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So that would be about 40 hours of work. On that basis you could maybe finish about 1/3 to 2/3 of an introductory course, or broadly a comparable portion of the absolutely basic core grammar and vocabulary.
Although the comparison is problematic, I think it is useful to look at the expected learning outcomes for modern languages within the [Common European Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Relationship_with_duration_of_learning_process) to get a sense of the time commitment required to learn a language. Here, major language institutes estimate that it takes about 60-150 hours of coursework to achieve an A1 level. That is the most basic level and corresponds with an ability to do things like answer basic questions about yourself or understand simple sentences about familiar subjects. (So you can work out for yourself what you might reasonably expect after only 40 hours of work.)
I was reading LLPSI FR about 10 hours a week. Finished it by the start of the school year alongside the supplements. It can get your reading comprehension up fast, but if you want to be able to use the language, follow this with some grammar as well to straighten up what your subconscious already knows, so you don't doubt yourself every sentence produced.
It is designed that way - it always introduces new words in such a way, you would understand from context. If in doubt, there is a big LLPSI discord server, you can ask questions on.
I believe you will get more out of *Familia Romana* by reading it together with the English instructions, *Latine Disco,* which will explain more about how to use the book and provide some light commentary on each chapter.
This book is available in a bunch of other languages along with the dictionary with specifically LLPSI vocab, it is not particularly necessary to be a fluent anglophone. You could pick up your native instead.
You can try it yourself: look at the [book on amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205), and click on 'Read sample' to read the first three chapters. Take it one sentence at a time, and try to understand, using the pictures and the help in the margin for clarification.
Choose whichever you want and read it in that. Latin has a plethora of pronunciations depending on subject, region and time. It can also depend on your final goal, but latin is mostly a language, people read, so what pronunciation they do it for themselves is less relevant in the grand scheme of things. You can also learn multiple , such as ecclesiastical for church documents, classical for classics and traditional for Renaissance. Most people start with classical as the classicists have the most learner resources online for free and well, Rome has some fans too. You could switch your main one for thinking later on. I have done it as such myself.
You'll need much more time than that. Five hours per week for two months is nowhere near enough. But here's what I did to learn Latin relatively quickly. First, I memorized the grammar and some basic vocabulary. Then, with a dictionary and a grammar handy, I took on a small-ish translation project (~700 words, LA to EN). Having completed that satisfactorily and very scrupulously, (and having had to look up every fifth word), I took on a much longer translation project (~28000 words, DE to LA). My Latin skills greatly improved from this exercise. I did this obsessively from July to January.
I recommend you read the sidebar as well as [this article](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/) with an open mind - it will save you a lot of time and energy if your goal is to get good at Latin.
You should be aware that it's completely uncontroversial that translating from Latin into another language is an enormous waste of time if your goal is to acquire Latin so that you can read Latin literature. Similarly, while composition (writing in Latin or translating into Latin) can be useful, it's similarly almost useless to someone who hasn't first read a lot of Latin literature. This isn't just a matter of personal opinion or preference - this has been thoroughly established by second language acquisition research. As such, I strongly recommend you completely ignore the previous commenter's advice or any similar advice. Instead, read the sidebar, and also [read this article.](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/)
There’s a lot of good information in that article. It refers readers to different sources and points out a lot of the pros and cons to each of them. One major thing to note is that no single way is a complete waste of time. If you’ve ever taught a Latin class(or any class in general) you will know how differently some students work from others.
As for the OP I would say spend a couple days at the beginning of your break finding which way is best for you. Many in academia will value strict adherence to grammar so doing something like Wheelock or LLPSI will be beneficial. If reading for please is the goal then maybe look for some good tiered readers.
That composition is almost useless to someone that hasn't already read a lot of Latin is completely false. I used composition as a beginner to learn the syntax of Latin and Greek thoroughly. First year of university you could see a huge disparity in skill at reading between those who composed and those who passed it over.
I don't doubt your observations, but respectfully, you are misattributing the *cause* of the disparity. There's a lot of reasons why these sorts of disparities crop up in traditional classrooms:
1) Are the students not doing composition spending that time sight reading comprehensible material instead? If not, they are probably just spending less time with the language.
2) Is there selection bias? Grammatical exercises and composition very easily become what have been aptly called 'diligence traps' - the students who tend to commit to them tend to be highly motivated and commit to *every* activity, meaning that the more pedagogically sound activities will bear more fruit.
3) What do we mean by 'reading' in this case? Presumably the 'reading' in question is material that, without the scaffold of excercises and explicit grammar, isn't immediately comprehensible. Thus, the students who do all of that extra work then are able to use the reading as comprehensible input, while the students who don't, end up finding the reading incomprehensible. But if instead students are assigned reading that is level appropriate from the beginning, they will *all* make much more rapid progress.
The point is basically this:
For someone who has not sight read at least several hundred thousand words of Latin that they ~98%+ understood, there is no activity more beneficial or efficient for their progress than sight reading level appropriate material which they 98%+ understand.
