How long does it take to learn latin?

As a Latin teacher, I receive this question a lot, or it’s close equivalent: How Hard is Latin?

I have to remind most students asking it that the answer is relative. I generally answer this question under the assumption that the questioner is a native English speaker who only knows his mother tongue. Most people outside of this category ask different questions at the start of their Latin journey.

As a native English-speaker myself, I look to the US State Department’s framework for learning languages. Every day, in two locations in the US, hundreds of State Department employees are hard at work acquiring the language of the country they will live and work in for one to three years. The effectiveness of their methods is immediately tested and verifiable by the performance of these students in the countries to which they are dispatched. They have been training their employees from nothing to proficiency for seventy years. Their experience should tell us a great deal about what language-learning looks like.

How to Measure DIFFICULTY: Hours Not Years

Their framework first tackles the question in hours, not months or years. The mental attention required to expose yourself to a language you don’t know is inherently exhausting: there’s a limit to the fruitful number of hours in the day you can devote to it. That said, someone surrounding herself with Spanish every waking hour for a month will necessarily learn much more rapidly than the student taking a 45-minute class five times a week. She will, however, find herself drained and lonely—lacking a genuine connection to those around her—during that first month to six weeks of exposure.

Nonetheless, “I (have) studied Spanish for six years” communicates much less to me than “I’ve read and listened to Spanish I could understand for 300 hours, and spoken for about 100.” The State Department framework encourages us to think about our language learning in terms of hours dedicated to building the habit of expectation in our brains. I give a sampling of the four tiers below, but the whole chart is available at the State Department Website

The more different a language is from English, the longer it will take to learn. In comparing a language to English, there are three categories of habit: vocabulary, morphology and syntax. In the first, it may be easy to see that some words can be stored very close to others. Spanish gato looks close enough to cat for us English speakers to see the resemblance.

Morphology – How does the Language Look?

Morphology (and its oral equivalent phonology) is what the words look like (or orally, what they sound like). Both of these can take much longer when the sounds are different from the language you come from.

While certainly not as complex as the African clicks or Chinese tones, Latin has different vowels than English. Thanks to the great vowel shift, you’ll often hear what some Europeans have dubbed “cowboy Latin” coming out of Americans’ mouths because they keep the American vowels, particularly the wide-open a or i in words like ape or ice, in their Latin.

The morphology, which will effect the phonology, is more complex. Rather than the word showing its function by where it is in the sentence, Latin tags each noun, verb, adjective, and pronoun with an ending detailing its function relative to the words around it. Some will saw Latin word order doesn’t matter, but that’s too extreme. Developing in eras before scare-quotes and italics, Latin word order primarily changes emphasis rather than meaning.

This complicates vocabulary slightly, as each noun will have 6-10 forms which will alter whether or not they mean duck, ducks, of the duck(s), to/for the ducks, by the ducks, or the ducks are on the receiving end of a verb. Does one know the word duck when they recognize anas? Or do they know the word when they recognize it in all ten forms? Or do they only know the word when they can use it in those forms?

Yes, the morphology of Latin is quite different from English and thus increases the distance the brain must traverse in building the habits of mind to express oneself in this language (or understand someone else expressing things).

Syntax – Latin Compared

Syntax is how words come together to form phrases and clauses with meaning. This is influence by morphology but also covers things like word order, subordination of ideas, reporting the speech of others, and other nuances that we all deploy in our native languages without thinking.

Latin vocabulary is similar to the Romance languages it produced, and thus I’d put most Latin vocabulary in the second tier. I do this only because our Latinate words are our more complex words, and as English continues to spread as a global language and fewer of my native-English students read, the active and passive vocabulary of the rising generation shrinks.

Thus, Latin’s vocabulary building power generally works in one direction for people below the age of twenty: it builds your English vocabulary more than you will build your Latin vocabulary by knowing a lot of English words. I knew one student in high school whose English vocabulary was already large enough that he could guess many Latin words. He’s still the only young person I’ve ever met who could do that. He also read (in English) for several hours every day.

I also think the syntax bumps Latin into the second or third tier. I’ll give two examples. As English speakers, it’s really hard for us to process the verb last, as German (Level 2) regularly does. Latin loves to put the verb last and builds more complex sentences than English has for hundreds of years. Jane Austen, Walter Scott, or Charles Dickens give a better example of the kind of sentences Latin prose usually prefers but they still don’t delay the verb to the end. Training this habit takes more time than it would if Latin’s word order were closer to that of English.

