Familia Romana: 5 Tips
Maybe you followed our book recommendation and purchased a glossy new copy of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata to take your Latin to the next level, but you are finding the book to be a little more challenging than expected. Worry not. We have five tips for you as you walk through the book. If you are a teacher looking for ways to implement Lingua Latina in your class, keep your eyes open for that post in the future. For now, we want to spend some time talking about how to use the Familia Romana book if you are a self learner who is new to the series.
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Inspect Every Corner
It is really easy to get tunnel vision when reading this book, since reading a normal book does not usually demand that we inspect every corner of a page, but that is exactly what you have to do if you are reading Familia Romana. I specifically remember reading chapter six in college and getting stuck on the word ‘murus’, which pops up towards the bottom of the first page of the chapter. I couldn’t figure out what it meant and was sure I had not seen it before. Turns out, it is the first time the word appears in the book, and there is a picture on the same page. The image of a ‘murus’ is towards the top of the page, and the label for the picture is almost sneaking off the edge. You really have to be looking for the word to see it, and that can easily lead to some frustration. So if you stumble upon a word you have never seen before, pause and inspect the entirety of the page, keeping in mind that the form you see in the text might not be exactly what is in the margin. For example, the form ‘muri’ is what appears in the text first, but the image on the same page is labelled ‘murus’ which might be a cause for confusion, especially if your brain is looking for the word ‘muri’.
Skip It
Don’t let difficult passages completley ruin your fun. Part of what makes Lingua Latina so great is that the repetitive nature of the text helps build your reading confidence. Nothing shatters that sense of progress more than getting stuck on what seems like a silly word or sentence. It is good to feel like you shouldn’t move on until you have learned every word. Sometimes, however, Lingua Latina will tell you what a word means in a later sentence. For example in chapter 12 we see the first instance of the word ‘eques’. The attentive reader will notice that it is similar to the word ‘equus’, but there is no picture for this new vocabulary word. Instead, Orberg defines ‘eques’ in the following sentence: “Eques est miles qui ex equo pugnat”. Lingua Latina does this kind of thing all the time, so skipping over a foreign word might be exactly what the author intended. It’s also possible that the word becomes more clear to you in a different context in the chapter, so just keep reading, and come back to it later when you reread the chapter if you still don’t understand.
Reread, reread, reread
In short, you should reread these Lingua Latina chapters as much as possible. Don’t think that reading through a chapter once means you are done with it. If you followed the last tip, there were likely some things in the chapter that you did not totally understand. Use your second read through to take a little more time puzzling out foreign words and more complicated sentences. Consider translating difficult passages onto a separate sheet of paper so you can clearly see how each part of the sentence is working. Once you have figured everything out, reading the chapter (or at least the difficult passages) one more time will help cement everything in your head. Obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule, and if you feel like you are ready to move on, go for it. I would recommend, though, that if you have decided to move on, and the new chapter is really difficult, you should go back and reread previous chapters. Doing so will help get your confidence back up, but it will also help refresh your memory. I often tell my students that these chapters should be read three times through at a bare minimum, and if you are really looking to make progress, I would set the goal for five times per chapter.
Don't Forget the Index
Before you go off and use the 5th tip on our list, consider using your index. Lingua Latina’s index is the alphebetized list of vocabulary words at the back of the book that point you to the first occurence of a word in the text by giving you the chapter (indicated with bold text) and the line number. For example, if you looked up the word ‘postea’ you would see: post-ea 22.41, which means the first time that vocabulary word appears in the text is line 41 of chapter 22. All line numbers appear sneakily on the inside margin of the text. Sometimes, the first time that a word appears is not in the body of the text, but in a margin picture. So, if you don’t see a word right away in the line that you were told to go to, check the margins in that spot for pictures. Admittedly, the index can be a little bit of a hassle to use sometimes, and the journey probably takes a little longer than you would like, but there is something about the process of hunting the word down to the place where you first learned its meaning that is more satisfying and memorable than looking the word up with a lexicon. Remember that the index lists words as their most basic forms, so you will not be able to find the form ‘laetorum’, the masculine genitive plural form of ‘laetus’, for example, but you will find ‘laetus’. It takes a little practice to figure out, but once you get the hang of it, it is a nice tool to have at your disposal.
Look it up
Sometimes, the pictures and the index are just not enough, or you just don’t have the time or the patience for the index. There is nothing wrong with looking words up. In fact, when you get into reading non-Familia-Romana books, looking things up is going to be your very first resource when you light upon a word you don’t recognize. When I was first learning, I found that using the Wiktionary source was the quickest way to find inflected forms of words. For example if you just typed an inflected word like ‘noceant’ along with ‘Latin’ into google, the first result will likely be the Wiktionary entry. They provide accurate and succinct definitions and often a table with all the inflected forms. Wiktionary shouldn’t be relied on as a scholarly source, since it could be edited by anyone, but it gets the job done for Familia Romana.
Bonus - Set a Goal to Read Every Day
If you really want to get better, consitency is key. I would set a goal to read a chapter of Familia Romana a day, even if it is a chapter you have alread read. If you can’t make that happen, scale it back and read a smaller text from the Colloquia Personarum book or the Fabellae Latinae.
I hope these tips help you out in your Lingua Latina journey a little bit. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave a comment, or email us at contact@thelatinteacher.com. Keep your eyes peeled for more posts.
– Rogerius