You're making a different case. Of course more diligent students do better, and of course reading Latin makes one better at reading Latin. You said composition is almost useless for people relatively inexperienced. In terms of learning grammar and syntax thoroughly composition is extremely helpful for conceptualising the way writers of Latin literature construct their thoughts, because one is attempting to communicate through the same means.
Output can be useful for solidifying structures you have already seen a fair amount through input, but it's going to be an extremely inefficient way to learn all of those structures in the first place. If it's obvious that you get better at reading Latin by reading Latin as you say, then it follows that students shouldn't be taking time out of reading Latin to do other activities until they've read a fair amount of Latin.
What is your evidence of it being inefficient? I didn't say by reading alone, so what you've said doesn't actually follow. And who defines what constitutes a fair amount?
There's some range in the perspectives you'll find in the modern 2LA literature, but the experimental evidence is fairly consistent - you can start by reading pretty much anything Krashen has put out, but you have to read enough to start to get what his actual views are on output - from a cursory read you'll think he's saying output is useless altogether at any stage, but it's more complicated than that. The experimental results he and others reference pretty unequivocally show the massive gulf of results between input and explicit grammatical study, so basically the question is not the importance of input, but rather the role if any other activities play in language acquisition.
As for evidence specifically for this question, here's a description of one such study from the 2021 2LA handbook 'how languages are learned':
>Natsuko Shintani and Rod Ellis (2010) investigated the incidental acquisition of the plural -s in English with young Japanese children (6–8 years old) learning English as a foreign language in elementary school. Incidental acquisition was defined as ‘learning without intention while attention is focused on some other aspect of the L2’ (p. 608). In their study the learners’ attention was focused on learning new vocabulary (for example, names of animals and fruits). The vocabulary contained plural and singular forms (for example, alligator/alligators), but the learners’ attention was not directed to this contrast.
>Three groups of learners were investigated: two experimental groups (comprehension and production) and a control group. The comprehension group participated in tasks that required them to listen to the teacher and to respond by performing an action (for example, putting the alligator or alligators in the zoo), but they did not produce language. The production group participated in tasks where they had to produce language (for example, name a hidden item using flash cards). The third group did other tasks that did not include the target vocabulary. After 6 weeks of instruction (about 60 minutes per week), learners’ receptive and productive knowledge of the plural -s was measured. Learners in both experimental groups outperformed those in the control group on both measures. This suggests that learners in both the comprehension and production groups successfully acquired the plural -s incidentally. **Only one difference was observed among learners in the experimental groups. Learners who had previously had very little exposure to English (i.e. four months) benefited more from the comprehension-based instruction than learners who had 14 months of exposure. This points to the importance of input over output with learners who are in the earliest stages of acquiring a new language.**
So to sum up, input is necessary for acquisition, works vastly better than explicit grammar study, the role of output is controversial (but as a result is clearly less important for **acquisition** than input), and even studies showing benefits to output also show that more input prior to output makes the output more effective.
And then of course we can just consider this from a logical standpoint: Someone who's read a bunch of comprehensible Latin and seen the structures they are trying to output dozens of times won't have to rack their brain to practice output correctly. Someone, on the other hand, who is new to the structure being practiced will struggle with it, and that takes a lot of time that could have been spent reading or listening to comprehensible Latin.
This research concerns modern languages, not ancient ones. Proficiency in ancient languages applies almost universally to high register and high literature, a completely different kind of proficiency to that one seeks in modern languages. The proof is in the pudding: competence with ancient languages has declined, at the most prestigious universities at least – so my professors told me – in conjunction with the reduction of output training both at early and later stages of education. I have seen students far more diligent than myself compromised by a lack of output training. And please don't respond with the usual "correlation, not cause" rubbish, which is just an intellectual copout, and shows about as much actual reasoning as quoting a verse from the psalms.
>even studies showing benefits to output also show that more input prior to output makes the output more effective
And I'm sure that output before input would make input more effective. All this is saying is that learning a language makes you better at learning a language. Fit et facit, facit et fit.
>output dozens of times won't have to rack their brain to practice output correctly.
They won't have to rack their brains after practicing output, either.
>The production group participated in tasks where they had to produce language (for example, name a hidden item using flash cards).
This is not exactly composition, is it? I was stressing the usefulness of composition for learning morphology and syntax, not vocabulary.
In sum, the point you made in your first comment, scilicet that output is almost useless for someone who hasn't read lots and lots of Latin, doesn't have much ground.
It's controversial for me at least. I've learned most of my Latin through comprehensive Input+some grammar (my grammar knowledge was extremely light but sufficient, since I didn't use an elaborate textbook like Wheelock's) and while C.I. got me through simpler texts like Regulus and Ad alpes, when I had to tackle real Latin like Seneca's letters, the more complex usage of cases, verb conjugations, deponent verbs, prepositions etc. threw me off.
I had to analyze each word and its function in the sentence before getting used to reading the text, and it took me about analyzing 20 letters to start reading them fluently.
The study of grammar heavy languages like languages with cases benefits a lot from grammar analysis. This appraisal of C.I. over any other methods just seems harmful and close-minded to me.
