Emily Fleming

Thus begins the second of the lengthy reviews which I promised last week without asking whether anyone wanted to read them. This will perhaps be a slightly shorter review, because it is easy to say: yes, I recommend this resource. Four and a half stars: room of room for improvement, and yet still far and away the most effective Latin resource that I have ever used.

What makes Legentibus so great? The answer is pretty simple: it’s usable. I was able to use it. I kept using it. Between the Legentibus Beginner Immersion Course and the handful of additional beginner texts outside the course, I managed to read 101,457 words (~36 hours) in slightly less than four months. That is easily the most Latin I have read since undergrad. I think I read a little more than that during my three semesters of Latin literature in undergrad–I’m pretty sure–I’m sure I was supposed to–but possibly not very much more. I emphatically confess that I did not read that Latin well; it would be more accurate to say that I Loeb’d it than read it. Alas for the G-T experience. Someday I’m going to go back and read a bunch of that stuff for real.

For now, though, I’m just going to keep reading Legentibus (or I will, after I knock out the two CLC books that I own but have never read). I’m going to see if I can make it through all the intermediate books/courses (easier with the app to estimate the total time than the wordcount, ~25 hours) by the beginning of summer. Getting through the advanced books by autumn is probably a little ambitious, but maybe I can get somewhat close.

Because it is so unusual, please allow me to underscore for the reader that I am actually confident that I will keep reading on Legentibus. The readings get harder, sure, but they also get more rewarding. I’ve been meaning to read Pugio Bruti for years; I’m now at the point where I can read it comfortably. An r/latin comment led me to glance at the beginning of Imitatio Christi; I plan to hold off on it until the vocabulary is more comfortable, but it’s not unreadable now. This is pretty exciting, to have Latin texts that I want to read within my grasp or very near to it. It is also pretty exciting to have finally finished reading Familia Rōmāna for the very first time. I have never had this kind of confidence in my own Latin reading ability before, in my entire life. I have never had so much confidence that I am actually going to keep reading Latin.

A few high points from Legentibus: the stories written by the Legentibus team are all good, and some of them are outstanding. For its length, Auda is easily the best and most rereadable narrative that I’ve ever seen for a beginning Latin student. At some point I will probably return to Victor Frans' Stories in easy Latin, Daniel Pettersson’s Fabulae Faciles, and Auda, to see what I can learn about writing compelling stories with sheltered vocabulary. The public domain stories narrated were not all equally compelling–some of them, such as Reynolds' De Stellis et Tellure, were downright dull–but the Latīnitās seemed in my view to be satisfactory, so I just sighed and read them anyway.

Another high point was the narration. I don’t often go in for English audiobooks, because it’s just too hard for me to pay attention to them. Audiobooks typically turn into this tedious endless cycle of realizing that I zoned out, then skipping back thirty seconds, then zoning out again before I’ve hit the sentences I missed, and so on. It’s just not very fun, as a way to experience a book. (I do the same thing when I’m reading a physical book, for what it’s worth, but it’s much easier to navigate going back to reread a paragraph or two, than it is to recapture whatever you missed of an audiobook. Or a conversation, for that matter!)

But the narration (mostly by Pettersson, but also Frans, Amelie Rosengren, Marina Garanin, and Diane Warne Anderson) increased my enjoyment of the story more than I expected. It’s hard for me to decide whether the narration was most impactful when it was particularly excellent per se (such as Pettersson’s on Auda, when his by-now extensive experience is applied to an obvious labor of love), or when the story was just a little bit weak (here I think not only of Pettersson on FR, but also of Garanin on Chickering & Hoadley’s somewhat uneven Beginners' Latin Stories). It is admittedly possible to guess whether Pettersson recorded a story earlier or later in the process, based on the amount of elision and confidence/skill in his Latin reading. In some ways that was encouraging to see, that we can all continue growing in our abilities, and that one does not have to be perfect to start doing worthwhile things.

The narration was also very good for me…because I tend to avoid listening to Latin. I know that I ought to be listening to lots of Latin and not just reading it, but I don’t really like the process very much at all: too overwhelming, too many words I don’t remember or don’t understand in the moment, either so slow and simple that it’s boring or so fast and complicated that I feel hopeless. So far, I have yet to listen to a Latin story on the app without following along with the text. I think however that at some point in the next few months I will give it a shot, with one of the easy stories I have already read and liked the most.

