My Impressions of Lingua Latina

    You may have never heard of Lingua Latina. It's a pretty obscure series, even among the world of Latin books. There are hugely popular books such as the Cambridge Latin Course, then the ones which are well-known in Latin enthusiast circles, like John Taylor's Latin Beyond GCSE. Lingua Latin doesn't have the same wide appeal as those titles, but it does have a dedicated fanbase. And when I say a dedicated fanbase, I mean dedicated. There are popular online who absolutely swear by this thing and promote it as much as humanly possible. Some even go as far to say that it's so good that it makes all other Latin books completely obsolete. So I thought, I better read it and see what I think!

    Here are my impressions of the first part of Lingua Latina: Familia Romana!

    For those who don't know the book, it's very different to the likes of the Cambridge Latin Course. It does not use the traditional grammar and exercises approach but prefers the 'natural method'. To put this in simple language, the book tries to get you to read Latin by reading lots of Latin prose. And I mean lots. Familia Romana is two hundred and ninety pages long, and while there are some exercises at the end of each chapter, the majority of the book is reading material. Lingua Latina's use of the natural method is what separates it from every other Latin textbooks. I should also note that the book is beautifully presented, it's colourful and has lots of nice illustrations. Other Latin books like nice (I really like the striking design of John Taylor's books) but Lingua Latina's design is up there!

    It's well-known among those of us who studied Latin at intensive courses at university that the grammar and exercise approach is far better at teaching grammar than it is vocabulary. I, like many other graduates, had a perfect understanding of grammar and virtually non-existent vocabulary. This makes reading Latin texts virtually impossible, since you have to look up a dictionary for every word, which slows you down to a crawl. In turn, this makes it so that we aren't accustomed to reading Latin lines by sight and we start to get very technical in breaking down constructions. Useful for philology, but a pain for reading! Lingua Latina teaches you vocabulary effortlessly because it is so brilliantly written. It chooses a set of words for the theme for each chapter, not atypical for Latin books, but repeats them a lot and in different cases, far moreso than other textbooks. These words are then scattered in subsequent chapters so you don't forget them. Lingua Latina also has synonyms and antonym of common words in the margins, which is really helpful for learning vocabulary. I really liked the way it glossed words with explanations in Latin, since that helps you think about the words as Latin words rather than just straight translations of English ideas. It's jarring going back to other textbooks now, where unusual words are sometimes randomly thrown into passages.

    However, I know what is perhaps the biggest question on everyone's mind. Can Lingua Latina really teach students grammar via just Latin prose? It certainly doesn't have the abundance of grammar tables and exercises of other textbooks. I do admit that I was initially sceptical of the book's ability to teach grammar. The passive verb seems to come from nowhere at the end of chapter four. It's also not always consistent: it does give you grammar tables for the third declension in chapter nine, I assume because the third declension is so unlike the others that you need some help. However, if you don't know what the grammar tables already mean then you would have no idea what the book is talking about, since it hasn't used them at all up until that point.

    That said, I have approached this book in an unintended way and cannot fairly represent what a first time reader would think of it's approach, since I already knew all the grammar before I started reading. Lingua Latina says L1NGVA LATINA est primus liber tuus Latinus (Lingua Latina is your first book) on page nineteen and this line is a good representation of the book's primary goal. Its first part, Familia Romana, is designed for complete beginners and does not expect any knowledge of Latin grammar. I did learn more than I already knew about the gerund by reading its usages in the narrative, as the gerund is one of those forms which you can always learn more about. I think if you had a really good teacher who was confident enough to teach Lingua Latina to a class then it could teach grammar really well. It would definitely be tougher than the traditional approach, I suspect, since you would have to detect the forms immediately upon reading them in class and go over them on the fly, rather than dedicating time to them in tables which you have fully prepared in advance. But from what new grammar I did learn from the book, it's taught more organically in a narrative than exercises, which I think is a positive.

