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When ‘comprehensible input’ is not enough
I’ve been on Latin reddit discussions for years and one single educational theory comes up again and again as if it were the only way to learn a language: Krashen and his comprehensible input hypothesis. Put simply, a learner should be introduced to the each feature of the language incrementally, by receiving input that contains…
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‘Palatina Medea’ or ‘Medea Palatina’? A preference for adjective-noun word order in Latin
We’ve been told that adjectives in Latin ‘tend to’ or ‘prefer to’ follow the nouns they describe. But on the contrary, the statistical evidence shows that Caesar and Cicero actually preferred putting adjectives before nouns. We didn’t learn that ‘noun then adjective’ rule from reading unadapted Latin. We didn’t discover it from real usage. We…
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Tabula: a strategic 2-player Roman board and dice game
Picture yourself planning for a Year 8 class in the final period of the day. It’s the second last week of term and everyone has finished their exams and have mentally started their holidays already. The class includes several (loud, influential) students who are not continuing Latin next year. They’ve probably been watching videos all…
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The accent of words ending in -que
TL;DR: Latin words ending in -que should be accented on the syllable before -que only if that syllable is (or has become) heavy; otherwise, the word should retain its original accent. If this sounds new to you, that’s probably because you’ve been following Allen & Greenough and other nineteenth century scholarship. The rules of accent…
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Twelve tenses: When English outdoes Ancient Greek in precision
I have sometimes heard people say, “Ancient Greek is the most precise language in the world.” This usually comes from people who have not studied Greek for themselves and haven’t really seen its quirks first-hand. I don’t know how best to respond. True, there are distinctions which Greek makes that English doesn’t make, but in…
Found in Antiquity:
Learner-friendly Latin and Ancient Greek
The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4
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The Beasts of Rome: A Tiered Reader of Phaedrus Fables I
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Found in Antiquity 