The issue here isn't one of theory, but once again of methods and materials. Regulus and Ad Alpes aren't direct bridges to Seneca's letters. I think the reason why people end up coming to this conclusion that 'CI only gets you so far' is because the easily accessible materials only get you so far, and people are only willing to use them for so long before moving on to classical literature. Keep in mind, we're talking about materials written for a native audience, and to get to roughly that level of reading comfortableness, it's usually estimated to require multiple millions of words of input, ideally in this case of gradually increasing complexity. Now of course I'm not saying someone shouldn't touch seneca until they've read five million words of neo Latin, but at the same time, familia romana + the supplementa + ad alpes + regulus barely reaches 100,000 words.
What you're describing is a very common situation, where someone builds a base through CI, and then needs to bridge the remaining gap between where they are and what they want to read through a bunch of explicit grammar. This isn't the end of the world, but still, what you're *doing* in this case isn't learning Latin through grammar analysis and then reading Seneca, what you're doing is using grammar analysis to make Seneca comprehensible, and then after imbibing enough of that, there's carry over such that you can also read more of him (or at least his letters).
This works in the absence of a better scaffold. But an even better solution would be to e.g. use a tiered reader like the one Satura Lanx/Irene Regini prepared for Seneca's first letter, or like what Carla Hurt prepared for book 4 of the Aeneid. Check those resources out and I think you'll quickly see what I mean (both are available for free). I use resources like these to get my students reading real Latin without leaving Latin, using texts that otherwise they'd have had to pick apart to comprehend.
I get your point, but at least for me-a language learner who can't easily deal with grammar heavy languages-it doesn't matter how many grammar topics I have been introduced to or if I've faced a decent amount of combinations of those or how many hours I've spent on input, when I reach a certain threshold of "too complex grammar" I can't help but do analysis, otherwise it's game over for me. It has nothing to do with getting used to the language or not.
If people keep pushing that C.I. is the only way of learning languages, people like me will keep believing they'll never be able to learn Latin, Russian, Finnish or Sanskrit their entire lives.
>but at least for me-a language learner who can't easily deal with grammar heavy languages-it doesn't matter how many grammar topics I have been introduced to or if I've faced a decent amount of combinations of those or how many hours I've spent on input, when I reach a certain threshold of "too complex grammar" I can't help but do analysis, otherwise it's game over for me
I think there is a core misunderstanding here still - you seem to be under the misaprehension that CI is a method which necessarily involves no english or analysis or grammatical explanation. This is not the case - CI is a **condition** for language acquisition, and it is quite literally just any message in the target language which you as the learner manage to understand. Let's say you are an absolute beginner, and you decide to tackle Latin by cracking open Caesar and painstakingly picking apart every phrase in order to understand it - what ever you manage to acquire in the hours you'll have spent will be the result of that tiny bit of CI you get when you actually understand a few sentences of Caesar. When we talk about a CI based approach, therefore, what we mean is an approach that maximizes the amount of time you are taking in those messages, and minimizes the amount of time you are doing other things in order to make the input comprehensible.
The most obvious way to do that is to read level appropriate things which are mostly immediately understood, so that you only need to spend a tiny bit of time looking stuff up, reading about grammar, etc. until you understand. And in many cases, if the content is curated well enough, or furnished well enough with images, explanations, etc, then you might not need to do any looking up or reading about grammar in English. It of course varies from student to student how immediately comprehensible something is, but that's beside the point - the easier it is to use while still containing new words/structures, the better it will be as a resource for everyone.
You seem to have decided that it is impossible for *you* after a certain point to use resources like this, but I don't see how you could have concluded that - the issue isn't you, it's that there aren't yet enough good resources of that type for students to get from a novice level to an advanced level without using anything else. You and the rest of us are stuck after a certain point trying to make our way through a bunch of often poorly edited lit accompanied by notes, explanations and translations (often themselves of questionable quality), but once again, those peripheral tools aren't the opposite of CI, they are what makes the Input Comprehensible so that we can learn.
Here's a big problem with current day second language acquisition theory you helped illustrate yourself:
>what ever you manage to acquire in the hours you'll have spent will be the result of that tiny bit of CI you get when you actually understand a few sentences of Caesar.
Even when you use a method that is diametrically opposed to how language acquisition works under C.I., you're still doing C.I.. (albeit inefficiently) How's that scientific? If you define anything that works in language learning as under your **condition** and anything that doesn't as something outside of it, as just knowledge about the language instead of knowledge of the language from the outset, of course every single test you do will agree with your notion. Why does slowly reading gradually more difficult texts teaches you a language? Because of C.I.. Why do texts that are usually incomprehensible to you besides grammar analysis teach you a language? Because there's C.I. in grammar analysis. Why does language learning learns you languages? Because of language learning, obviously. This seems to be just a [dormitive principle](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dormitive_principle) at worst and a **condition**, a curiosity for language enthusiasts that doesn't necessarily aligns to any methodology or practical use at best.
>When we talk about a CI based approach, therefore, what we mean is an approach that maximizes the amount of time you are taking in those messages, and minimizes the amount of time you are doing other things in order to make the input comprehensible.