The second thing is that Latin’s idioms cut against the way we think in English. English prefers abstract nouns; we speak a lot about preference and favorites, and our sentences tend to have more prepositional phrases in them than Latin. Latin prefers concrete nouns (using something like vīsus to express vision or sight more often than it would use vīsio). Latin speaks more objectively or keeps preference and opinion to parenthetical interruptions (i.e. vidētur mihi can change the whole clause into an “I think that…”). I’ve never found a strong idiomatic way to express so many things we obsess about in other language classrooms: favorite food, favorite pets, favorites sports teams. Small talk looked different in Latin, I’m sure. My students also struggle with Latin’s prepositions. When the preposition is explicit in the sentence, they usually adapt quickly. The uses of the ablative (aka the Swiss army knife of noun-endings) remains hard for them to recognize for a long time.

I won’t put Latin into a Category 3 (1100 hours) language because it lacks many of the things that make Category 3 languages hard. Latin’s alphabet is easily mastered in a day (it lacks W and borrowed K, Y, and Z from Greek). Not so for Hebrew, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, or Amharic (all Category 3 languages). As someone who has studied the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, I’d even put Greek (vowels!) at easier than Hebrew (nikkud?!).

Latin has only one more case than German (the Ablative) and doesn’t have 7+ like Polish or Lithuanian (also Category 3). With only six tenses in the Indicative and four in the Subjunctive, it’s similar to German (Category 2). While it has more tenses than Polish, aspect (progressive vs. perfect in English, i.e. continuous action vs. completed action) in Polish is much more complex and Latin seems to have been blithely unaware of aspect until exposed to Greek.

All the category three languages give almost no vocabulary to English, as well, thus making the vocabulary a much steeper climb. Farsi gives us the word lemon, but you still can’t recognize it (لیمون) easily until you can read the script (Arabic script), which has a different letter form for letter at the beginning, middle, and end of words.

The Verdict – How hard is Latin?

So, where does Latin fall? I’ll compare it to what I know of the other languages on the list and try to give my best guess based on fifteen years of teaching experience.

Upshot – Proficiency Heading for Mastery

So, Latin doesn’t turn out to be hard to acquire, but we’ve been teaching it rather strangely for the last century and a half as merely a puzzle. When taught as a puzzle, it tends to remain that way until many more hours of reading and speaking have activated it.

When taught with acquisitional and analytical methods combined (something most of the community doesn’t seem to discuss, thinking that the one excludes the other), the focus is on building the right habits of vocabulary and idiom. This, combined with a knowledge of how the grammar works, can help not only our English (the avowed goal of most Latin program in the US), but also make reading and praying in Latin a lifelong habit building towards mastery.

That’s the goal for me at least: to introduce my students to a language and culture that have stored up so much human wisdom and experience in so many genres and styles.

Measuring Success: How Often Do You Use the Language?

It’s difficult for most teachers to look beyond college and pin down the lifelong impacts of their own teaching (or their own education). Partly this is because teaching must always remain personal, and thus is a lot more than skill acquisition or fact memorization. Rather, most of our important teachers influenced us most in who they were not just what they taught or even how.

I don’t have control over who my students become. Thus I shouldn’t set a goal that they all read and enjoy Latin for the rest of their lives; I’m just setting myself up for disappointment as their tastes and skills lead them down other roads.

If English teachers set a goal for all their students to be above-average readers, most of their students, already fluent in English, fail to read more than ten books per year. And nowhere can I find studies distinguishing between people who read pulp romance, business nonfiction, classical English literature, or philosophy and theology in translation. One man’s stack of ten could be significantly weaker than another man’s.

So, I’d rather measure success for my Latin students across the board. How often do they read, pray, sing, or hear Latin? I’m still failing as a teacher, which is great motivation for me to continue working hard to help my students learn enough Latin that they enjoy Latin. None of us enjoy being beginners forever, and rarely do we rejoice in being bad at something.

So, my task each year is to help my students acquire enough habits in the language to gain traction in building their language habit on their own. It’s true that you often lose whatever language you don’t use, but, like riding a bike or driving a manual transmission, it’s not nearly as lost as you think. One’s muscle-memory kicks back in as soon as the exposure to the language increases and comprehensible input returns.