What I learnt from learning English the informal way
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salve Reader, I am sure you have noticed I am not a native speaker of English. In fact, English was not even my second language until my twenties! I grew up and studied in Spanish and Catalan, my A-Level MFL was French, and I only really started developing my English after I received a scholarship to spend a summer in Ireland aged 21, where I kept talking to people in German because my English was still, ehem, a bit lacking. Moving to England was never on the cards, let alone teaching Latin in English! However, one thing I loved was watching movies. In uni, I used to spend my lunch times in the language lab (not sure if those exist anymore), watching movies in English with English subtitles. I did not really know it at the time, but this regular exposure to easy, contextualised conversations would quietly turn me into a confident English reader (and speaker!) It was Kevin Costner and Ben Affleck before Shakespeare, Ghost before Dickens. It worked. I know that it is not easy to find bingeable content in accessible Latin, but it is important to look for opportunities to use the language naturally (rather than as a puzzle). For A-Level students, if they do one thing for their Latin this summer (and they should!), it has to be extended reading. If you do not know where to start, in the A-Level hub, I will be preparing weekly challenges that involve reading and listening to accessible texts. Learning words in a vocabulary list is not enough to learn a language, and both Y12 and Y13 students need to use the summer to build their fluency. The hub is currently £70 per month and includes the full library of resources, weekly guidance, the Legentibus app for guided reading, and a monthly live workshop (the next one is on the 23rd of July).
Let us learn Latin as the language it is. in proximum! 🏛️🌿
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salve Reader! I hope you open this email while enjoying a well-deserved break over the summer. I am writing from my hometown myself, just hours before I head off to France, then back to the northern coast of Catalonia for my yearly holiday. Yes, there will be diving and ancient ruins, so here is a heads-up that I may take a bit longer to reply to emails. This has been quite the week for me. One of the highlights was observing an almost total eclipse with my children and experimenting with the...
salve Reader! If you have been following me for a while, I am sure you have noticed that I discourage my students from learning vocabulary through apps like Quizlet. I promote keeping a written record, reading extensively and using the words in new contexts. Still, I am aware that some students just love the app format. So, after much insistence from students on having a vocabulary list or suggesting an app that works, I have opted for a middle path: an app that has words unlikely to not be...
salve Reader! Do you know the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí? He is the genius behind the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. He believed that love came before any technical considerations, and looking at his ground-breaking architecture, I think we can all agree that his approach worked. This love-first approach is key to language learning. If there is no interest in reading a text to enjoy a story, it is very difficult to find the motivation to look at the grammar holding it together. The...