<p>I posted a related question in the LD forum, but want to also ask a more general question here.</p>
<p>We're trying to decide for which foreign language my D should register for the 3 years of middle school. Can someone tell me how much of an oral component there is to Latin? Of course I know it's a dead language, but I ask because D has auditory processing difficulties and I'm thinking Latin study might work better for her. She's good at reading and memorizing words on a page, but struggles with information that comes through the ear. The drawback is that I don't know any Latin, but could help her a lot with either French or Spanish.</p>
<p>No oral component at all. Also almost almost all the work is translating from Latin to English not vice versa. IMO it meant my kids didn’t learn it nearly as well. Still, if your child has trouble with aural learning it may be a good idea. My younger son struggled with Latin and has (very mild) auditory processing issues and a (relatively) bad short term memory. Interesting while he mostly got B-'s he did quite well on the National Latin Exams, so perhaps our teacher was more demanding than average.</p>
<p>No spoken component-- but you might want to check with the teacher to see how much of the class material is delivered in a lecture format; and compare that to the French and Spanish options.</p>
<p>Latin is the perfect language for students with APD. It also helps students gain insight into the English language, by showing the derivation of many English words. Son did fantastic on both AP English language and AP Latin tests- each language helped boost his understanding of the other language.</p>
<p>A few schools have instituted spoken Latin as a component of the class–that might be the coming trend–though the majority do not have it. My grandfather (aka “Decimus”) had some spoken Latin back when he took beginning Latin, pre-World War I. </p>
<p>The “no speaking component” (most places) is good for students who prefer to double-check their work in a foreign language for accuracy before speaking–because that tends to interfere with fluency. APD throws another element into the mix. I think Latin would be a very good choice for your daughter. Also, it seems to me that the speaking tests in other languages caused the most stress for good students who were QMP’s friends. </p>
<p>If you know French and Spanish, and have a reasonably good command of English grammar, it will be easy for you to help your daughter with Latin. Locally, the #1 reason for taking Latin is that the Latin teacher is superb! Generally, one tends to get scholars as Latin teachers. And there is the great benefit of connection to 2,500 years of scholars in the past.</p>
<p>Oh hey, TheGFG, I tried to answer your post over on the LD forum :)</p>
<p>I have yet to come across any spoken Latin component over in my neck of the woods (the south) at all. It seems to be a new thing. I doubt your child will have it, but you would have to really double check on that. </p>
<p>If you already know two Romance Languages, then you could play at Latin at home. The post you made on the LD forum made me think that you child was still rather young and all. </p>
<p>Our high school, which has a fabulous Latin teacher and strong enrollment in Latin, absolutely has an oral component to Latin. Not oral in the sense of conversational, but in the sense of learning how to pronounce (according to current research) latin words and phrases, being able to read texts out loud, memorizing orations, and so on. She teaches declensions using some cool chants and hand/arm movements, which seems to help kinesthetic learners. I proctored the National Latin Exam one year, and you could watch kids twitch a little here and there as they worked through something and used small muscle memory to trigger the brain. The vast majority of the class earns honors in the National Latin exam each year, and I don’t remember the last time a student didn’t get at least a passing grade on the AP or IB exam.</p>
<p>There is also an oral component available in competitions sponsored by the Junior Classical League, both at the state level and nationally.</p>
<p>With Latin I’d ask more questions about the perceived quality of the teacher and the experience of different kinds of kids. Our school offered both an IB/AP track and a regular track, taught in the same classroom by the same teacher.</p>
<p>Spoken Latin is almost completely pointless since it is no longer a spoken language. Nobody can agree on how the Romans pronounced some syllables, and you will learn very different pronunciations depending on the country in which you learn your Latin. For example British pronunciations of Latin are very different from American, and both are different from the Italian.</p>
<p>coureur, I can agree with you since you included <em>almost</em> in your post. My grandfather still remembered idioms and forms that are inequivalent to the English forms, when he was in his 70’s. I attribute this to his answering aloud questions such as, “Quid est tibi nomen?” (“What is your name?”)–the point being that tibi is a noun in the dative, and not an adjective modifying nomen.</p>
<p>(For completeness, I should add that I liked not having to speak the language in high school. By college, I was ready for a spoken language.)</p>
<p>I’m not a Latin student, but I asked my child’s teacher about this, and she said that they have a very good understanding – she mentioned three areas: rhyming schemes in poetry – if you know that two words must rhyme because of their placement, that gives you evidence, error analysis, which linguistics scholars apparently use to work on how words sound (because if you make a spelling error it is often in the direction of the way the word sounds - if you see a lot of misspellings of relevant as relevent, you can reasonably assume that the word is pronounced with a short e sound despite being spelled with an a.), and analysis of how language morphs over time – and with latin being a root language for the romance languages, there’s a lot with which to work. There’s a paper on the subject available on-line – here’s the most relevant part</p>
<p>3 Do we know how the Romans pronounced Latin?