Another positive point: the illustrations. Illustrations can and should be an important part of the reader’s experience of a book, just like the narrator. I have encountered a fair number of ancient language books whose illustrations I don’t particularly care for, stylistically, though I don’t know enough about art to know whether my tastes are “right” or “wrong”, or whether I’m missing hidden virtues in certain books' artwork. I will not mention which books those are, since I nevertheless admire very much that people are still paying illustrators for books that are never going to make a lot of money; there are far too many people just using AI art in their Latin & Greek books. Amelie Rosengren’s drawings are however illustrations that I enjoy looking at. Presumably the reason the original Ørberg illustrations aren’t used for FR involves copyright law and licensing, but I prefer Rosengren’s anyway. (I also happen to prefer inset illustrations to marginal ones, at least in a language-learning context.) There are not really as many illustrations as there would ideally be for beginners, but references have been made to increasing their number. In the meantime, I appreciate that the existing Legentibus artwork has stylistic coherence and charm.

Finally, being able to look up words with two taps on my Kindle (which I still do fairly often) is probably a functionality I could learn to implement with a different Latin app. However, it is nice for a Luddite like me not to have to worry about something like that.

If I like Legentibus so much, why is this not a five-star review?

There are still some items that the team can continue to improve. First of all, and most important–I would be very interested in hearing how well the app has worked for a true Latin beginner, and not just for someone who only ever really learned how to decipher (and that a long time ago). I suspect that it would be a very difficult process, the success of which depends mainly on the student’s inherent linguistic abilities and/or their ability to tolerate delayed gratification. I think, for example, that it would have been extraordinarily difficult–maybe not possible–for me to have learned Latin from scratch using Legentibus. Okay, probably not impossible. But making Legentibus work for a beginner means repeating the readings pretty often; for a good student with a large L1 vocabulary full of helpful cognates, I’m guessing 3-4 repetitions of each text. I would not be surprised if a large number of beginners needed more on the order of 6-7 repetitions of each text to get really comfortable with their grammatical features and their vocabulary. That amount of required rereading is not a small order of difficulty for a student, I think–it is exactly what I have never been able to do with Familia Rōmāna–and it is the area in which I think Legentibus has the most room for improvement.

Again, please reach out if you think I’m wrong! If you learned Latin from scratch with Legentibus and you weren’t tired of the beginner immersion course long before it ended, I’d love to hear about your process. If you are struggling and you’re looking for more free beginner reading material, check out the level 1 difficulty stories on Fabulae Faciles, the Fabellae Latīnae, and/or the early volumes in the Cambridge Latin Course.

I do think they’re a little bit hamstrung by having chosen FR as the core text for the beginner course. When one of their authors sits down to write or adapt a new story, I assume they start with a list of the vocabulary used up to that point in the beginner course and/or FR. Unfortunately, the sequencing of vocabulary is not one of FR’s selling points. Discounting the grammatical vocabulary–since the “Grammatica Latīna” sections are heavily de-emphasized by the app and the pēnsa don’t appear–it is still normal to see about 35 new words per chapter and not unknown to see 88. (Yes, 88 new words in a single chapter! That’s capitulum XXXIV, so it’s not as though you’re going to see them again in this book.) It is simply not a terribly well-chosen list for beginners. My dream is that someday Carla Hurt & co. would come up with a Medulla list of, say:

• 500 or fewer words, not 1000

• roughly in order

• that are key for communicating basic concepts

• with an early emphasis on key verbs à la the Quaint Quinque, Elite Octō or Sweet Sēdecim

• that are good for telling short/simple stories (fewer “here are a bunch of animal names/body parts”, unless those nouns are used to dramatic effect in a story)

• perhaps even with a focus on the vocabulary of some highly-accessible and culturally important authentic text.

Those are the basic goals of my Ancient Greek 101 list, which I pulled from when drafting my own introductory graded reader. The goal was to work from the vocabulary of three different beginner-ish texts to create a graded reader with a particular focus on the vocabulary of the Gospel of John. The draft is stalled out at around 6,000 words while I finish my PhD (and while Seumas Macdonald revises his LGPSI), but someday I hope very much to return to an improved version of that 101 list and my Εἰσαγωγή.

And until someone comes up with a much better Medulla list (which, pace Hurt, is in my opinion going to require ditching a commitment to any particular textbook–they’re just not that compatible in terms of vocabulary), the Legentibus team will presumably keep trying to come up with a sufficient volume of compelling content that sticks roughly to the vocabulary sequence of FR. I wonder very much how that awkward FR list is going to shape future chapters of Auda, which introduces new vocabulary at a perfectly acceptable rate and is (again) the most compelling beginner Latin text I’ve ever read. Will the Legentibus team ever shift the centre of vocabulary towards Auda, rather than continuing to try and fit new texts in with the FR sequence? I hope they consider it. If I was ever trying to work on a Medulla list, I would absolutely make Auda one of my core Latin 101 texts.

