So that’s only Pig Latin, which actually differs quite greatly from Ancient Latin, an educational journey I embarked on this January. I’ve always viewed Winter Term as a month-long period to do anything, anywhere that you’ve been wanting to do but, whether because life just gets in the way, or classwork and a job overload you, you never found the time for. Some of my friends were hiking and podcasting in Portland. Others travelled to Egypt with an Oberlin program. Last year, I relaxed at home and read eight books I’d been wanting to read for years. This year, I–-incredibly apprehensively–-signed myself up for Intensive Latin. Nearly as thrilling as riding a camel, I’m sure. In all honesty, I was dreading Intensive Latin from the day I signed up to the day I started. I’ve never really enjoyed learning languages. But as an Art History major, I’m required to take 2 semesters of a language, and as someone who’s also about to declare a Classical Civilization major, I have to take Latin or Greek. Intensive Latin over Winter Term seemed like the best way to get my language requirements out of the way without sacrificing a whole semester.
On January 4, I drove the eight hours between New Jersey and Ohio to start my Latin education. Three-and-a-half weeks on campus, a foot of snow, and nothing to do except learn Latin, twice a day, five days a week.
Week 1
Our first class started strong, already cracking open Wheelock’s Latin, the textbook from which we would carry out all our lessons. Rather than a professor, Intensive Latin is traditionally taught by two exceptional Latin students. Lily and Gabby, our teachers, took us through chapters 1 to 7 that first week. In class, we typically came with the reading prepared for the chapter we would be focusing on and our attempts at translating a few sentences; then we’d go through the topics of the chapter and the homework as a group. Wheelock’s textbook is actually quite well paced for this sort of thing; we were able to go through two chapters a day. By the end of the week, I knew three tenses (Latin has a ton, but once you get the hang of them it’s pretty easy to do!) and I could conjugate verbs and nouns with no problem. Over the weekend, we had a short take-home exam, but none of our assignments were actually graded on correctness, just participation (but just for the record, I did pretty well). Despite my trepidation, I began to enjoy my twice-daily dose of an ancient language.
Week 2
After learning the basics in Week 1, we picked up the second week with more tenses, more vocab, and more complex sentences, even moving on to some passages. I translated some writing from famous Latin authors like Cicero and Virgil. This felt much more rewarding than the simple sentences of the week past–-rather than just a one-off idea, I could read from a real Latin text and follow the ideas an ancient writer communicated. I–-perhaps obviously–-love writing, and it hadn’t occurred to me that, though I historically haven’t liked learning languages, learning the language from which so many have been built might be interesting–-fun, even. In retrospect, Week 2 certainly felt the heaviest in terms of work and concepts to learn, though not overwhelming. That’s the benefit of focusing on one single subject for a month; I had literally nothing else to do.
Week 3
Our last full week was taught by Gabby as well as Professor T, a well-liked and well-educated Classics professor here. By then, we’d reached chapter 14 and, since we’d only be going up to chapter 20, we were able to focus on one chapter per day. After two weeks of incredible cold, mountains of snow, and Stevie (Stevenson Dining Hall is the only one open for Winter Term; not great news but certainly adequate) three meals a day, the slower-paced classes were a need. That week, I especially noticed how drastically my translation skills had improved since the first week. We used to spend around 10 minutes translating one sentence as a class, but by the end we could do paragraphs in 15. On Friday, we had the wonderful chance to read ancient Latin manuscripts from the Oberlin Archives instead of having regular class. I was really impressed to see how expansive our archives are and how much of the centuries-old texts I was able to read.
Week 4
The final week of Intensive Latin was only three days, and only two were really class. That Monday, we only had chapters 19 and 20 left. We’d learned so much vocab and so many tenses at that point that the last few lessons were easy and quick, and going through the homework took no more than 20 minutes. For our last class, Professor T brought in coffee and bagels from Slow Train, and the group of us translated a reading from Cicero.
In those four weeks, my class learned a semester's worth of Latin. Does that seem impossible, or stressful at least? Definitely. But I can assure you, between the help of my teachers and Wheelock, I actually enjoyed learning a language.