Surprisingly, yes. The details of the reconstruction are given in W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina
(written in English), Cambridge, 1965. There are several main sources of knowledge:
• The Latin alphabet was meant to be entirely phonetic. Unlike us, the ancient Romans did
not inherit their spellings from any earlier language. What you see is what you get.
• Language teaching was big business in Roman times, and ancient Roman grammarians give
us surprisingly detailed information about the sounds of the language.
• Languages derived from Latin give us a lot of evidence. In fact, many of the letters of the
alphabet are pronounced the same way in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. It
stands to reason that the original Latin pronunciation has survived.
• Spelling errors made by the ancient Romans are very informative. If two letters are often
mixed up, they must sound fairly similar. Likewise, if two letters are never mixed up, we
know they sounded dif ferent.
Here’s an example. In classical times, the natives had no trouble keeping ae distinct from
e; if they ever misspelled ae it came out ai. Later on, they started changing ae to e. That
enables us to pinpoint when the sound of ae changed.
• Finally, transcriptions into other writing systems, such as Greek and Sanskrit, often pin
down the ancient pronunciation of Latin very precisely.</p>
<p>I was taught the reconstructed pronunciation. But it appears that the French reconstituted pronunciation differs from the British and American version. It has once been said that when Catholic prelates from all over the world meet, they speak one single, mutually unintelligible language–Latin.</p>
<p>Both my kids studied Latin and there was very little oral component to the language, none in middle school. In high school, they might read a passage out loud, but Latin is a phonetic language with fairly consistent rules so that’s not very hard to learn. My daughter in particular loved Latin because speaking the language was not part of it. It has been a great boost to her vocabulary and grammar skills. What might be hard for a student with a learning disability is the complex sentence structure that they’ll run into in later years of Latin.</p>
<p>^Did you not have to recite poetry? Arma virumque cano and all that?
Winston Churchill had a hilarious passage about learning Latin. Apparently in England one learned the first declension using “mensa” (we used “rosa”). Whoever says: “Oh, table!” he asked rhetorically. He then went on to complain that when he recited “arma virumque…” his pronunciation of “cano” did not please his teacher. “Cane-oh? I’ll give you cane-oh!”</p>
<p>I remember D practicing declaiming Vergil, loudly. But that’s different from the kind of speaking that students do in a modern language class, which usually involves carrying on a conversation and having to spontaneously come up with the right words. It seems to me that memorizing and reciting uses a somewhat different set of skills than conversation does.</p>
<p>My kids started Latin in 5th grade. There is an optional Latin class senior year, with an oral component.
If your D is good at memorizing words on a page, Latin will be a good language to learn.<br>
I don’t understand why most of the translations are from Latin to English? This makes it so much easier. When I was in school it wasn’t the case.</p>
<p>We had to translate both ways. As you say, translating from Latin to French (or English) was far easier. The opportunities to make mistakes translating into Latin were endless; and, alas, grading was extremely strict. A minor grammatical mistake (solecisme) meant being docked 2 points out of 20. A mistake involving the “invention of a whole new word” (barbarisme) got you docked 4 points out of 20. There was the memorable tests in which the lowest grade was minus 36!</p>
<p>I agree that recitation is very different from conversation. But we did have to recite quite a bit of poetry.</p>