Latin for Beginners -Legacy Course

Sobre este curso

so we're hi in this lesson I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the serial and oral method which is the method that we are using in this course

to learn Latin the method was invented by Jean mineski and it dates back to the late 1700s early 1800s it took him about 30 years to develop the system and essentially what this system is is a

natural method which distributes and classic classifies the parts of language and the idea is that the information is presented in an order that can be more easily assimilated so that even if

someone isn't particularly brilliant intellectually they can still acquire the language whereas much traditional language learning being heavily grammar based certainly skews the playing field

towards those with a more mathematical type of mind whereas we can see out in the real world most people can speak language can use language but may not necessarily be able to analyze it most

Latin courses are not actually about teaching the language per se they are about analyzing it and that's a different thing completely being able to analyze a language effectively doesn't

make you into a good user of that language or a good practitioner of that language and obviously having some grammatical knowledge is useful and helpful but we don't need it completely

our brains are able to produce an enormous amount of generalization and our brains are able to pick up rules pretty much by themselves for example this recent bit of research on moment

I'll put up avid this bit of research was published in April 2011 so very recently in the linguistic Society of America journal language and what it shows is that language learning isn't

about imitation but that those people have learn to generalize rules and learn the restrictions that are played to the rules even when they're not taught the rules explicitly so you learn not what

to say for example a artificial word oblem was made up and it was then put in situation where people knew it was a modifier of a noun an adjective and what was found as that users using this word

were avoiding putting it in front of the noun it was modifying they were not saying an ugly maquette they were saying the cat that sablon at what seems to be happening here is that the word was

being generalized because there other words in English sound a bit like oblem like for example afraid we don't say the afraid cat we say the cat that's afraid and that's the that's the rule for that

kind of of modifier and so what was happening is that speakers were generalizing the made-up word what was also happening was that when it was put after the noun in contexts where it was

quite clear that this wasn't natural language use the brain didn't acquire the generalization and the researchers lightening this – watching somebody playing a video game with their right

hand in a plaster cast and of course you don't a child watching this isn't going to make the generalization that you have to play video games with your left hand they will assume that if the person's

right hand was free they could play so the brain was only making its connections when the word was being used in a in a natural unrestricted fashion so what what this research shows is that

learning isn't purely through imitation but your brain is actually being highly creative and acquiring patterns while you are listening now of course language learning is a bit different to the

Android you don't know really have all the data so an enormous amount of repetition is needed to build up the data set inside your brain so you can make the generalizations this is the

basis to some degree of mine escas method will return to that now Minh eskas method is called the serial and oral method is called the serial method because the elements of language

teaching are distributed and now classified in a logical series now the idea miniscus idea was this would be a sort of natural progression and he designed his series specifically for the

french language nice it bought any other language you teach you would need to readjust the series the order in which things are are presented and the elements for example of moods tenses

pronouns parts of speech idioms and these are each arranged in in place and they form a great chain of interconnected and dependent links and the slowly builds up so we start off

with a very limited amount of information and slowly slowly slowly increase it and so by either serial arrangement the idea is that you the student are led on from simpler parts of

a language to more complex parts of a language and you acquire this without an enormous amount of labour and because the system isn't a artificial system but a natural system your brain can engage

in the task simply through exposure to the linguistic data set now the unique part of miniscus system was that it was oral and it was oral in the time period before language

laboratories and before tape recorders so it was quite an onerous job for the teacher to implement it and I think this is one reason why it never became very successful

whereas with YouTube I can present the lessons and I've only got to teach them once because an enormous amount of repetition is indicated by this method so the oral method of course teaches

knowledge of this spoken language and these are all exercises have been prepared and they are introduced for the purpose of communicating oral skill in the language miniscus idea is basic idea

was that this system would sort of follow the natural language acquisition system of a child and he sort of observed children quite closely and took notes of how their language skill

developed and what kind of things were being said at the beginning and he tried to model this on natural language growth to the degree that he was able to observe it very similar to the method

that her mother would use when talking to their child in their mother tongue but of course structured and adapted for students who are of a moment to your age and so the whole process is condensed it

is greatly abridged and concentrated into a much shorter span of time it takes a small child several years to acquire language that an adult can acquire in relatively shorter time