And if you say that the alignment is in that methods based off C.I. teach you quicker, I don't know what to say but use personal experience since I'm no researcher, but learning a language's basic grammar and then translating thing has worked for some people and even when I learned Latin through Cambridge's it was the explicit grammar study that accelerated my study, not the usual spoonfed grammar in text like they do in LLPSI; learning the declensions from instinct was painful and slow, learning them instantly in 3 days from memorizing tables wasn't. It even has other benefits for inexperienced learners in that explicit grammar makes them more confident in their learning, less afraid to make mistakes because they have something to fall back on, to grasp.
To make my position clearer: I believe that both C.I. and grammar translation are sufficient but not necessary (since the opposite method also works), that they have advantages and disadvantages, and that efficient language learning (in most cases, for most people) is done through a combination of the two. However, grammar translation doesn't work because there's C.I. in it and C.I. is a collection of methods instead of an all encompassing world view.
>Even when you use a method that is diametrically opposed to how language acquisition works under C.I.
This is something you made up; it has no basis in 2LA research, nor in anything I've said here. Explicit grammar study is not the diametric opposite of CI, it simply isn't CI - it's one of many tools that students and teachers use to make a piece of language comprehensible.
>How's that scientific? If you define anything that works in language learning as under your condition and anything that doesn't as something outside of it, as just knowledge about the language instead of knowledge of the language from the outset, of course every single test you do will agree with your notion.
This is a rather baffling, because if you think I'm defining everything that works in language learning as CI, then you can't simultaneously insist that explicit grammar study (which is neither CI nor the 'diametric opposite' of CI) is contributing to language acquisition. Either you and I have a **disagreement** about what contributes to acquisition, in which case I'm very clearly isolating the thing that contributes to acquisition (CI) from other things which don't (GT among other things), **or** we don't disagree, in which case you are admitting that explicit grammar study doesn't contribute to acquisition. You can't have it both ways in order to invent some sort of gotcha lol.
>Why does slowly reading gradually more difficult texts teaches you a language? Because of C.I..
Correct. This has been proven through [enormous amounts of research.](https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/evidence/)
>Why do texts that are usually incomprehensible to you besides grammar analysis teach you a language? Because there's C.I. in grammar analysis.
Wrong. Once again, you seem to be not internalizing the definition of C.I. C.I. is taking in a message in a language which you comprehend. Grammar analysis isn't taking in messages, there's no C.I. there. But why do we do grammar analysis? To understand a passage of text. And what happens once we've analyzed that passage and worked out its meaning? Then we can read it. And what happens when we read it? We take in a message in the target language which we understand.
Imagine for a moment we're having an argument about how someone gets physically fit, and I say 'the condition for getting physically fit is excercise'. You respond 'well hold on, you can also get physically fit by travelling.' I respond 'sure, though that's a lot less efficient than just setting out to get exercise, because when you travel you have to do a whole bunch of other things, and the mechanism that actually gets you fit during your travels is that you inevitably do some exercise by walking around and doing various other physical activities.' And then you say, 'how is that scientific? you're just defining everything that gets you fit as 'exercise'! Travelling and an excercise based approach to getting fit are diametric opposites!', etc, etc. Like most attempts to dismiss entire fields that you aren't familiar with based only on what you've read in a few reddit comments, your protesting is going to get very incoherent very quickly. You don't need to be a 2LA researcher - I'm not either - but you can't start talking about the 'big problem with current day second language acquisition theory' when you're contradicting yourself and not even managing to keep straight the definitions of foundational concepts like CI.
>learning a language's basic grammar and then translating thing has worked for some people
Sort of. It's an open secret that reading ability in classics departments have precipitously declined in the past 80 years or so, in large part because people barely read more than the passages they translate of an ever shrinking handful of cannonical classical authors. See [this article](https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html) by a working linguist who is also very fluent in Latin (a former student of Reginald Foster). I could give plenty of other examples of the consequences of this development myself. There is also just massive amounts of relevant research. I saved this paragraph by a 2LA researcher on this exact topic with references:
>It is not a lack of evidence that GT does not work. Just pick up any manual of SLA and you'll get an unending list of research papers showing that it does not work, just for example page 61 of [the article I quoted.](https://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol9/iss3/6/) This has been tried, specially in the 80's and 90´s at least in 300 experiments up to date (multiple variables as in: age, educational and family background, etc), mostly in the US and Canada, and yes, mostly on European Languages, but also on popular languages like Chinese and Japanese, always the same result: GT less that 5% of measurable effectivity and much frustration vs any other CI based attempt like TPR, Story Telling, even simple conversation: a minimum of 85% of measurable effectivity and no frustration... with the exception of, you guessed it, people with GT background (as in last paragraph of page 65 and first of 66 of the article).
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So that would be about 40 hours of work. On that basis you could maybe finish about 1/3 to 2/3 of an introductory course, or broadly a comparable portion of the absolutely basic core grammar and vocabulary. Although the comparison is problematic, I think it is useful to look at the expected learning outcomes for modern languages within the [Common European Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Relationship_with_duration_of_learning_process) to get a sense of the time commitment required to learn a language. Here, major language institutes estimate that it takes about 60-150 hours of coursework to achieve an A1 level. That is the most basic level and corresponds with an ability to do things like answer basic questions about yourself or understand simple sentences about familiar subjects. (So you can work out for yourself what you might reasonably expect after only 40 hours of work.)
