SCHOLA LATINA
Work-texts for introductory-level Latin


Where did my Latin education, starting so well as it did, go wrong? . . . I think it would have helped me very much if I had ever been got into the habit of speaking Latin, if only to say "Please" and "Thank you" and "Pass the mustard."
—Dorothy Sayers


The need for Schola Latina arises from my agreement with Dorothy Sayers's comments on learning Latin. In order for a language to become natural and spontaneous with a student, it must become a language, which, as Latin scholars know, means that it must become a matter of the tongue, the lingua. It must be on the lips during the course of a normal day. When a present-day American child learns French (or English, for that matter), she begins by learning the names of the objects around her in the house. But when she starts Latin, she begins by learning military terms she's expected to come across in Caesar four years down the line. I wished instead to begin the study of Latin for children with the names of familiar objects—animals, parts of the body, and household items—and with everyday verbs—"to eat" rather than "to seize." It was my goal that every word in the vocabulary list could be used in simple, natural sentences as the students learned the rudiments of grammar. That meant, for instance, that there were to be no transitive verbs before the student learned to use direct objects. "The sailor looks at" is not an acceptable sentence to me, and I don't want to suggest to children that it should be for them.

Above all I wanted to include useful conversational phrases that would put the language onto the tongue even before the mastery of grammar. A student asked me after my first year of teaching Latin, "How could we have studied a language for a whole year and not learned ‘Please' and ‘Thank you' or ‘Yes' and ‘no'?" This book teaches those phrases and more. And yes, Book II teaches the student how to say "Pass the butter."

Another goal was to provide exercises that encouraged reading and spelling the vocabulary words repetitively without making the work too terribly tedious. The puzzles, for instance, other than being fun to design, are here simply as a means of reviewing the spelling of the vocabulary words one more time. The student (child or adult) should speak, read, and write the material of each lesson several times before moving on to the next.

Apart from these concerns, I simply built upon the foundation found in other recent books for teaching Latin to children: classical quotations and phrases, derivatives, repetition of grammatical forms, and history lessons are all here much as they are in other texts. The history summaries correspond to stories from Famous Men of Rome by John H. Haaren and A. B. Poland and are meant for review only. The students should at least read the stories from the book or hear them read and should be encouraged, in order to reinforce the material and to make the learning more fun, to act the stories out or illustrate them.

Eamus!

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