through studying a structured method now what is of crucial interest in this method is menescal was insistent that in each progressive step only one new element would be introduced there would

be one new construction or one new idiom or one mood or one tense and it's presented at the same time to the student and it's first practiced upon with simple elements which are very well

known so every exercise goes back to the first principles and reviews a very simple material that's already known and then very very quickly through the exercise we review and advance to the

material as we go through so of course the exercises do get longer and longer as the course progresses the idea being that every single new element of linguistic knowledge requires quite

substantial mental effort your brain has to work out how to structure it where it fits in with the existing knowledge that you have and the idea is to limit the amount of new information so that's only

one mental effort is required of a student at any one time and now my nesco says something very interesting he says that to impress the elements on the mind as many of the senses as possible should

be engaged so the burden of acquisition isn't thrown completely on on the memory as I said traditional Latin teaching is heavily grammar oriented and it's heavily memory oriented there isn't an

enormous amount of material of text of exposure to to latin text in most latin text books even very good ones like the cambridge latin course in my view do not have sufficient material for students to

read there should be far far more examples far more material covering the ground so to go back inside idea of using all of the sensors firstly the sense of hearing is engaged in the

oral exercises the sense of sight of seeing the letters is engaged in the reading exercises if you're actually going to look at the text and then sight and touch are combined in writing now

this is very interesting observation there's been another bit of research produced and I'm going to just flip and find that now and pull it up for you one moment now the the bit of research I've

just pulled up is a piece of research by Professor and Mangum at the University of Stavanger at the reading centre and this bit of research was examining whether students who were typing

information on a keyboard or students who were writing it out using their hand were the same where they were getting the same information into their heads now of course the process of reading and

writing there's mineski pointed out involves site involves touch and involves movement kinesthetic movement your arm is moving so there are a number of sensors involved when you write by

hand and this is all feeding back into your brain from our motor actions together with the sensation of the fingers touching the pencil the feel of the paper and this is a there's a lot

more feedback here than there is when we simply touching a keyboard and so the research was done with a neurophysiologist and they examined a large amount of

research that confirmed that pretty much those students or those tasks that are carried out by hand when we're producing more what's the word I want more stickiness I suppose the information was

was building up in a clearer pattern in the brain than those tasks that were carried out with the key you know in this experiment what was done by this particular research

team was to find out which parts of the brain were activated when we read letters which we've learned by handwriting and also which parts the brain activated simply when we are

recognizing letters that we've learned through typing on a keyboard because when we're writing by hand then that involves a motor memory it involves a sensory motor part of the brain which is

a different part of the brain and that helps us recognize the letters themselves and so this implies a connection between reading and writing which is not so strange and it suggests

that the researchers thought that the sensory motor this feeling and and movement connection was involved in visual recognition when and reading and the experiments so that a certain part

of the brain called Broca's area it was much more active when reading something that is associated with physical activity compared to reading a say a verb that's to do with running walking

or reading a verb that's not associated with an action like dying and also this is associated when you simply observe somebody doing something you don't have to do anything yourself this is why

watching me speak Latin is actually quite useful because simply hearing about or watching elective it is enough because your brain is able to model it through through watching through

mirroring and what these researchers noted was that there's actually been a lot of research in the computer gaming field and in various educational fields that are using where computers are being

used to teach with haptic septics is about touch for example computer game consoles the the hand controls which vibrate and start to move to write sensory feedback vibrating hand controls

to trained dentists how to use dental drills virtual drills that have got sound and they've got vibration but what these researchers pointed out was actually very little research has been

done that includes haptic sets sensory motor information connected to the educational acquisition of information through through notes reading and writing whether touch is actually

important whether movement is important so in the experiment they devise they made up an alphabet one that no one had seen before and they involve two groups of adults one of them had to write out

this alphabet to learn the other one had to simply type it on the keyboard and they were taught to type using this alphabet on the keyboard and the other group were taught to write it using pen

and paper and those who learned how to write it using pen and paper came out ahead in all of the tests subsequently to this first testing that ended the MRI scans and they showed that those who

were writing when they were writing using this new alphabet the Broca's area of the brain was being activated whereas those who were typing there was little or no activation of the Broca's area now