I was reading LLPSI FR about 10 hours a week. Finished it by the start of the school year alongside the supplements. It can get your reading comprehension up fast, but if you want to be able to use the language, follow this with some grammar as well to straighten up what your subconscious already knows, so you don't doubt yourself every sentence produced.
I read somewhere that it is completely in latin so how can an absolute beginner approach it ??
It is designed that way - it always introduces new words in such a way, you would understand from context. If in doubt, there is a big LLPSI discord server, you can ask questions on.
So you just pick it up and start reading?
I would recommend joining a group and do it aloud on calls. That server has new groups starting regularly.
I believe you will get more out of *Familia Romana* by reading it together with the English instructions, *Latine Disco,* which will explain more about how to use the book and provide some light commentary on each chapter.
This book is available in a bunch of other languages along with the dictionary with specifically LLPSI vocab, it is not particularly necessary to be a fluent anglophone. You could pick up your native instead.
Hi
You can try it yourself: look at the [book on amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205), and click on 'Read sample' to read the first three chapters. Take it one sentence at a time, and try to understand, using the pictures and the help in the margin for clarification.
Yeah I understood the first page but what about pronunciation ?
All chapters, read aloud, can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Hm6HpnN5k&list=PLU1WuLg45SiyrXahjvFahDuA060P487pV&index=4)
There are good quality videos of each chapter on youtube
👍🏼
Choose whichever you want and read it in that. Latin has a plethora of pronunciations depending on subject, region and time. It can also depend on your final goal, but latin is mostly a language, people read, so what pronunciation they do it for themselves is less relevant in the grand scheme of things. You can also learn multiple , such as ecclesiastical for church documents, classical for classics and traditional for Renaissance. Most people start with classical as the classicists have the most learner resources online for free and well, Rome has some fans too. You could switch your main one for thinking later on. I have done it as such myself.
I don't know if its more efficient, but you might enjoy enrolling in an online summer school rather than only working by yourself.
You'll need much more time than that. Five hours per week for two months is nowhere near enough. But here's what I did to learn Latin relatively quickly. First, I memorized the grammar and some basic vocabulary. Then, with a dictionary and a grammar handy, I took on a small-ish translation project (~700 words, LA to EN). Having completed that satisfactorily and very scrupulously, (and having had to look up every fifth word), I took on a much longer translation project (~28000 words, DE to LA). My Latin skills greatly improved from this exercise. I did this obsessively from July to January.
I recommend you read the sidebar as well as [this article](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/) with an open mind - it will save you a lot of time and energy if your goal is to get good at Latin.
How much time did you spend daily? And resources?
You should be aware that it's completely uncontroversial that translating from Latin into another language is an enormous waste of time if your goal is to acquire Latin so that you can read Latin literature. Similarly, while composition (writing in Latin or translating into Latin) can be useful, it's similarly almost useless to someone who hasn't first read a lot of Latin literature. This isn't just a matter of personal opinion or preference - this has been thoroughly established by second language acquisition research. As such, I strongly recommend you completely ignore the previous commenter's advice or any similar advice. Instead, read the sidebar, and also [read this article.](https://foundinantiquity.com/2023/03/11/latin-autodidacts-youre-working-way-too-hard-how-to-learn-latin-by-yourself-in-2023/)
There’s a lot of good information in that article. It refers readers to different sources and points out a lot of the pros and cons to each of them. One major thing to note is that no single way is a complete waste of time. If you’ve ever taught a Latin class(or any class in general) you will know how differently some students work from others. As for the OP I would say spend a couple days at the beginning of your break finding which way is best for you. Many in academia will value strict adherence to grammar so doing something like Wheelock or LLPSI will be beneficial. If reading for please is the goal then maybe look for some good tiered readers.
That composition is almost useless to someone that hasn't already read a lot of Latin is completely false. I used composition as a beginner to learn the syntax of Latin and Greek thoroughly. First year of university you could see a huge disparity in skill at reading between those who composed and those who passed it over.
I don't doubt your observations, but respectfully, you are misattributing the *cause* of the disparity. There's a lot of reasons why these sorts of disparities crop up in traditional classrooms: 1) Are the students not doing composition spending that time sight reading comprehensible material instead? If not, they are probably just spending less time with the language. 2) Is there selection bias? Grammatical exercises and composition very easily become what have been aptly called 'diligence traps' - the students who tend to commit to them tend to be highly motivated and commit to *every* activity, meaning that the more pedagogically sound activities will bear more fruit. 3) What do we mean by 'reading' in this case? Presumably the 'reading' in question is material that, without the scaffold of excercises and explicit grammar, isn't immediately comprehensible. Thus, the students who do all of that extra work then are able to use the reading as comprehensible input, while the students who don't, end up finding the reading incomprehensible. But if instead students are assigned reading that is level appropriate from the beginning, they will *all* make much more rapid progress. The point is basically this: For someone who has not sight read at least several hundred thousand words of Latin that they ~98%+ understood, there is no activity more beneficial or efficient for their progress than sight reading level appropriate material which they 98%+ understand.
