Lessons Learned from a Decade of Forgetting: Strategies for Learning Latin Effectively, Part 1

Preliminary Considerations, Comprehension, and Remembrance

During my university years a decade ago, I took a year-long Latin course. I fell in love with the language, but despite various attempts over the years to renew my Latin knowledge, I’ve spent most of the time since then slowly forgetting what I expended so much effort to learn. All that changed this fall when my oldest child accepted my offer to begin to teach him Latin (the choice wasn’t if; it was when).

I am, I admit, an inappropriately competitive person when it comes to academics. So, as soon as I knew that my child would be learning Latin, it was game on. I wouldn’t just (re)learn what I needed to know in order to teach him; no, it was time to level up. And so here I am, most of the way through relearning the material I covered in my course, with no plans of stopping.

To atone for my academic pride, I thought I could offer up some general thoughts, strategies, and tips for better Latin learning. I am, of course, no great Latin expert, but I have done some analysis of the content of the Latin I have retained versus the Latin I have forgotten, and many of my ideas come from that comparison. Some of the material stuck like glue, some I seemed to be seeing for the first time all over again, and the rest was somewhere in between.

Peter Ilsted, Public domain, via Simple Joy Art

While some of the ideas here are specific to Latin learning, many of them apply more generally to language learning, and some also come from my primary- and secondary-school years of French Immersion education. For the sake of convenience, I’ve organised them under six general headings: preliminary considerations, comprehension, remembrance, pacing, practice, and contemplation. To keep things to a reasonable length, I’ve split my suggestions across two posts. This is the first.

Without further ado, let’s begin with some…

Preliminary Considerations: Three Questions

Before you get started—or now, if you’ve already started—I strongly recommend that you identify, first, why you want to learn Latin (or the language in question), second, what outcome you hope to achieve from your learning, and third, how, practically, you intend to learn it. These questions will guide your course of study and make your efforts more fruitful.

So, why do you want to learn Latin, anyway? You will approach your learning differently if you are studying to teach your children, or if you are studying because you love the way the language sounds, or if you are studying because you want to read Cicero in his original words, or if you are studying because you want to be able to follow along with the Latin Mass. If you can’t identify a reason that you want to learn Latin, are you sure that you actually do want to learn it? Maybe it’s something you just feel like you “should” do. Perhaps it even is something you should do—but if that’s your only motivation, you’ll probably struggle more than if you’re working with innate desire. Knowing that, you can at least plan ahead for the times when your motivation is especially low and the difficulty is especially high.

Your reason for learning will typically be linked to your desired outcome, and here again, your course of study will be very different if, for example, you want to master Latin insofar as you are able, as opposed to if you simply want to memorise a few common prayers. Your course of study must fit your goals if you want to have any hope of success. If you’re interested in reading the classics, you’ll need to build a set of skills and vocabulary suited to them; if you want to follow along with the Latin Mass, you’ll want to be sure that you learn how to pronounce Ecclesiastical Latin. You’ll spend less time getting lost if you have a destination in mind.

Ideally, you will plan your course of study only after you’ve answered the previous two questions. Even so, it is wise to be flexible—if, say, there is a classical Latin course offered for free at your local university, and you know that you struggle with self-directed learning, you would be wise to consider participating in the course, even if you’re more interested in learning Church Latin. It’s far easier to adapt classical Latin to an Ecclesiastical setting than it is to learn Latin from scratch. If no such opportunities are available, take some time to research a reasonable option for your personal circumstances, but then get to work. The perfect course doesn’t exist,¹ and starting something good enough now is generally going to bear more fruit than starting something a little bit better after months of agonising over research. Don’t let your research be an excuse to procrastinate!

Ready to get started with your course? Excellent. As you begin to work your way through the material, take plenty of time to make sure you truly…

Understand

I’m going to be a bearer of some (potentially) bad news: if you want to learn Latin beyond some basic memorisation, you’ll also need to understand some fundamental grammatical concepts, many of which you probably weren’t taught in school. Latin is a highly inflected language: most of its words take on different endings depending upon the contextual purpose they serve and their relationship to the other words in the phrase or sentence. To compose a correct Latin sentence, or to correctly translate a Latin passage, you must know, among other things, the difference between a subject, an indirect object, and a direct object; you must understand, on at least a basic level, the difference between imperfect and perfect tenses; and you must be able to recognise the different functions of various parts of speech, including, but not limited to, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions. As a general rule, the stronger your understanding of grammar, the easier it will be for you to understand Latin passages and translate texts to and from Latin.