In terms of the interface: my UX is not 100% flawless. I don’t know if this is because I am running the app on a Kindle Fire (which required sideloading the Google Play store), or because the app actually has a bug that makes the navigation quite laggy. However, the convenience and comfort of having Legentibus on an e-reader are far too great for me to ever complain very much about eg slow loading, or the fact that your total number of words read won’t show up until you’ve exited and restarted the app. I have seen the odd complaint about the Latin dictionaries the app uses; I don’t know that they’re great, but they haven’t bothered me at my current level. I mention these things mainly so that the user will not be surprised or disappointed if the app doesn’t run flawlessly. I can’t speak to the desktop versions until there’s one for Linux :)

To reiterate in conclusion: as a remedial student, subscribing to Legentibus is the single best decision I’ve ever made for my Latin, and I’m pleased to be supporting Pettersson’s continued excellent work on Auda and other easy Latin stories. I still think this is a very steep curve for true beginners, but unlike with other introductions to Latin, not an impossible one. If you’re willing to reread/re-listen to texts a few times, then this app can get you from square one to reading real Latin pretty comfortably.

I’ll try and post another review once I finish the intermediate texts in the app. In the meantime, fēlīciter legātis!

As promised, here are some thoughts (this time in English!) about volume I, Familia Rōmāna, of Hans Ørberg’s famous Lingua Latīna Per Sē Illūstrata. FR is an astonishingly ambitious attempt at three very different goals.

Ørberg’s aims in FR

First, more thoroughly than any Latin textbook I know of, FR aims to gradually teach not only Latin vocabulary but also Latin morphology and syntax, both implicitly and explicitly in Latin. Thus, a given feature of the language (i.e., imperfect indicative) is not presented at all until chapter 19, which contains something like 90 instances of imperfect verbs (active, passive, esse, in various persons and numbers) contrasted with the familiar present tense forms; then, in the “Grammatica Latīna” section of ch.19, we read in Latin about “Verbī tempora, praesēns et praeteritum”. Finally, the three pēnsa at the end of the chapter allow the reader to practice producing correct Latin in three different ways: two short paragraphs of an inflectional cloze exercise, two paragraphs of a cloze exercise focused on the new vocabulary in the chapter, and a number of short comprehension check questions (e.g., “Cūr Aemilia Iūlium nōn amābat?").

Second, the actual narrative content of FR has some vaguely didactic intention of immersing readers in the world of imperial Rome. In this respect, reading FR is a profoundly conventional experience, familiar to readers of many other introductory Greek & Latin readers. This book follows some of the doings of the wealthy couple Iulius and Aemilia, their three young children, Aemilia’s brother in Germania, and a handful of their slaves & tenants over the course of a few days. Theoretically, the reader learns some things from FR about the “typical lives” of classical Latin speakers.

Third, as a fictional narrative, FR is intended (one ought to infer) as a form of entertainment. The characters in the book kiss, tease, run away, fight, break bones, moralize, flee (presumed) pirates, write letters, drink, recite poetry and myths, and more. We are, I presume, supposed to be emotionally engaged in this: nōnne estis oblectātī?

As I said: remarkably ambitious. Without further dithering, I offer my assessment of whether or not the whole thing really works…for me, no. Not really.

What I think is most successful in FR is the morphosyntactic instruction. At about 36,000 words long, this volume alone is not a remotely large enough quantity of input to absorb all of the Latin grammar presented–especially not the features presented late in the book–but it’s not a bad start. Many of the grammar introductions are quite well done. Are they good enough for self-teaching without L1 explanations? Eh, maybe, if this isn’t really your first exposure to Latin, or if you already know a very similar language. (The grammatical explanations are useless if you don’t know corresponding cognates in some other language.) And if you’ve got a knack for picking up grammar quickly. If none of those things are true for a student, then they’re going to need other resources just to understand what’s up with the Latin grammar.

But then again, that’s going to be true for even the most talented analysts of foreign languages picking up this book as a Latin introduction, for one simple reason: vocabulary. The idea that beginning Latin students can acquire more than 1,700 Latin words from a 36,000-word text is, quite frankly, not sane. Even if you add in all of the accompanying materials (of which I accessed only Colloquia Persōnārum), you’re still trying to learn some 2,400 Latin words from an 87,000-word narrative. This is still much less than a tenth of the input most students need to acquire more than 2,000 words of a foreign language from reading.

