Just because I complain about learning Latin in 10 minutes does not mean one cannot start learning Latin in 15 minutes (or 20 or 30).
Who has not complained about that teacher who came to class with yellow notes and pieces of tape: those notes that he himself took as a student and that for decades he has been teaching as they are to generations of students?
One rarely has such a good method that not a comma has had to be changed in 50 years.
Of course, little has changed in Latin since I started studying it at the age of 16 until now.
Even so, I am continually introducing changes of various kinds in my Latin course: not only am I adding more theory and practice, but I am also reviewing and polishing what has already been published.
Even if the Latin is the same, neither the method nor the teacher nor anything or anyone is really the same (you know: πάντα ῥεῖ, as Heraclitus used to say).
Well.
It is easy to be carried away by inertia and to impart a subject similarly as one learned it.
But it is precisely with one’s own experience and with the feedback of others that one evolves.
Because of this inertia, my Latin course starts with too much theory, too much grammar, before starting with practice, before starting to read Latin or to analyze and translate.
Nothing wrong with theory and grammar: they are, in fact, necessary along the way, but not necessary in such a large quantity at the beginning of the course.
That’s why I have added a zeroeth class, a quick start class: the minimum necessary before jumping already to the first texts.
Vale!
Paco
P. S. As I say in the class itself, it does not replace the other contents, but is, rather, a turbo, like those glowing arrows on the ground in videogames with races and cars.