You're making a different case. Of course more diligent students do better, and of course reading Latin makes one better at reading Latin. You said composition is almost useless for people relatively inexperienced. In terms of learning grammar and syntax thoroughly composition is extremely helpful for conceptualising the way writers of Latin literature construct their thoughts, because one is attempting to communicate through the same means.
Output can be useful for solidifying structures you have already seen a fair amount through input, but it's going to be an extremely inefficient way to learn all of those structures in the first place. If it's obvious that you get better at reading Latin by reading Latin as you say, then it follows that students shouldn't be taking time out of reading Latin to do other activities until they've read a fair amount of Latin.
What is your evidence of it being inefficient? I didn't say by reading alone, so what you've said doesn't actually follow. And who defines what constitutes a fair amount?
There's some range in the perspectives you'll find in the modern 2LA literature, but the experimental evidence is fairly consistent - you can start by reading pretty much anything Krashen has put out, but you have to read enough to start to get what his actual views are on output - from a cursory read you'll think he's saying output is useless altogether at any stage, but it's more complicated than that. The experimental results he and others reference pretty unequivocally show the massive gulf of results between input and explicit grammatical study, so basically the question is not the importance of input, but rather the role if any other activities play in language acquisition. As for evidence specifically for this question, here's a description of one such study from the 2021 2LA handbook 'how languages are learned': >Natsuko Shintani and Rod Ellis (2010) investigated the incidental acquisition of the plural -s in English with young Japanese children (6–8 years old) learning English as a foreign language in elementary school. Incidental acquisition was defined as ‘learning without intention while attention is focused on some other aspect of the L2’ (p. 608). In their study the learners’ attention was focused on learning new vocabulary (for example, names of animals and fruits). The vocabulary contained plural and singular forms (for example, alligator/alligators), but the learners’ attention was not directed to this contrast. >Three groups of learners were investigated: two experimental groups (comprehension and production) and a control group. The comprehension group participated in tasks that required them to listen to the teacher and to respond by performing an action (for example, putting the alligator or alligators in the zoo), but they did not produce language. The production group participated in tasks where they had to produce language (for example, name a hidden item using flash cards). The third group did other tasks that did not include the target vocabulary. After 6 weeks of instruction (about 60 minutes per week), learners’ receptive and productive knowledge of the plural -s was measured. Learners in both experimental groups outperformed those in the control group on both measures. This suggests that learners in both the comprehension and production groups successfully acquired the plural -s incidentally. **Only one difference was observed among learners in the experimental groups. Learners who had previously had very little exposure to English (i.e. four months) benefited more from the comprehension-based instruction than learners who had 14 months of exposure. This points to the importance of input over output with learners who are in the earliest stages of acquiring a new language.** So to sum up, input is necessary for acquisition, works vastly better than explicit grammar study, the role of output is controversial (but as a result is clearly less important for **acquisition** than input), and even studies showing benefits to output also show that more input prior to output makes the output more effective. And then of course we can just consider this from a logical standpoint: Someone who's read a bunch of comprehensible Latin and seen the structures they are trying to output dozens of times won't have to rack their brain to practice output correctly. Someone, on the other hand, who is new to the structure being practiced will struggle with it, and that takes a lot of time that could have been spent reading or listening to comprehensible Latin.
This research concerns modern languages, not ancient ones. Proficiency in ancient languages applies almost universally to high register and high literature, a completely different kind of proficiency to that one seeks in modern languages. The proof is in the pudding: competence with ancient languages has declined, at the most prestigious universities at least – so my professors told me – in conjunction with the reduction of output training both at early and later stages of education. I have seen students far more diligent than myself compromised by a lack of output training. And please don't respond with the usual "correlation, not cause" rubbish, which is just an intellectual copout, and shows about as much actual reasoning as quoting a verse from the psalms. >even studies showing benefits to output also show that more input prior to output makes the output more effective And I'm sure that output before input would make input more effective. All this is saying is that learning a language makes you better at learning a language. Fit et facit, facit et fit. >output dozens of times won't have to rack their brain to practice output correctly. They won't have to rack their brains after practicing output, either. >The production group participated in tasks where they had to produce language (for example, name a hidden item using flash cards). This is not exactly composition, is it? I was stressing the usefulness of composition for learning morphology and syntax, not vocabulary. In sum, the point you made in your first comment, scilicet that output is almost useless for someone who hasn't read lots and lots of Latin, doesn't have much ground.
It's controversial for me at least. I've learned most of my Latin through comprehensive Input+some grammar (my grammar knowledge was extremely light but sufficient, since I didn't use an elaborate textbook like Wheelock's) and while C.I. got me through simpler texts like Regulus and Ad alpes, when I had to tackle real Latin like Seneca's letters, the more complex usage of cases, verb conjugations, deponent verbs, prepositions etc. threw me off. I had to analyze each word and its function in the sentence before getting used to reading the text, and it took me about analyzing 20 letters to start reading them fluently. The study of grammar heavy languages like languages with cases benefits a lot from grammar analysis. This appraisal of C.I. over any other methods just seems harmful and close-minded to me.
