Friday, July 18, 2014

Review of Gavin Betts, Teach Yourself Latin (Hodder and Stoughton, Sevenoaks: 1986). ISBN 0340384816.



Review of Gavin Betts, Teach Yourself Latin (Hodder and Stoughton, Sevenoaks: 1986). ISBN 0340384816.
Brian Ó Broin, Department of English, William Paterson University, New Jersey.

Introductory
This is a technically fine, but ultimately overambitious book, which is quite unsuited to any but the most brilliant of teach-yourself clients.
There are 31 “units” in the book, each opening with a section on grammar, continuing to a “Latin Reading” section, usually consisting of between 15 and 25 items, and moving on (in the early units) to an “excursus” on some matter of interest to the Classics student. From early on, however, this “Excursus” becomes “Extra Reading” from a Latin author. It is not clear what difference there is between the “Latin Reading” sections and these “Extra Reading” sections.
The excurses, provided sporadically up to unit 13, are on subjects like the Roman gods, Roman geography, and onomastics. It is disappointing that they are not provided in further units, as they are highly illuminating.

Although this book has several problems, the principal one lies particularly in the identification of target clients. Who will buy this book, and what do they want from it? If the typical teach-yourself customer, then they are already too overscheduled to take classes, and they must be able to sit down to a highly-organized text that provides a standardized experience for every session spent with the book. What kind of time-frame does the author have in mind for completing the course?
This text cannot provide that experience, and clients are likely to find themselves frustrated from an early point, unless they have considerable time to spare.
The text assumes a prerequisite knowledge of grammar that most people, even the well-educated, do not have. By lesson six, for example, we are already into “ablative of quality” and “genitive of characteristic.”