    This leads to what is by far the greatest strength of of Lingua Latina: that there is a lot of reading material and it's all reasonably straightforward to get through. To be honest, I think the difficulty of the book can be understated by its enthusiasts. It's true that the first chapter is incredibly easy and you can blast through the first fifty pages if you are familiar with reading Latin. But it gets much, much tougher as it goes along. I was actually finding myself surprised by how difficult it was in the last hundred pages. I'd say it's not far off the difficulty of the passages in John Taylor's Latin Beyond GCSE when it gets going. Lingua Latina starts off with very straightforward Latin, but the sentence structure gets increasingly complicated and it starts to resemble other textbooks pretty quickly. What makes it superior as a reading book is that it has sentences which flow logically, rather than having ones which try to trick you. It also has logical conversations from characters who speak like human beings. I think other textbooks can have sentences which are hard to follow because there's more focus put to grammar constructions than there is making a coherent story.

    And the narrative focus of Lingua Latina is something which really sets it apart from other Latin textbooks. This is a book, with main characters, an overarching narrative, and plot twists. Some other books have this to an extent. The Oxford Latin Course has Horace as the main character and Reading Greek has the (somewhat notorious) adventures of Dikaiopolis, but no book comes close to Lingua Latina here. One of the most rewarding things of reading it is that you feel you have actually read a real book in Latin, even if it isn't high literature or anything. I think the narrative is probably at its most interesting in the middle of the book, as, aside from an interesting plot twist towards the end of the book (which I don't want to spoil), it kind of loses its focus in the last fifty pages. It swaps around from scene to scene a lot because it needs to cover so many vocabulary themes, but it's a very impressive effort.

    One of the biggest weaknesses with Lingua Latina's story, however, is that it has a lot of toxic ideas which are (mostly) uncritically presented. It teaches you the word pulsare (to strike) by Marcus beating up his younger sister and there's a lot of comic family beatings which might rub some the wrong way. It has a very cliched presentation of slaves for most of the book, showing them stealing from their masters and acting deviously. To be fair, there is more to this trope than first appears when you read all the way through, and this is not unique to Lingua Latina, but it's worth mentioning that most of the narrative is fairly as you would expect in regards to slavery. It has a very sexist portrayal of women, who only really seem to get excited about jewelry, and it repeatedly tells us that men shouldn't cry. There is one passage where it a man cries in a positive manner, but it's done in a very traditional way where a soldier cries nobly for his homeland. On the whole, the book has very traditional views of society. How much this will bother you in a Latin teaching book is subjective, but it's worth mentioning. This was first published many decades ago and it's starting to show its age here.

    It's also worth mentioning that as great as Lingua Latina is in presenting an engaging narrative, reading two hundred and ninety pages of Latin prose is a monumental task which can test your patience. I found myself getting exhausted by the last hundred pages and finishing because I wanted to say I had read it. I've now received the second part, Roma Aeterna, which is one hundred pages longer than Familia Romana and printed on larger pages! It's intimidating! In a sense, then, the book's greatest strength is also its greatest flaw. It teaches you an incredible amount of vocabulary because you read so much Latin, but it also requires that you read far more Latin than any other textbook demands! I spent months dedicating my lunch breaks to an hour of Lingua Latina and I'm not sure if everyone would be able to persevere. However, the amount of prose text is fundamental to the book's teaching style and it wouldn't be able to be shortened without compromising it. So it's one of those things you just have to push through, but it's worth conceding that it can be an absolute pain.

    A lot of people read Lingua Latina to read Latin in Latin rather than constantly translating in your head. I know some people who teach with it even speak Latin in class, which I would fail horribly at! I felt like I was ruining everyone's fun when I was reading it since I sometimes consulted a dictionary which is supposed to be absolutely forbidden. I also did translate in English in my head when I went along (shock horror), but I found that even doing this, you start to recognise Latin patterns in your head without even thinking about it. In many ways, I think Lingua Latina can be read in many different ways and it serves a lot of purposes. It can be an excellent beginner book. It serves as a great graded reader, it's good even for those of us who have studied Latin for many years and just want to improve our vocabulary. It's recommended to read it a certain way (no dictionary and in Latin in your head) but I honestly think you can read it however you want and you'll get a lot out of it.

    So in sum, the book is excellent and I think far more people in Classics should know about it. If you want to learn more vocabulary, which is a common problem for us all, then this is the book for you! If you do read it though, let me know, so we can say how awful a person Marcus is and how dumb Medus is! And let's not even talk about Aemilia...