You probably don’t need to delay your Latin education until after you’ve learned more grammar, but you should be prepared to pick up some new concepts along the way. Your textbook or course material may include this grammatical information as its associated content is introduced, but if it doesn’t, you’ll have to seek it out yourself. Take the time to truly understand unfamiliar grammatical concepts as they are introduced in your course.

I have also found it very helpful to know and understand the pronunciation of classical Latin, even as I choose to memorise vocabulary in the Ecclesiastical style. If you know that classical Latin pronounces ‘x’ as ‘gs’, for example, it suddenly makes a lot of sense that rex (‘king’) becomes regis in the genitive case (rex = regs). This, in turn, makes it easier to remember what previously appeared to be arbitrary word transformations.

On a related note, it can also help to study, or at least to pay attention to, trends in how letters transform or are assimilated when combined with other letters. These sorts of etymological aids can make memorisation easier, and can give you a fighting chance of making a correct guess on those occasions when your memory fails you.

Finally, when it comes to testing your understanding, there is no greater (nor more daunting) test, I think, than to challenge yourself to teach what you’ve learned to someone else. Think you understand what a declension is? Try to explain it to your spouse. No spouse? When I was a student, my long-suffering cat was subjected to some of my experiments in teaching. Even a stuffed animal can act as a helpful student.

Of course, understanding is only the first step. Next, it’s crucial to find ways to…

Remember

My first piece of advice here is fairly uncreative: make your own flashcards. But I’m going to get a bit more specific than that, and talk about the elements of flashcard creation and usage that I have found most effective. Of course, your experience may be different than mine.

First, I recommend physical flashcards. Admittedly, I have a natural bias for tangible (versus digital) objects, but I do believe that physical flashcards offer several identifiable benefits. The process of writing out vocabulary and definitions, rather than typing them or entering them into a phone, can assist in the memorisation process (and, for what it’s worth, writing Latin vocabulary by hand is generally easier than entering content digitally if you intend to include macrons and/or stress marks). Writing out flashcards can also help you to notice particular nuances in spelling and meaning that you might otherwise gloss over. It’s easy to leave a stack of flashcards in a convenient location and flip through them in a moment of downtime, allowing you to fit practice into the margins of your day. And, I think, we are naturally more inclined to value and use things that we have put some work into.

Digital flashcards do, I admit, have a few benefits of their own. Many of us are a bit too addicted to our phones, and replacing scrolling with a bit of vocabulary practice can be a step in the right direction. There are also many programmes and apps available that claim to optimise rates of spaced repetition for maximally effective memorisation. And, no doubt, there are apps that will provide the flashcards for you, saving you some work—but I personally consider this to be a serious downside, not a benefit.

Supposing you’ve taken my suggestion to create your own flashcards, you’ll need to consider what content, precisely, you will include on a given card, and the arrangement of that content. Here again I can only speak to what has worked for me, but there are a few choices that my university-self made that my current relearning-self has greatly appreciated.

My own flashcards are mostly set up with the Latin vocabulary word on one side, with all its principle parts and its gender, where appropriate; and its various English translations on the other side (as many as are given in my textbook). Occasionally I will also include a brief note, typically in parentheses, about matters such as usage—e.g., I will note postpositive conjunctions as such. Although I choose not to memorise macrons, and I try to know the rules to determine which syllable is stressed, I nonetheless include macrons and stress marks on my flashcards. This helps me to pronounce the words accurately when practising them, and it also means that if I ever change my mind and decide to memorise macrons, I won’t have to go through and add them to every single flashcard.

One other detail that I was tremendously grateful to have included back when I first composed my flashcards was the number of the chapter associated with each vocabulary word. This not only makes it easy to look up the word in my textbook if I have any questions or confusion about it or its usage, but it also proved to be tremendously valuable when restarting my studies this fall. I could quickly organise the cards by chapter, allowing me to easily grab the next batch whenever I was ready for it. I strongly recommend including macrons, stress marks, and chapter or lesson references, even if you think you’ll never need them. It only takes a moment, and it can save you a world of time down the road if you change your mind.

