Oscar started Prima Latina last week, and he’s still really excited about it. Relatives and family friends always act very impressed, or else confused, when I mention that Oscar is going to study Latin, as if it should be especially difficult or unfeasible to teach in the home. I’ll grant that it is less “useful” for life in Minneapolis than, say, Spanish (which we are also studying). But Latin has several distinct advantages that make it an excellent choice for the home school.
First: pronunciation. Because conversational Latin is not really an issue, it simply doesn’t matter that we don’t have a “native speaker” or an expert pronouncer among our family or friends. We do not have to learn to trill the r’s just right or shape the mouth around any diphthongs that don’t exist in our native language. As if to reinforce this, the woman who speaks Latin on the CD included with our program has a very strong Southern accent. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini, y’all. Latin study is generally a study of the written language. The only big pronunciation issue is Classical or ecclesiastical?
Second: available curricula. Very, very, very few homeschool curricula for Spanish, or French, or German, or Italian, are specifically designed for a teacher with little background in the new language. It’s as if they assume we’re just going to teach our kids the language we learned in high school (I took many, many years of French, which I enjoyed and which I still read, but I’m going to require my kids to learn Spanish, so I can’t actually help them very much). But several Latin programs are specifically designed for the parent and child to learn together. There are a lot more homeschooling parents who are interested in teaching classical languages than who are fluent in them.
Third: grammar. Latin study is a good place to start talking about grammar. Why, it’s almost like being in grammar school! What is a verb? What is a noun? What is a preposition? What is a proper noun? These kinds of first encounters with parts of speech can happen in Latin first, before talking about it in English. The highly inflected nature of Latin makes it clearer, not less clear, how the sentence fits together.
Oscar’s still excited to be saying “ambulo” and “salve!” and “luna” and “oremus” — I think it will be a few weeks before the novelty wears off. He has been trying to make sentences out of the half-dozen vocabulary words from the first lesson — he shouted “Salve, Deus!” when we drove past the basilica yesterday.
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