There is of course a classic remedy suggested by FR devotees: just read it again! Read it all ten times, or twenty, or however long it takes you to internalize everything!

And my problem with the remedy is that, to be quite honest, I didn’t really like reading Familia Rōmāna once.

I have owned a copy of FR since my first year of graduate school, which began in 2018. I have even taught a few of the early chapters of FR, back in my middle school Latin teacher days. I, with my two and a half degrees in Classics, who have read (well, translated, anyway) Vergil and Cicero and Caesar and Plautus, have been trying to read this book for almost a decade. I have started it many times over the years, and I have started it many ways. Read it and do the pēnsa. Read it and skip the pēnsa. Read every chapter three times. Read it, always starting from the beginning and seeing how far you can comfortably get, then doing the same thing again the next day. Read it and copy out the text by hand. Read it and type out the text. Read the book out loud. Listen to audio recordings of the book.

None of that worked. The only thing that actually worked for me was to pick up a Black Friday subscription to Legentibus, and to make my laborious way through FR interspersed with things I actually did more or less enjoy reading. In conclusion, the key to reading Ørberg was to read many more things that aren’t Ørberg.

Why is this text so unsuccessful?

I carped a lot about the difficulty of the vocabulary in FR, but that’s not the real reason this particular book is so difficult to implement as an introduction to Latin. I haven’t yet done any analysis of ways vocabulary is introduced in the other Legentibus stories (how many new words on average in a chapter/section of equivalent size, for example; how often are those new words repeated within their first story; how much are they repeated in later stories), but I am not convinced that it’s very different from FR. My unscientific impression of the Legentibus beginner stories (by Daniel Pettersson, Amelie Rosengrin, Victor Frans, et al.) is that the truly new reader of Latin will still find the vocabulary experience to be too much like a firehose. I don’t love that texts still need to be reread (if I had to guess) something like four or five times for a genuine beginner to really get a good grip on the vocabulary.

But these texts are at least able to be reread, because they are–get this–communicating something. When I read them, I get something out of them. Most of them are narratives rather than pure descriptions; many of them are only slightly familiar to me or even new (hello, Gesta Danorum!). The content of the Latin always meets at least one of the implicit goals of FR’s content, i.e., either to teach something about the world of Latin speakers, or to entertain. And not a single one of those texts completely fails on the grounds of both information and entertainment.

The actual semantic content of FR, on the other hand, quite often fails to either instruct or to entertain. Is it too harsh to say that it usually achieves neither? Maybe it is a little harsh. Maybe it is also true. There are just not going to be a lot of readers who are so totally ignorant of Roman society that they actually learn something about it from reading this book. They’re not going to learn that slavery existed in the Roman empire, because they already knew that–and a few of the things they pick up about slavery from FR are going to be more or less inaccurate. They’re not going to learn how the human body works (ch. 11), because they already know that “humans see with their eyes and hear with their ears”. They know that “sheep eat grass”, and that “grass is found in a field” (ch. 9). They probably don’t know how the Roman calendar worked (ch. 13) or that per Donatus both adjectives and nouns are categorized as nōmina and participia count as their own species within the Romans' deceptively equivalent eight principle parts of speech (ch. 35)…but I hear that most students dislike those chapters and are therefore unlikely to read them again for the pure joy of knowledge presented without any charm, humanity, or life to distract them. Personally, I would rather put up with the ides & nones than have to read (in a language I don’t understand, and with negligibly more charm, humanity, or life to distract me) that shepherds eat bread and sheep eat grass.

It’s odd to me that FR is so remarkably deficient in both interest and charm, because Ørberg is demonstrably capable of accomplishing both, sometimes even at the same time. I absolutely prefer the faithless lovers leaping out of windows in CP to Aemilia talking about how beautiful her peristylum is (a passage that provoked one of my first notes in Latin about FR, in which I noted the similarity to Daisy weeping over Gatsby’s shirts–not a positive reflection on the text). The high point of the effort for me is Diodorus’s conversation in the taverna about De Rerum Natura while (unbeknownst to him) his house burns down. Great success! We have here a story that engages the beginning Latin student with actual Roman philosophy & literature in a meaningful conversation between believable characters, while a compelling drama is playing out. Why didn’t Ørberg do more of that in FR, and less of Iulius being “severe but not inhumane”?–also not a characterization, by the way, which I found easy to assent to.