While most of my flashcards use the formatting already described (Latin vocabulary word on one side and English translations on the other), I also create flashcards in other forms as needed. For example, I have cards to help me memorise the various endings of different declensions and conjugations, cards to help me memorise the forms of irregularly-declined nouns and adjectives, cards to help me to memorise the rules for recognising i-stem third-declension nouns, and so on. If there’s something to brute-force memorise, I try to find a way to put it into flashcard form, because for me, that’s the best way I’ve found to get it into my head and to keep it there.

It won’t be long before you find yourself with a stack of flashcards threatening to fall over and squish your toddler, so you probably want to start thinking about how you want to organise and store your completed cards. Mine are in a sturdy cardboard box made specifically for index cards, but any secure storage will work. During my university years, they lived in a large freezer bag that I could easily toss into my backpack (which probably explains both how I achieved excellent memorisation of the year’s vocabulary and why my back was in constant pain). Just do yourself a favour, and choose some form of storage that will hold up to the ever-increasing weight of your collection, lest you spend an afternoon playing a supersized game of fifty-two pickup.

A major benefit of storing cards in a box is the ability to easily section off your cards. You can, of course, do this with a bag as well, but investing in some tabbed index cards, or creating your own, can help you to level up your memorisation routine. I personally have sections for vocabulary that I’m actively working to memorise, vocabulary that I am reviewing, vocabulary that I have recently reviewed, and vocabulary from future chapters (this section will soon be empty, if all goes according to plan). As I master new vocabulary, it shifts into the section to be reviewed. I regularly dip into the review section, and those cards are then placed in either the ‘recently reviewed’ section, if I correctly and fully remember the contents of the reverse side, or in the current section, if I incorrectly or incompletely remember the contents. When I have emptied the review section, I flip all the cards in the ‘recently reviewed’ section to the opposite direction, and replace them in the review section; this way, I regularly practice translating both into and from Latin.

If at all possible, you’re going to want to keep your cards somewhere you can access them easily, dipping into them whenever you have a moment or two to spare. For me, this used to be my kitchen counter; currently, it’s on my desk, which is in one of our main living spaces. I like to grab a stack of cards and work through them (out loud) while pacing around with the baby in a carrier; he finds it interesting enough that he doesn’t fuss, but it’ll often help him to drift off into a nap (and—bonus—it lets me joke that I’m resurrecting a dead language, by raising him with Latin as a first language). I try to do at least a small amount of vocabulary review everyday, even if I can only spend thirty seconds on half a dozen cards.

A final tool in my memorisation arsenal is a pocket notebook dedicated to various things which I wish to commit to memory. Since I use a traveller’s-style pocket notebook that I carry with me everywhere, it’s pretty easy for me to dedicate one of the multiple slim notebooks in the cover to this task. In my downtime, instead of reaching for my phone or another such distraction, I can (at least in theory) pull out my notebook and find something more worthwhile to do. I’m still a work in progress, but this has helped me to memorise a poem (in English, mind you), a Latin prayer, and to learn most of the rules of Latin syllabification. If you can find space in your pocket (or purse, or even—gasp—in a note on your phone, if that’s your best option), a portable source of content that you wish to memorise can be one way to fit more memorisation into your busy life.

Next time

I hope you found something valuable amongst my suggestions thus far. Next time, I’ll wrap up my list of learning strategies with some thoughts and ideas about pacing, practice, and contemplation. I hope you’ll join me.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. What has worked well for you in studying Latin or other languages? What have been your biggest sources of struggle?

If these strategies have been helpful to you, I’d invite you to consider subscribing to my substack. And if you know anyone who would find these helpful, please do forward this article to them.

Until next time, vale, mi amice!

1. That said, my personal experience using Wheelock’s Latin has been overwhelmingly positive, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in learning Latin. It is a classical Latin textbook, so if you're more interested in Ecclesiastical Latin, it might not be your best option, but it is what I used in university and it is what I am using now, despite my preference for Ecclesiastical pronunciation. With a bit of supplementation, it has thus far suited my Church-related interests just fine.