My first week as a student in the Paideia Institute’s “Living Latin in Rome” program has been absolutely surreal. I have translated the words of Cicero in the Forum, of Propertius on the Tarpeian rock, and of Augustine in Ostia. I can feel my skills of translation, of sight reading, developing exponentially.
I’m not quite sure how this blog is supposed to work for a student of a dead language. One of the suggested tasks for this blog is to “Identify a local and culturally important holiday about which you would like to learn more. Next, locate a tourism office/museum/historical center and ask someone who works there about the historical and cultural significance of the holiday and its origins. After you have spoken to someone in an official capacity, ask the same question(s) to a regular citizen. Were the two accounts the same/similar?” I suppose I could ask a tourism office in Rome about Saturnalia, an ancient Roman festival in honor of the god Saturn, but I’m not sure what kind of response I would get.
Despite the fact that my language of choice is dead, the ability to try it out conversationally has been invaluable. In the first session of conversational Latin, my teacher, John, explained that one should be able to laugh at oneself when speaking Latin. All of the classicists here are strong in the language and used to translating it well. Yet, speaking Latin is an entirely different proposition from translating it. Because I’m used to reading complex sentences in Latin, the struggle involved in saying “where do you live?” is frustrating and new to me. Yet I am learning to embrace the struggle, and I am keeping up as my classes slowly transition into full immersion.
One new strategy I have learned for my studies is this: to delete my quizlet account and throw away my flashcards. At the Paideia Institute, we learn new Latin vocabulary by associating it with Latin words we already do know. This way, we are not flipping back and forth from English to Latin, but totally immersed in Latin. For example, in a story from Livvy I came across an unfamiliar word: anser, which means goose. Instead of writing that word on a flashcard and “goose” on the back, I mentally associated the word with other goose-related Latin words: aves, ala, columba, mater, and stultus (birds, wing, dove, mother, and silly, respectively). I can already tell that my Latin vocabulary is expanding thanks to this technique.
My favorite part of the program so far has been the opportunity to connect the ancient authors I love with their historical contexts. At the Capitoline Museums, I gazed up at the fasti, the very lists of consuls that Ovid consulted when he wrote his poem of the same name. Livy’s account of the founding of Rome became much more real to me when I read it on the Palatine Hill itself. And Plautus’ hilarious play, Pseudolus, was a thousand times more funny when performed in an actual ancient theatre, in Ostia.
In summary, I feel so blessed for all of the opportunities I have had in my first week of my Summer Language Abroad, and I cannot wait for the next adventures!