But after that, you were expected to decipher what came next based on your knowledge of what came before. 1Īll in all, my first Latin tutor was more merciful to his students than Knock was and did give us some words of introduction before we plunged into the text. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with a sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another.
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The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all they are only solving a puzzle. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it I was beginning to think in Greek.
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He appeared at this stage to value speed more than absolute accuracy. Then it became a kind of game to see how far beyond. Then I could go a line or two beyond his furthest North. At first I could travel only a very short way along the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further. It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked. When he had finished he handed me over Crusius’ Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as I could of what he had done, left the room. I had never seen a classical author taken in such large gulps before. Without a word of introduction Knock read aloud the first twenty lines or so in the “new” pronunciation, which I had never heard before…He then translated, with a few, a very few explanations, about a hundred lines. At nine o’ clock we sat down to work in the little upstairs study which soon became so familiar to me…We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Golly!” The name struck awe into my soul. He replied merely with a sound very frequent in his conversation which I can only spell “Huh.” I found this rather disquieting and I woke on Monday saying to myself, “Now for Homer. I explained that I had never read a word in any dialect but the Attic, assuming that when he knew this he would approach Homer through some preliminary lessons on the Epic language. I arrived at Gastons (so the Knock’s house was called) on a Saturday, and he announced that we would begin Homer on Monday. His recollection of it in Surprised by Joy is so close to my own that I can nearly read it as though I were the one writing it: Apparently, Lewis had a similar experience in learning Ancient Greek. Lewis, I found words to describe the process my brain went through.
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Some years later, in reading Surprised by Joy, by C.S. After floundering for a few weeks (after all, no one said being dunked in Latin was easy), I began to adapt. The textbook is written entirely in Latin. Lingua Latina uses a form of immersion called the Natural Method.
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The book I was taught from was Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina. No toe-dipping-complete submersion, head and all. All this was due to the way I was taught: submersion in the language itself. I have attempted before to describe my remarkable experience of learning Latin and how it revolutionized my perspective on language-learning.