Remembering your Latin

[tulip]

In elementary, jr. high and high school, I took French. No choice in the matter until high school, when we could choose Latin instead. I did not.

In college I decided it would be a good idea to learn Latin since I was determined to be a Romance Language major. It was not and I changed majors.

Luckily I'm fluent in French and English. Spanish would be nice to learn but so far I have not gotten serious about it.

[withm]

I have the distinction of being flunked in Latin I by the SAME nun that flunked my mother some 40 years before me. I then got transferred into a different class, and took 2 more years and did well enough so that it helped with my French all through college.

Though I never took any Spanish classes, I was able to muddle through French, Spanish, and even Italian contracts just with the French and Latin background. (In my industry all the contracts said pretty much the same thing so it wasn't that difficult). I don't claim to have made literal translations, but I got the gist pretty well, and knew when I would need a better translation of particular clause.

[Pax]

I have the distinction of being flunked in Latin I by the SAME nun that flunked my mother some 40 years before me.

I didn't get flunked but I did have the same nun for 2nd grade that taught my dad AND my grandfather, I think she was close to 90 at the time.

[Zen]

I wish I had taken Latin.
French has proven rather useless.
I'd like to be able to toss around a 'sine qua non' once in a while.

[alpinerabbit]

7 years Latin, (not the American way with one class a day, more like between 4 and 6 per week depending on year).
I remember nary a sentence, when I see one I can hardly find out what it means but I understand (can derive) most latinate words and we learned how a language works. I kinda liked it when we got into translating poetry because they had weird ways to restructure their sentences.

7 years French (3-4/week) - after my US stay I hated it; I hate being un-proficient in it.
I just went to a 1 week brush-up intensive last fall (best school ever, if you need a recommendation).

My two favorite remnants?

Nubere vis Prisco, non miror, Paula, sapisti
ducere te non vult, Priscus et ille sapit.

Non sunt certa meam moveant quae basia mentem.

I'll give out a beer for a correct translation.

[Veronica]

Classics degree - emphasis in Latin. 4 years of Latin in high school, 4 years in college and 3.5 years of classical Greek in college. Oh and 2 years of French in high school, 3 years of French in college and a year of Russian.

My 5th graders do very well with vocabulary and grammar.

V.

[mimitabby]

2 years of latin
amo amas amat, It helped me with my Italian. i'm surprised to see so many Latin scholars here.

[7rider]

2 years of high school Latin here. 1 year mandatory....the second year b/c the teacher snookered us with "1 year is useless...you need two to actually learn anything!"
I remember "Agricola, agricolae. First declention. Farmer."
It has helped with remembering scientific names - Megaptera novaeangliae anyone? It also helped with my 3 years of high school Spanish.

[tulip]

I remember the book--it was red. Wheelock's Latin. I don't remember anything in it, though.

[NoNo]

4 years in high school and a semester in college. I took it in high school because my brother did, and I always heard stories about this crazy teacher. Once I took the class, I understood. He was definitely quirky, but he loved the language and the culture and wouldn't tolerate anyone that didn't give it the proper respect. The first year was the weed-out class to figure out who would stick with it and who would drop. From that point on, we were still "children" (specifically the "Children of the Peanut Gallery") and never "students". As he said, we hadn't "arrived" to that level. By senior year, there were only 6 of us left and in April he finally called us "students". Being only girls left, we all started crying, because we knew it actually meant something. Any questions about his life were answered with "That's none of your business, little girl." Every year we'd take an ill-fated trip to NYC under the guise of studying the city because it was modeled after Rome. Usually there was some type of accident involved, but we always had fun. If you couldn't keep up with him walking, you'd be left behind, and he'd give us a map before we left with places you could find a phone to call him To this day, my brother and I still keep in touch with him and occassionally go to his house to drink wine and talk.

We never learned much vocab, it was a dead language and we prefered to keep it that way (Latin is a language, as dead as it can be. It killed the ancient Romans, and now it's killing me!). We did lots of translations and conjugating and declining. I'll never forget during a test one day my friend broke down in tears. When asked what the problem was, she blurted out "We never learned the subjunctive!" That was a total lie, but he felt awful and told us to skip that section Yeah, I have a lot of happy memories from that class.

[cyclingmama]

I remember "Agricola, agricolae. First declention. Farmer."

I would not have come up with this on my own, but the moment I read it I could hear it, plain as day, roll off the tongue of my Latin teacher. He was a phenomenal teacher as well, and those of us that stuck it out after the first year could not have escaped his class without his having a profound impact on our lives. I'm seeing that as a trend in these posts.

[Mr. Bloom]

I wish I had taken Latin.
French has proven rather useless.

I wish I had taken French. Latin proved rather useless to me.

I spent two years translating The Illiad and The Odyssey with Sister Mary Catherine

All I remember is something totally unrelated:

Tinitus, tinitus, semper tinitus!

[Veronica]

The Iliad annd The Odyssey are Greek and written by Homer. If you translated something similar in Latin that would be the Aeneid, written by Vergil.

Arma virumque cano

[Mr. Bloom]

The Iliad annd The Odyssey are Greek and written by Homer. If you translated something similar in Latin that would be the Aeneid, written by Vergil.

Arma virumque cano

Oops...I not only forgot the Latin...I forgot what I was translating

But I still remember the first line of Jingle Bells

and, I still remember the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega