Sunday, January 24, 2010

Latin Noun Endings

A little while ago, I decided I wanted to rejuvenate my Latin studies. I took three years of it in high school, but I was never very good at it... my grades were A's the first year, B's the second, and C's the third... because I never really got my basics locked down, and so the farther I got, the more I was behind. At the time, I had real disdain for memorization. This was mostly snobbery on my part -- I felt like if it had to be memorized, it wasn't worth knowing. Fortunately for me, I've grown up, and I now have proper respect for the value of memorization. And so, I'm trying out the Dowling Method for learning Latin. It involves intense memorization, followed by immersion in all-Latin texts. This blog entry marks my completion of memorizing the noun endings -- I wrote them, from memory, 200 times. It took me months. I really do feel like I have all five declensions locked down now. The next task is to do the same with the adjectives, and then verbs. Wish me luck!

11 comments:

  1. Hi Jesse,

    I recently wrote a webapp for helping people memorize the six tables for the Dowling Method. See if you find it useful: http://jonathanaquino.com/latin/index.php.

    So far, I've typed out the Nouns table 100 times.

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  2. Hey .. I'm working on the same thing. How has your progress been so far? I'm down to the subjunctives.... really just slogging through so that I can get to Lingua Latina.

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  3. I'm halfway through the adjectives.

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  4. Very cool, Jonathon. Like I said on your blog, I like your Dowling Wheel tool. I'm just really ready to start reading Latin rather than memorizing forms. Stupid Dowling method better work. The Wheelock method I have tried before with very limited results at best.

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  5. It's funny - we're investing 6 months of our lives in memorization, and we're not even sure it will work. It better!

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  6. It's totally working for me. I'm 2/3 through the adjectives, and once in a while I go back and check my nouns, and they are still rock solid. I'm kind of slow (about 6 months in at this point, probably 6 months to go before Lingua Latina) but I definitely feel like I'm making good progress. Though, the verbs scare me to death.

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  7. Slow going for me too, Jesse. I've been at it for 3 months. The thing is, life is so busy - you know what I mean. I too am afraid of the verbs.

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  8. No fear! Once you get the Active Indicative down, the rest are just variations on a theme. I, however, am dying to start LL. Another 200 of Passive Subjunctive, and I'm there. I think that I'm skipping the deponents. Seems overly repetitive.

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  9. Hey, Jesse,

    I posted this on Jonathan's blog, as well. This weekend I downloaded a memorization app from http://ichi2.net/anki/

    It's a a freeware memorization app that syncs across computers and phones. In any case, I created a notecard deck with all the Indicative and Subjunctives (Passive and Active) on it. I created it as a shared deck. Anyone can download it and use it. It might (or might not) prove helpful to you. The name of the shared deck is 'LatinConjugations'.

    Take care,
    harry

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  10. Hey, just come across this site on google, I'm using Dowling method as well, right now just finished adjectives and started verbs, hopefully I can start LL by august

    cheers

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  11. Cool stuff. I just started verbs as well. I have probably forgotten Nouns by now. Oh well.

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