The matter of the book
The text obsesses from early on over exceptions to rules, rather than making the students comfortable with the rules themselves. We are sternly told not to consult the answer keys at the back of the book until we have attempted the exercises, but some of the sentences for translation are quite impossible to understand without first seeing the translation. The effect of this is the leave even the most determined students baffled and demoralized from early on as they try and fail to make sense of sometimes highly-idiomatic Latin. There is no benefit to be gained from teaching students exceptions and irregularities except in the most common of verbs and nouns. Yet, by unit 26 Betts is providing lists of fairly rare nouns (virus – poison; quercus – oak) for readers to memorize. This is counter-productive and will simply confuse students.
It is a misstep to include Latin verse as complicated as the Georgics as early as Unit 15. Even this student, a university linguistics professor supposedly well-schooled in Medieval Latin, found this impossible.
The absence of a glossary for each unit is felt painfully (there is no glossary after unit nine). Beyond grammar, one of the greatest challenges for a language student is vocabulary. Without a list in each unit, the student is forced to hope that he can memorize the new words he finds in each unit, but this rarely happens. Each unit, between sample reading sentences and exercises, introduces about sixty new items of vocabulary. This student was forced to compile his own glossary for each unit after unit nine.
The end-of-book glossary makes up a little for the absence of unit glossaries in its comprehensiveness, but the constant weight of new vocabulary means that it becomes overused. And because this is an upper-level text, devoting much time to Latin idiom and minutiae of grammar, the index still needs to be expanded. It is annoying, for example, to find that the sole entry for the very-tricky verb fieri refers readers to page “000” (sic.).
The book’s appendices, which supposedly cover grammar, are poor. Most annoyingly, they only cover verbs, and the paradigms are mostly provided on their side in chaotically-presented columns that are unevenly separated. These paradigms should be more thorough, and their contents should be separated with lines for greater legibility. The text dispenses with paradigms for other word categories, or scatters them throughout the book. This is annoying for students who might simply be looking to refresh their memories on third-declension adjectives, for example.
There is a serviceable index, however, which directs students to the relevant points in the text for further explanation. This at least makes the book marginally more useful as a reference source after taking the course.
The varying length of the units is puzzling. A text like this should be highly standardized, so that the teach-yourself client, when he sits down for his hour-a-week of Latin (or whatever), gets as far as he did the previous week. But some of the units in this book are considerably trickier, or longer, or shorter, than others, meaning that one must frequently leave off mid-paragraph. Likewise with the exercises for each unit: some may have ten sentences to translate, and some twenty. Some may have a long passage from Caesar’s Gallic Wars to translate, and some no more than two or three epigrams. Then there is the puzzling and potentially frustrating decision to add “Extra Reading” passages to many units. Are these necessary parts of the course or not? If they are optional, students who opt not to do them finish the course feeling like they have not done everything. If they are necessary to the course, then it is doubly frustrating, as many of these passages are simply too difficult, as is the very first “Extra Reading” passage in unit 15, from Virgil’s account of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Georgics.
Betts’ occasional purism and pedanticism can be irritating. In a very opaque discussion of the subjunctive, for example, he announces that “there are clear differences between the two categories [of conditionals]”. For speakers of English, peremptory claims like this are annoying, and furthermore (as any student of the subjunctive knows) not fully true. He quite unnecessarily declares that the Latin utinam “has no equivalent in English except the normally unacceptable hopefully” (159).
As noted, the units are of varying length and difficulty, making it impossible to budget time effectively. As an example, the matter of unit 21 is 3.5 pages long and deals with the imperative, a relatively simple concept ot most English speakers. The matter of unit 22, however, is 6.5 pages long, and covers all flavors of the subjunctive, a notoriously difficult concept for English speakers, whose subjunctive has now nearly died out.
Betts is most comfortable with the simpler schoolroom-type Latin of Units 1-22, but he begins to flounder pedagogically once the matter becomes sophisticated, as the sequence of tenses in indirect questions. All Betts can do here is provide three slightly chaotic tables to show how the sequence works. There is no attempt made to explain the why of the matter, however, and students come away with the sense of “that’s the way it is and that’s that.” Only the minimum of examples are provided before students are launched into the exercises. Even Betts realizes the folly of this, describing a massive list of peculiar noun-case uses as “undoubtedly formidable” and “likely to lead to severe indigestion”. If so, why include it as a unit at all, particularly when Betts himself acknowledges that the lists cannot be learned en masse?
There is no discernible system to the course’s arrangement, meaning that students are in a constant state of uncertainty. Will the next unit be vocabulary-heavy, or grammar-heavy?
The inclusion of Latin verse from unit 15 on is probably meant to encourage readers, but in practice these mostly untranslatable (because highly idiomatic) passages serve only to discourage readers, who begin to loathe the regular slog through these dense nuggets of pain. Even with the trot, translating them can take several hours per passage, and one shudders to think how long it might take if one were to follow Betts’ instructions and attempt them without the trot!
Each unit is heavy in new vocabulary (perhaps sixty items). This would be a good thing if the vocabulary were reinforced in following units, but most items are not, meaning that the learner expends considerable energy memorizing material for immediate use only to forget it soon after for want of use.
Even the exercises are not a standard length. Though there are usually about twenty items to translate, some will be several lines long, while others will be a single short sentence. The first eleven items of unit 22’s exercise are thirteen lines long, for example, while the next eleven are thirty lines. So the exercises cannot equitably be broken into smaller portions.
Betts leaves the student with one last punch to the gut: his final unit consists of a monster list of rules on indirect speech and the subjunctive, including a page-sized table of sentences that requires prerequisite knowledge of three other units. Sequence of tenses may be mastered by memorizing tables and rules, but is mch more likely inculcated by simple practice. This punch to the gut is accompanied by a text in reported speech that is translated so awkwardly that its meaning is utterly unclear. The reader leaves this text not excited to be moving on to a higher level, but confused, demoralized, and unconfident.
The Take-Away
Beyond these problems, however, it must be acknowledged that the determined student will reach a very high standard of Latin if he completes this book. Students are already reading Martial by Unit Three and Virgil by Unit Eight. A dedicated student finishing this course will reach the equivalent language standard of any university classics major (without the broad experience in literature that such a major might afford). The question is, however, “who will finish it?”
In truth, this book could probably not be attempted by a first-time learner of Latin. This reader, already a veteran of several courses and teach-yourself books, was already feeling overstretched by unit 5. I would, however, recommend the book to those seeking a rigorous refresher course in Latin.
Betts is obviously a brilliant scholar and knows both Latin grammar and Latin literature thoroughly. In fact, is is his determination to get students to apply their knowledge of grammar to real Latin texts that attracted me to the book in the first place.
One does wish that Betts might more often discard the dry tone of the stiff classicist more often. It was amusing, for example, to see him encourage learners of the gerundive thus: “If you do not master it at first, non tibi desperandum est.”  More levity like this might have made the book more bearable.
Teach-yourself clients need all the help they can get, and in the case of this book, sample study plans should be laid out for students who expect to use the book once a week, or once a day, or whatever. But the student must be encouraged to believe that he will cover the same distance every time. Instead, the units very wildly in length and difficulty.
There is very little sense of pleasure to be had from doing this course (although such an expectation may be misguided). By about unit 22 there remains little more in the student than a resigned, bored desire to reach unit 31 before the world ends. Even the most hardened, beaten-down scholar likes the very occasional reassurance that progress (some? any?) is being made. Several of the units, even with the most determined scholar, can take a fortnight and more to complete (unit 25, for example). It can take so long to do a unit that the sentences illustrating a rule in the exercises might not be seen for a week or two after seeing the rule. Few students will remember abstract information for that long, meaning the exercise is wasted.
It is never truly defined what this course’s goals are, and it is not clear that Betts knows either. Certainly anyone reaching unit 31 (the course’s arbitrary final unit) will have achieved a comprehensive knowledge of Classical Latin grammar, prose, and verse that will position them to take advanced Latin classes. In this student’s opinion anyone finishing the course will have reached the language level of a typical undistinguished college Latin major (not fluent, but competent). But it also seems very likely to this student that only a tiny minority of clients will ever finish the course.
How long will the course take? The text does not tell us. This very-determined student, however, already well versed in Latin, took about eight months to complete the course, spending no less than an hour (and sometimes more than two) on it every day. Less determined, or less experienced, students might need between one and two years to complete the course, which seems excessive for any teach-yourself course.
Will you be fluent by course’s end? No. This text can only provide familiarity with the language (which it does) and enough ability to wade into advanced texts without complete disaster.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

posted by sacsanua @ 12:58 PM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home