or out of spoken Latin, and we can rule out the enjoyment of films and recordings. Latin also will not help us (much) to prepare for the study of non-Indo-European languages. Since we have already spent years specializing in Latin, one more year will not broaden our understanding of human language very much, at least not as much as starting an entirely new language might, and we have probably hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to expanding our English vocabulary with new Latin roots. Finally, these students already have the necessary three credits to get into college, possibly enough to test out of college requirements; and if they do choose to study a new modern language in college, they probably have already picked up enough study skills to succeed, especially if they pursue one of Latin's modern descendants.

The strengths, then, remain. These are the historical culture of the Roman world and of the educated medieval world that inherited its language; a large body of literature to read and appreciate, encompassing rhetoric, philosophy, science, engineering, poetry, history, narratives, and drama; the logical, analytical, and synthetic skills that are developed more deeply by exploring ever-more-detailed intricacies of grammar and syntax; and the skilled, creative, and pondering mind of the translator of written texts.

There is a lot of overlap here. If you concentrate on translating Latin literature into English, you must read it closely, parse each sentence, and appreciate the texts' style and content; by doing so (also, in order to do so) you must learn something of the culture that produced it. An advanced study of grammar and syntax necessarily uses authentic texts drawn from literature and history as its raw material. The history and culture are best encountered in the literature itself, the primary sources from which we know almost everything of that foreign country, the past, and here and there we are compelled to make a direct translation if we want to talk about the texts' meaning in our own language. So by focusing on one of these strengths, we won't fail to touch on any of the others.

The overlap implies that I could try to balance them all, have some of everything. This has been the mode of the third year, after the syllabus published by Mother of Divine Grace School: translation (mostly Caesar, a little Horace and a little Vulgate) as homework, grammar exercises in class as whiteboard work, occasionally reading passages quickly for their informational content, trying to go straight from the Latin into the brain, so to speak, without the English middleman.

That could be the best for them; certainly it covers all the bases. But what do I want for them two or three or twenty years out? I know what I still enjoy from my years of French: I can and do read it with some regularity, novels and plays and poems, news articles and now tweets and Facebook posts; I can speak it well enough to get by, and from time to time have sought out conversation; I translate for fun and the peculiar joy of geeking out with fellow amateurs; I possess boundless optimism about learning bits and pieces of other languages.

They're not the same as me, but I can see bits of particular interest. Translating the Gallic Wars, I catch them wisecracking about learning yet another word for "slaughter" or "bloodthirsty;" I recognize it, a teenage expression of a certain pride in their own expertise, that they know enough to get the joke. This or that vocabulary word lights up recognition of even an obscure English cognate. After months of slogging through Caesar's prose word by word, they notice things like euphemism ("Hey, when Caesar says 'pacified' he actually means 'completely subjugated'!") and misdirection ("When this battle didn't go well, Caesar says it's because he wasn't particularly lucky that day.") A brief interlude of translating a poem, and being encouraged to do so with creativity and a free hand of interpretation, was met with declarations that it was fun, challenging, interesting (although weeks later when a second poem-translation was suggested, they denied enjoying it all that much).

I am pretty set on not concentrating purely on more grammar exercises, although we will surely have to do some, if only to parse difficult sentences as we encounter them. We could do more reading and less translating, so that the homework assignments were questions about interpretation and appreciation, and learn about literary devices and such. They could read in the original Latin, or in Latin translations from Greek, texts that they have already studied in English. If we continue doing translation, we could concentrate on rhetoric (Cicero being the next logical step) or poetry (Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Catullus), or evenly divide between them. For more specialization in translation, we could spend all our time working practically on Latin texts, or we could spend some time learning about all the tools in the translator's kit and about the different approaches one can take when translating a text in any language. No matter which approach I choose, I will have to learn more myself.

My interest right now lies in translating theory, so I often envision a course built not just on translating Latin, but in considering how different translators-into-English have solved problems peculiar to source texts in modern languages as well. I have acquired some books of essays by working translators, with sources drawn from French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Old English, and I think it would be fun to assign readings from that. I also have a textbook from a college translation course written generally so that it could be used for students of many different languages. It walks the student through concepts of equivalence at the word level, the sentence level, the paragraph; how ideas are logically linked, how transitions may be managed, ways to move back and forth in time and tense. It contains exercises at the end of each chapter, and I envision myself using them as models for constructing exercises specific to Latin-to-English translation, or more generally putting a word-for-word literal English rendering (of a text in any source language) into good English style.

Then, too, I sometimes imagine a course built more on literary appreciation. My students won't become professional translators, and I am not sure they will ever share my passion for amateur translation, no matter how enthusiastically I gush. Perhaps I could get them started with a conviction that the enjoyment of reading Latin literature is worth the extra effort and practice, or set them up with a broad understanding of literary style and devices to support college literature learning. But for that I need to acquire some more-than-basic knowledge of the body of Latin literature, and -- let's face it -- my practice of staying one step ahead of my students has not yet prepared me for it. I definitely don't have time to read widely enough that I could on my own select the right readings. I could perhaps borrow some other teacher's syllabus, or follow along with a sufficiently detailed literature-course spine. I'm not sure I would be able to do the subject justice. Then again, maybe I could... with a lot of work, work I would enjoy but that would take me away from other things that deserve my time.

Because in the end the teacher has to know her own strengths and limitations too. The best you can get out of me might not be exactly the thing that you want, but perhaps you would rather have my best than something you like better but that I can't do quite as well.

I think translation of both poetry and prose excerpts, combined with some reading and discussion drawn from introductory coursebooks, and enough grammar to support it, with a little work about translation theory, is the way to go. Yes, the balanced approach: Some of what I like and am confident in, but also the bringing in the work of experts (not me) for learning together with my students something of the breadth of Latin literature. This is my first time through advanced Latin too, and I have to pick it up as I go along. The next younger students might get better content out of me, once I have incorporated it into myself. But for now, let's not fool myself: I am no further along than my students in much of the field. What I can do well is organize information (even while I am still working to understand it) into pieces that make a coherent whole.

So I'll do that, keeping bite-sized the chunks I have still to learn, and we will all find out together what sort of picture emerges.

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Comments

[Melanie B]

So I took four years of Latin in high school. My senior year was AP Latin, which meant the subject was determined by the test. At that time the AP test alternated between, I think either Caesar or Cicero and The Aeneid. I was in the year that did Aeneid. Because of a weird schedule conflict I couldn't actually fit Latin 4 into my schedule, so the workaround we did was to stick me in independent study. I either sat in the back of the classroom during a Latin 2 class, or I went to the library to work on my translation. I pretty much spent the year doing a line by line translation of the first few books of the Aeneid on my own, with a little supervision from the teacher. It was a little less than optimal, but I learned a lot about translating just by grappling with the text on my own.

In preparation our teacher assigned all the 4th year Latin students to read the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid in English translation the summer before

I also seem to remember that teacher assigning me an independent research paper on feral children and language acquisition. I guess it was a sort of intro to linguistic theory, looking at what happens to language acquisition when the human brain is not introduced to language in the first six years. I can't remember if that was my junior or senior year, though, or if anyone else had to do research papers. It was just sort of this weird thing she had me do.