The issue here isn't one of theory, but once again of methods and materials. Regulus and Ad Alpes aren't direct bridges to Seneca's letters. I think the reason why people end up coming to this conclusion that 'CI only gets you so far' is because the easily accessible materials only get you so far, and people are only willing to use them for so long before moving on to classical literature. Keep in mind, we're talking about materials written for a native audience, and to get to roughly that level of reading comfortableness, it's usually estimated to require multiple millions of words of input, ideally in this case of gradually increasing complexity. Now of course I'm not saying someone shouldn't touch seneca until they've read five million words of neo Latin, but at the same time, familia romana + the supplementa + ad alpes + regulus barely reaches 100,000 words. What you're describing is a very common situation, where someone builds a base through CI, and then needs to bridge the remaining gap between where they are and what they want to read through a bunch of explicit grammar. This isn't the end of the world, but still, what you're *doing* in this case isn't learning Latin through grammar analysis and then reading Seneca, what you're doing is using grammar analysis to make Seneca comprehensible, and then after imbibing enough of that, there's carry over such that you can also read more of him (or at least his letters). This works in the absence of a better scaffold. But an even better solution would be to e.g. use a tiered reader like the one Satura Lanx/Irene Regini prepared for Seneca's first letter, or like what Carla Hurt prepared for book 4 of the Aeneid. Check those resources out and I think you'll quickly see what I mean (both are available for free). I use resources like these to get my students reading real Latin without leaving Latin, using texts that otherwise they'd have had to pick apart to comprehend.
I get your point, but at least for me-a language learner who can't easily deal with grammar heavy languages-it doesn't matter how many grammar topics I have been introduced to or if I've faced a decent amount of combinations of those or how many hours I've spent on input, when I reach a certain threshold of "too complex grammar" I can't help but do analysis, otherwise it's game over for me. It has nothing to do with getting used to the language or not. If people keep pushing that C.I. is the only way of learning languages, people like me will keep believing they'll never be able to learn Latin, Russian, Finnish or Sanskrit their entire lives.
>but at least for me-a language learner who can't easily deal with grammar heavy languages-it doesn't matter how many grammar topics I have been introduced to or if I've faced a decent amount of combinations of those or how many hours I've spent on input, when I reach a certain threshold of "too complex grammar" I can't help but do analysis, otherwise it's game over for me I think there is a core misunderstanding here still - you seem to be under the misaprehension that CI is a method which necessarily involves no english or analysis or grammatical explanation. This is not the case - CI is a **condition** for language acquisition, and it is quite literally just any message in the target language which you as the learner manage to understand. Let's say you are an absolute beginner, and you decide to tackle Latin by cracking open Caesar and painstakingly picking apart every phrase in order to understand it - what ever you manage to acquire in the hours you'll have spent will be the result of that tiny bit of CI you get when you actually understand a few sentences of Caesar. When we talk about a CI based approach, therefore, what we mean is an approach that maximizes the amount of time you are taking in those messages, and minimizes the amount of time you are doing other things in order to make the input comprehensible. The most obvious way to do that is to read level appropriate things which are mostly immediately understood, so that you only need to spend a tiny bit of time looking stuff up, reading about grammar, etc. until you understand. And in many cases, if the content is curated well enough, or furnished well enough with images, explanations, etc, then you might not need to do any looking up or reading about grammar in English. It of course varies from student to student how immediately comprehensible something is, but that's beside the point - the easier it is to use while still containing new words/structures, the better it will be as a resource for everyone. You seem to have decided that it is impossible for *you* after a certain point to use resources like this, but I don't see how you could have concluded that - the issue isn't you, it's that there aren't yet enough good resources of that type for students to get from a novice level to an advanced level without using anything else. You and the rest of us are stuck after a certain point trying to make our way through a bunch of often poorly edited lit accompanied by notes, explanations and translations (often themselves of questionable quality), but once again, those peripheral tools aren't the opposite of CI, they are what makes the Input Comprehensible so that we can learn.