let's go back to man ESCA writing in the very early eighteen hundreds this is what he says the writing of phrases which employs the sense of touch as well as the sense of sight and which

concentrates attention strongly is one of the most efficient methods of impressing language on the memory and now we know why because Broca's area in the brain is being activated when we are

doing sensory motor activity as the other two senses cannot be employed that's taste smell in the study of language all the material avenues to the mind which can be enlisted in the work

are resorted to by the present method it's very interesting because example neuro linguistic programming this area of psychology developed by band van grinder also greatly focuses on

the different sensory inputs and their great importance in learning memory etc as second part of of miniscus method is the intellectual analytical aspect of the method and the what he calls the

intellectual faculties and the first of these is analysis in that the elements of language are very carefully or have been very carefully analyzed and each element is presented singly and clearly

to the mind and the position and the value of each element is explained and through all of the examples its relation to the other other elements is then understood and this then enables the

learner to use the element pretty much without hesitation in a variety of combinations the second faculty addressed is what he calls the association of ideas every linguistic

element is associated in innumerable ways with other elements now we can't cover all of these in the course but we can be quite extensive and thus they are made to support each other and they

support each other mutually by association and then they help with their retention and the third logical Faculty is what he calls the synthetic faculty that of combination of ideas so

that as many facts or principles as possible in all cases are grouped together under one topic and now presented to the mind as a single linguistic fact or principle and this

greatly shortens the labor of learning generalizations have been made throughout the work of teaching and they've been made with very great care and this is intended to simplify the

acquisition of a language so the moods and tenses for example are simplified so that for example he's talking about the way he teaches French here by learning the infinitive mood and the second

person plural of the present indicative you then acquire all the other modes and tenses with little difficulty and the verbs are classified and the derivation of moods and tenses etc have been

adapted to the method and this applies to the Latin method as well that the order in which material is taught is changed from the usual order and which has taught in many grammar books now

Jean moleska the inventor of this oral method was born in 1774 and the island of send domingo and he had to flee from there because of political uprisings and he came to America and he'd lost all

this wealth he had the family had been extremely wealthy in Santo Domingo and he started to teach languages and this is pretty much what he devoted his life to the scientific study of language

teaching as we can see from what little we've covered of the the ideas behind his method he was an extremely original thinker some called him a genius and he may well have been certainly within this

area because of the originality of his thought his ability to look at the way language should be taught come up with a method which hadn't been used before explicitly there certainly is an element

of genius in that moleska worked on his method for about 20 years perfecting it teaching it developing it before he finally published and he published in 1835 and

he died in 1837 so he only published really towards the the end of of his life is his goal wasn't to publish a textbook he wanted to preserve his method the relationship between Jean –

cos method and Adler's method is this because they have a direct historic correlation – shot to each other Jean – ca' taught a student called Albert Brisbane who studied with Jean mineski

in 1825 and Brisbane kept copious exercise books in which the entire method as taught by my Oscar was written down and he went off and studied in Paris and he engaged a mr. only on and

off in Paris to teach him German and he showed on the island off the French lessons he'd had that were given to him by Romanesco and he asked mr. Allendorf to teach in German using the same

methodology which mr. Allendorf did and then what mr. Goff they went off and did was he devised his own method for teaching German based pretty much exactly on the method that he had

learned from looking at man escas notebooks and so we ended up with the Ollendorff method now the on dog method is not a serial and oral method although it's structured in a very similar way

and it uses the same principles it's essentially a method for learning the language through translating from English into French or from German into whatever target language so it's a

translation course although it can be used as a normal course it's not structured as that Adler then produced a updated latin version of the course although of himself had produced

latin version in the 1840s this wasn't very good I have a copy of it and then Adler rewrote this with grammatical notes and so we end up with Adler's practical grammar of the Latin language

which is a translation of Ohlendorf version of Jean – cos textbook so they all connect each other very well what I've done is I've gone back to jean meniscus original method using the

material from Adler and I am readjusting Allendorf imperfect implementation of Mineski and giving you the course as closely as possibly as it would have been taught by Jean mineski himself to

the extent that this is possible so that explains what we're trying to do here teaching you Latin through this serial and oral method while a thanks goodbye