Interesting. Latin is, of course, the poster child for classic, British-boarding-school, repetitive, utterly prescriptive teaching methods. And since it's the way I learned my Latin*, I find it hard to imagine learning Latin any other way than practicing the cases and the conjugations and memorizing the sequence of tenses and all that fun stuff %^).
As far as medieval Latin is concerned, I agree that it's pretty much "speaking English in Latin", that is, if you dispense with a substantial amount of Latin's innate syntax and just translate the original into Latin words, you have a good chance of getting good medieval Latin. For example, in English we say "Justin says that Rosetta Stone is expensive". In classical Latin, you say literally "Justin says Rosetta Stone to be expensive". In medieval Latin, you construct the sentence as in English using the conjunction "quod" (that).
In any case, I look forward to chatting with you in Latin.
*(And, for that matter, the varying amounts of Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, Lakota, Wampanoag, Onandaga, and other stuff I've either learned and lost, or am currently exploring. Yiddish and Tok Pisin were exceptions....)
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Date: 2010-06-13 02:14 am (UTC)As far as medieval Latin is concerned, I agree that it's pretty much "speaking English in Latin", that is, if you dispense with a substantial amount of Latin's innate syntax and just translate the original into Latin words, you have a good chance of getting good medieval Latin. For example, in English we say "Justin says that Rosetta Stone is expensive". In classical Latin, you say literally "Justin says Rosetta Stone to be expensive". In medieval Latin, you construct the sentence as in English using the conjunction "quod" (that).
In any case, I look forward to chatting with you in Latin.
*(And, for that matter, the varying amounts of Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, Lakota, Wampanoag, Onandaga, and other stuff I've either learned and lost, or am currently exploring. Yiddish and Tok Pisin were exceptions....)