I’m always interested to hear from my colleagues, and I have a question for you (though I confess I already have an answer of my own). Have you any thoughts on the order of the declensions?
Oerberg’s Lingua Latina presents the cases in an order that makes all the songs and jingles students use, well, useless.
Nominative
Accusative
Genitive
Dative
Ablative
It’s an order that has a pedigree of its own, and that I’ve seen advocated here and there as an early pedagogical aid. I’ve always used the traditional order of the cases (I call it the American as opposed to the European order when I wean kids off of Oerberg), and I try to ingrain the uses of the cases by making up sentences in familiar vocabulary that use all five:
fēmina ducis mihi dōnum cum grātiā dedit.
This kind of sentence can be used to reinforce the order of the cases and some of the basic meanings of the cases, including the adjectival sense of the genitive and the adverbial sense of the ablative.
The tendency in Latin syntax is toward SOV (subject, object, verb), and while that oversimplifies the issue, simplification is helpful. We can build on that, and show the importance of the first and last positions, but we can also see a tendency to place indirect objects before direct objects, etc.
This is not to mention the importance of the genitive in recognizing noun stems/declension, and building and recognizing forms. Delaying the genitive can cause problems in recognizing stems, especially with the third declension.
So then what’s the pedagogical advantage of teaching the accusative second in the paradigm? You can still teach the nominative and accusative first, but provide students with a blank chart. They’ll see the blanks for the forms they haven’t learned yet, and will know that they’re coming. Still, in the end, they won’t have the culture shock of encountering a world of grammars, songs, and other resources that present the genitive, and not the accusative, second.
Hi Dennis, for what it’s worth, I am an advocate of not teaching by paradigms at all, but teaching BY CASE. That’s how I learned Russian and Polish, case by case – not paradigm by paradigm – and I always figured my success with Latin and Greek had to do with the fact that I had enjoyed the enormous benefits of learning case by case in Russian and Polish before I tackled Latin and then Greek.
If you teach case by case, it is really meaningful; paradigm by paradigm is always arbitrary and therefore a bit meaningless. Cases DO mean something; paradigms do not.
The case order we followed in both of my Slavic classes was: nominative, accusative, genitive (in Slavic languages, the genitive is used as the object of negated verbs, so it has to be taught very early), dative, locative, instrumental. Unlike Russian, Polish has a morphologically complex and productive vocative case, so in Polish class we learned nominative and vocative together.
Justin Schwamm is taking a case by case, not paradigm by paradigm, approach at his Tres Columnae project and I am really enjoying that. I think it can definitely have enormous benefits for Latin students to introduce the morphology on a case by case basis, where the meaning and functions of each case can really sink in, one at a time.
Hi Laura,
I think what I’m talking about is compatible, and not at all arbitrary or meaningless. A paradigm is really just a graphic organizer, and like any other it’s an undeniable help as long as one is taught to use it in its proper place. What I described is focused on teaching cases, but simply provides a graphic organizer that lets you know what you’re in for and how near you are to having acquired all of the varied forms in use. The empty paradigm means that no case is met with groans (‘Ugh … there’s another one?!’), and that when the genitive, for example, is encountered, students are ready for it. I’m sure there are other ways to get them ready, but why is this one invisum?
A paradigm can mean a great deal. An empty paradigm, for example, means that you have a lot to learn, but that it’s manageable. As you fill it in, the paradigm becomes a rich tool for comparison, helping you to note similarities and ambiguities. Once complete the paradigm is a symbol of accomplishment and an anchor to keep you moored lest summer vacation, for example, set you adrift.
Nothing about paradigms necessitates not learning by case, and I’m dubious of any call that a tool be discarded because some people don’t know how to use it.
If two roads will take us to Rome, why not see the views each offers?
HI Dennis, every Latin textbook I’ve seen starts with a declension, all the cases at once, so, mea culpa, I thought that was what you were talking about – presenting the whole paradigm all at once. That paradigm-based approach is not very compatible with communication-based teaching. Slavic languages are just as highly inflected as Latin (more so, in fact), but I really benefited from learning (and teaching) those languages without paradigms. Instead of paradigms, we used meaningful utterances – making statements in the language, actually using the cases, not listing them. A paradigm is not a meaningful utterance – that doesn’t mean it is useless, but a paradigm does not convey meaning. Students complete blanks in a paradigm not because they have grasped the meaning of the utterance (it’s not an utterance), but because they have memorized the chart. That’s quite different from using the language to communicate something.