I'm taking Latin 201 this semester and it's been pretty interesting since the last Latin class I took was 2 years ago in high school. It's really cool since even though the language obviously hasn't changed, the learning environment has but I'm actually enjoying taking it again, probably because it's not for a grade.
But one thing I've noticed in both high school and college is that some people just don't get it. And it's not that they don't understand even somewhat complex things like grammatical constructions, it's just pretty basic things that they can't put together. What I don't understand is how you can't translate a three word sentence when you know: a) what each word means, b) what part of speech each word is and c) how each word is used (e.g. subject, direct object).
I mean it's not too hard. Assuming you don't know Latin, you may not be able to translate the sentence "puer amat canem" but if I told you that "puer" means boy and is the subject, "amat" means to love, and "canem" means dog and is the direct object, I'm guessing you'd be able to piece together what that sentence means rather quickly.
But some people in my class couldn't even do that. It's actually kind of disturbing. In my Biblical Hebrew class we were learning about verbs. One girl said she didn't know how to translate one of the words into English because she didn't know what the 2nd person singular pronoun was.
I mean this really isn't complex. And I really do hate it when people think I'm just being elitist or looking down on other people. I should just let them learn at their own pace and not worry about it. But the thing is, this is basic English stuff. We're not talking about being behind a couple days or even a couple weeks. This is elementary school level stuff.
It's funny to me that English classes in high school and college are basically just about literature and writing. Maybe a little grammar review thrown in somewhere wouldn't hurt.
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