Latin 1: Henle Lesson 1

We haven’t started Latin 1 yesterday.  We’ll begin next week.  I went through all of the exercises in the first unit.  I started the second noun declensions but had had enough today.   Over the past few weeks, I’ve been memorizing first declension nouns.  Here’s the issue in Latin; it’s a tremendous amount of memorization, Grammar, and translation.  I took two years of Latin in high school.  But, I took some Spanish, and had loads of French for fun.  I like languages, memorization, and grammar.  

Are you teaching Henle?  Start by memorizing the first declension nouns.  I write nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative singular and plural next to the declension.  Initially, I wrote the translations next to the Latin, too.  I also wrote the parts of speech next to the nouns.  For example, Nominative, singular, terra, subject, land.   Genitive, singular,  terrae, possessive, belonging to the land.  I did this many times to make sure the ending stick.  Then I repeated this process for each of the nouns listed.  Then I looked for more first declension nouns and repeated the process.  

Once I had a handle on the declensions, I began all of the exercises.  Initially, I diagrammed and labeled each sentence.  Once I completed each exercise, I checked and corrected every answer—even the accents.  Is this a lot of work?  It is.  I studied French in France.  I learned that the only way to master conjugations is to write them repeatedly.  Noun declensions are like conjugating verbs.  You have to write them over and over.

My high school Latin class was traditional.  I don’t see any short cuts.  Instead I see a lot of hard work.   I decided to start Latin next week and postpone Composition, Grammar, and Vocabulary—all of which have separate textbooks.

The Latin sentences initially are simple to diagram.  Lacie can diagram simple sentences.  All of the Latin in Lesson 1 is simple.  She is going to write the sentences in Latin, translate it into English, identify the parts of speech, and diagram each sentence.  Then we are going back to Easy Grammar for Grade 5, locate more examples and diagram them.  I’ll let you know how this goes.  I anticipate it will go slowly.