Didactic tools for Latin
Didactics for SLD-SEN
Why study LATIN? And why on earth should a teacher of ENGLISH worry about the fact that Latin might be abandoned by the young people of today?
The first reason – the most immediate one – is very simple: I studied it when I went to school and I realised that it’s an extraordinary language!!!
My opinion may seem rather biased and probably sounds totally unconvincing, but it’s true: Latin is a very rich, complex and musical language, and it is part of the linguistic and cultural heritage of more than one billion people around the world who speak languages deriving from it! When I started studying modern languages at university, I discovered with immense joy that 60% of the English language comes from Latin, not by direct influence of the Romans who, to be honest, left very little after they abandoned the island, but through the indirect influence of the French-speaking Normans. Thus, in English we have a linguistic register of Anglo-Saxon origin, immediate and commonplace, used for everyday exchanges, but we also find a more scholarly and elegant register for more formal occasions and situations, which uses, instead, a vocabulary of Latin origin.
The second reason is that the knowledge of this language hones our capacity to express ourselves with precision and correctness, bolstering our vocabulary and favouring an efficient communication. When you hear people speak fluently, without hesitating or repeating themselves or resorting continuously to those irritating “ums” and “uhs” and “ers” that litter our conversations, you can’t help feeling spellbound!!!
The third reason is that Latin favours and strengthens our logical reasoning processes and our deductive skills. As maths (!!!) teachers usually say, Latin is a training place for our mind, very useful to approach the study of SCIENTIFIC SUBJECTS!
It challenges those who study it by obliging them to proceed in a systematic and rigorous way when translating texts so as to avoid “creative” and thoroughly incorrect interpretations!
In this section you will have a “taste” of what translating from a language to another implies, starting from some simple sentences as well as didactic material for the 1st and 2nd year of a school course, organised in such a way as to be accessible to everyone.