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.