I've been at this awhile now. Seven years to be exact. I'd like to think I'm getting experienced with teaching Latin to home-school groups. Over time I've seen a variety of approaches to Latin study. Here are some of the traits I've seen in successful Latin learners:
Self-motivated
It shouldn't come as too much a surprise that students who decided to take Latin on their own do better than those who have been herded into it. For those of you who didn't decide to take up Laitn study on your own, you'll do better if you can find some sort of motivation to put in the work. Latin isn't hard, but that doesn't mean it is work-free.
•self-motivated
•consistent work habits
•mental flexibility
•curiosity about things that aren't immediate
Self-motivated
It shouldn't come as too much a surprise that students who decided to take Latin on their own do better than those who have been herded into it. For those of you who didn't decide to take up Laitn study on your own, you'll do better if you can find some sort of motivation to put in the work. Latin isn't hard, but that doesn't mean it is work-free.
Consistent work habits
Again, this feels obvious, but I feel like I need to say it. If you knock off for the whole month of December, you're going to fall behind. Brains forget stuff much easier than you think. Learning another language, particularly a dead one, takes day-in and day-out work. You don't need to put in mountains of work on any one day, but you need to put in some work each day.
Mental flexibility
This one doesn't come naturally to everyone. My daughter is a prime example. When it is lunch time, we have to have lunch where she wants to have lunch: and nowhere else. Luckily she usually wants to have lunch at home.
So how does this apply to Latin? There are two big things that I see students do. Or rather I hear one of them. Latin and English both use a similar tool for writing: the alphabet I'm using right now. But this is a trick. The letters look the same, but they do not act the same. Here is an example. Say the word in italics: sale. If you say it in English, it sounds like the word sail. But in Latin there is no silent e. It has two syllables. It sounds like sah-lay when you say it in Latin. You need the flexibility to be able to use the same tool in two ways. If I had a dollar for every non-silent e that students have made silent, I'd be financing a trip to Rome about now. I am not joking.
The other is the flexibility trick is the whole word order thing, but I've talked about that in other places. Again, it seems minor, but it isn't.
Curiosity about non-immediate things
Some learners are very much here-and-now. Sadly, many traditional approaches to Latin are, let's be polite and say, abstract. This sort of approach doesn't work for everyone, and this is where Latin got its reputation for being hard. There are ways to present Latin that make it more immediate. When someone else is picking the textbook and teacher, that can make it difficult.