To sum up, Ørberg only demonstrates the capacity for dark humor. He’s at his best with the tragedy and the peril (such as Aemilius’s letter recounting the recent battle and the death of his friend, ch.33). The fight between the schoolboys Ørberg pulls off, because he doesn’t really try to pretend that this is anything other than a wretched little affair of the type that children struggle not to periodically inflict on themselves and on those around them. He doesn’t ask us to pretend that Marcus isn’t acting like a little monster. The most aggravating parts of the book are the scenes which the author suggests we should interpret as comic, where we’re supposed to be unbothered by brutality, injustice, and manipulation. Ørberg would have been much more successful as a storyteller, I think, if he had been willing to tell more stories that left the reader sad, disturbed, or uncomfortable. I don’t know whether he just doesn’t have the knack for telling stories about noble humans, or whether it’s that the day-to-day lives of the Roman elite and their dependents are simply too difficult to spin that way.

What we should take away from FR: Quidnam commūnicāmus?

Grammar-translation aficionados aren’t going to be reading a review of FR, so here I address only teachers who share some of my pedagogical principles. Those of us who follow some kind of “communicative approach” have a question we should always, always, always be able to answer about our usage of Latin: what exactly are we communicating here? In FR, Ørberg is mostly not attempting to communicate anything, except how Latin works. Much of Familia Rōmāna isn’t really a story or a lesson at all; it’s just a story-shaped veil thrown over an extended example of how Latin could hypothetically work. The basic element of disingenuity there is, to me, essentially off-putting. I don’t want to read something that the author and I are both trying to pretend is a story, when in fact it is not a story at all. I don’t want to pretend that Ørberg is teaching me how eyes work, when in fact he has nothing to communicate with me except (again) how Latin works. For all that FR appears to be indispensable to communicative Latin teachers, it will always be a fundamentally frustrating tool for that purpose. What does Ørberg communicate to the reader, most of the time? An empty, language-covered box in which meaning is supposed to be found–but isn’t.

So for those who are trying to write “an LLPSI for language X”, I offer this rule of thumb. If you’re writing something that your students would legitimately never read if it weren’t in the target language–a text that is fundamentally empty of communicative purpose, and therefore also devoid of communicative value–don’t. If your text doesn’t offer something intrinsic to students–some fact, some engagement, some characters with the freedom to display a spark of real humanity, some real charm in the manner of telling–stop there. You are capable of offering students more than a simulacrum of a story. If you want students to invest emotionally, then entertain. If you want to tell them something, then tell them something they might not already know. And if you are going to offer information that only a Martian wouldn’t already possess, then for goodness' sake, write a frame narrative about first contact and commit to it, if you are going to ask a human being to spend time with your text. If you can’t imagine a context in which your readers might actually be pleased to receive your content, your so-called communicative approach is going to fail.

And when it comes to your rate of new vocabulary, do consider chopping Ørberg’s rate down by three-fourths. As Mr Ma teaches us, when it comes to intractable problems, Coupez la difficulté en quatre.

Conclusion: FR’s best use case

For my money, the most effective use to which FR can be put is not in trying to teach students how to read Latin, but in teaching them how to write it. This book is very far from being the worst way to learn how to write simple Latin correctly. It’s not the best way, either, because the best way involves an extremely well-read teacher who can identify what’s un-Latinish about your Latin and tell you how to fix it–preferably with lots of examples from authentic texts. But I think the cloze & short-answer exercises in the book are a basically effective method of allowing students to practice writing Latin with more or less ease and confidence. If you have a teacher, or if you don’t mind making thousands of mistakes, or if you love nothing more than spending hours with a dictionary and Logeion, well, great. But if you want to practice writing simple okay-ish Latin and there’s no one to teach you, then I would emphatically recommend a copy of FR over a book that gives you a lot of L1 sentences and asks you to translate them into Latin. Translation is a different skill from composition, although it does depend on the ability to compose. The way that elegant translation works is so non-mechanical that a book alone can’t really teach you to do it well from scratch. Either you start with some very odd-sounding English that was written for the purpose of being translated into Latin, or you translate into some very bad Latin indeed; in neither case is an answer key going to be of enough help.

So if you’ve been reading Latin for a year or two and you just want to get a bit of practice in producing the language correctly, FR is the first tool I’d recommend. Ørberg remains an eminent Latinist, although in this particular volume he doesn’t really have anything to say. Get a copy of FR, work through the pēnsa, write down your thoughts about the capitula and the colloquia and so on…and then one day you can try to write something that is actually worth reading.