Latin is hard kids.
But you want to know what makes Latin harder than it should be?
Staring at it, all scared, thinking you're not smart enough or you haven't learned enough or the material is too obscure, and for all of those reasons, not doing any of it.
Latin gets harder when you don't do it. It's not just the forgetting how to decline nouns or conjugate verbs or not recognizing uses of the dative case that is hard : its the emotional game that you play with yourself.
Lil'Bit and I had a good talk tonight about reading. Why its hard and why it takes practice. Why she feels like she can't do it and why I know that she can.
It's hard to make her realize how much potential she contains. From her point of view she contains none.
And of course, I think she contains the world.
Latin is hard. But good grief, having to gulp down medicine meant for another (cute little) human being is even harder.
3 comments:
YOU CAN DO IT, MP! I promise. Take it all one sentence at a time. If it's a compound sentence, or even if not, break it all apart. Find the verb. Find all the verbs. Figure out what "type" of subject they need- I, you, some he, she, or it, we, y'all, or a group of theys. Identify the tense.
Then seek out the subjects. Don't try to put anything together yet, just find nominatives. Then find any datives. Then find any accusatives. Then find any prepositional phrases. Then, you start to seek out special clauses like cum clauses, or purpose clauses, etc. etc, or ablative absolutes. But don't try to SOLVE it right away. Just figure out what's what first.
Only once you've pulled it ALL the way apart can it start to make some sense trying to put it back together. And put it back together in small chunks. It takes a long time, yes. It took me over an hour to translate 10 lines of The Aeneid in college. Wretched. But the more you do it, the faster you get.
I'm sure you're prof has told you all of this already, but sometimes it helps to be reminded again.
You. Can. Do. This. MP. I promise. If I can, you can.
**Above advice applies especially to long and convoluted authors such as Cicero or Livy. Sometimes, in easier stuff, you don't have to do such painstaking work. But for the hardcore guys. Yea. I would do the work first before trying to solve the puzzle.
This is definitely what I needed to hear. Aw. warm fuzzies :)
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