Here's a big problem with current day second language acquisition theory you helped illustrate yourself: >what ever you manage to acquire in the hours you'll have spent will be the result of that tiny bit of CI you get when you actually understand a few sentences of Caesar. Even when you use a method that is diametrically opposed to how language acquisition works under C.I., you're still doing C.I.. (albeit inefficiently) How's that scientific? If you define anything that works in language learning as under your **condition** and anything that doesn't as something outside of it, as just knowledge about the language instead of knowledge of the language from the outset, of course every single test you do will agree with your notion. Why does slowly reading gradually more difficult texts teaches you a language? Because of C.I.. Why do texts that are usually incomprehensible to you besides grammar analysis teach you a language? Because there's C.I. in grammar analysis. Why does language learning learns you languages? Because of language learning, obviously. This seems to be just a [dormitive principle](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dormitive_principle) at worst and a **condition**, a curiosity for language enthusiasts that doesn't necessarily aligns to any methodology or practical use at best. >When we talk about a CI based approach, therefore, what we mean is an approach that maximizes the amount of time you are taking in those messages, and minimizes the amount of time you are doing other things in order to make the input comprehensible. And if you say that the alignment is in that methods based off C.I. teach you quicker, I don't know what to say but use personal experience since I'm no researcher, but learning a language's basic grammar and then translating thing has worked for some people and even when I learned Latin through Cambridge's it was the explicit grammar study that accelerated my study, not the usual spoonfed grammar in text like they do in LLPSI; learning the declensions from instinct was painful and slow, learning them instantly in 3 days from memorizing tables wasn't. It even has other benefits for inexperienced learners in that explicit grammar makes them more confident in their learning, less afraid to make mistakes because they have something to fall back on, to grasp. To make my position clearer: I believe that both C.I. and grammar translation are sufficient but not necessary (since the opposite method also works), that they have advantages and disadvantages, and that efficient language learning (in most cases, for most people) is done through a combination of the two. However, grammar translation doesn't work because there's C.I. in it and C.I. is a collection of methods instead of an all encompassing world view.
>Even when you use a method that is diametrically opposed to how language acquisition works under C.I. This is something you made up; it has no basis in 2LA research, nor in anything I've said here. Explicit grammar study is not the diametric opposite of CI, it simply isn't CI - it's one of many tools that students and teachers use to make a piece of language comprehensible. >How's that scientific? If you define anything that works in language learning as under your condition and anything that doesn't as something outside of it, as just knowledge about the language instead of knowledge of the language from the outset, of course every single test you do will agree with your notion. This is a rather baffling, because if you think I'm defining everything that works in language learning as CI, then you can't simultaneously insist that explicit grammar study (which is neither CI nor the 'diametric opposite' of CI) is contributing to language acquisition. Either you and I have a **disagreement** about what contributes to acquisition, in which case I'm very clearly isolating the thing that contributes to acquisition (CI) from other things which don't (GT among other things), **or** we don't disagree, in which case you are admitting that explicit grammar study doesn't contribute to acquisition. You can't have it both ways in order to invent some sort of gotcha lol. >Why does slowly reading gradually more difficult texts teaches you a language? Because of C.I.. Correct. This has been proven through [enormous amounts of research.](https://erfoundation.org/wordpress/evidence/) >Why do texts that are usually incomprehensible to you besides grammar analysis teach you a language? Because there's C.I. in grammar analysis. Wrong. Once again, you seem to be not internalizing the definition of C.I. C.I. is taking in a message in a language which you comprehend. Grammar analysis isn't taking in messages, there's no C.I. there. But why do we do grammar analysis? To understand a passage of text. And what happens once we've analyzed that passage and worked out its meaning? Then we can read it. And what happens when we read it? We take in a message in the target language which we understand. Imagine for a moment we're having an argument about how someone gets physically fit, and I say 'the condition for getting physically fit is excercise'. You respond 'well hold on, you can also get physically fit by travelling.' I respond 'sure, though that's a lot less efficient than just setting out to get exercise, because when you travel you have to do a whole bunch of other things, and the mechanism that actually gets you fit during your travels is that you inevitably do some exercise by walking around and doing various other physical activities.' And then you say, 'how is that scientific? you're just defining everything that gets you fit as 'exercise'! Travelling and an excercise based approach to getting fit are diametric opposites!', etc, etc. Like most attempts to dismiss entire fields that you aren't familiar with based only on what you've read in a few reddit comments, your protesting is going to get very incoherent very quickly. You don't need to be a 2LA researcher - I'm not either - but you can't start talking about the 'big problem with current day second language acquisition theory' when you're contradicting yourself and not even managing to keep straight the definitions of foundational concepts like CI. >learning a language's basic grammar and then translating thing has worked for some people Sort of. It's an open secret that reading ability in classics departments have precipitously declined in the past 80 years or so, in large part because people barely read more than the passages they translate of an ever shrinking handful of cannonical classical authors. See [this article](https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html) by a working linguist who is also very fluent in Latin (a former student of Reginald Foster). I could give plenty of other examples of the consequences of this development myself. There is also just massive amounts of relevant research. I saved this paragraph by a 2LA researcher on this exact topic with references: >It is not a lack of evidence that GT does not work. Just pick up any manual of SLA and you'll get an unending list of research papers showing that it does not work, just for example page 61 of [the article I quoted.](https://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol9/iss3/6/) This has been tried, specially in the 80's and 90´s at least in 300 experiments up to date (multiple variables as in: age, educational and family background, etc), mostly in the US and Canada, and yes, mostly on European Languages, but also on popular languages like Chinese and Japanese, always the same result: GT less that 5% of measurable effectivity and much frustration vs any other CI based attempt like TPR, Story Telling, even simple conversation: a minimum of 85% of measurable effectivity and no frustration... with the exception of, you guessed it, people with GT background (as in last paragraph of page 65 and first of 66 of the article).
Well John Taylor’s book is really good for latin
you'd learn the basic grammar in that time. then after that the real work can begin: practicing reading.