The Latinum Method

Reading is the Royal Road to Fluency

There are many ways to learn a language. Fashions come and go. Not every method out there will suit you, or may only be useful at a particular point in your language learning journey.

Many methods fail because students get discouraged when trying to read ‘real’ books.

The reality is most students give up long before they reach the level of being able to read high artistic literature in the language they are striving to learn.

From my own experience, one of the the keys to progression is extensive reading. You need to read a lot. Really, a lot. You need a massive vocabulary. This cannot be obtained pleasantly through drilling and flashcards, no matter how dressed up with gamification and rewards. You simply need too many words. Most courses, even at college level or online, will give you a vocabulary of between 1500 and 3000 words. You need tens of thousands.

This observation is not at all new, and formed the basis of the teaching method fine-tuned by James Hamilton in the nineteenth century, and his followers through to the early twentieth century.

Hamilton’s method was designed to get students reading complex authentic Latin texts fast and relatively painlessly from a young age.

New research has backed up his ideas, and forms the basis of the research of the Extensive Reading Foundation.

Interestingly, research on Hamilton’s method was also carried out in the nineteenth century, over a course of several months, in a once-famous study. This showed the effectiveness of his method for teaching Latin to ten year old boys.

The success was achieved through massive extensive reading, using this Hamiltonian system.

The Latinum Method uses this system: with comprehensible input as its driver, with comprehension provided quickly and efficiently by the interlinear construed translations.

The Extensive Reading Foundation notes that the modern research indicates that for comfortable extensive reading around 98% of the words on a page must be comprehensible.

This creates a problem for students, due to the ugly reality which is Zipf’s Law. In summary, outside of a small group of highly frequent words, Zipf’s Law states most words are seldom encountered, with a mathematically computable formula. This is why language students have such a miserable time trying to read a novel, even after many years of traditional language study.

The second issue is that this infrequent word is often the key to unlocking the meaning of the sentence. Double misery.

This is where Hamilton comes in. His interlinear system (not by any means invented by him, as examples can be found in the medieval period, the philosopher John Locke’s version of Aesop, Clarke’s extensive series in the early 1800’s, and John Stirling DD’s extensive series of classics written in the century before Hamilton) is designed to defeat Zipf.

It does this by providing a literal interlinear gloss (translation) to the original text. This text is rewritten so that it can work together with the syntax of the second language. John Stirling DD had earlier developed a system of Latin paraphrases of the original text, padding things out, and adding words and phrases in Latin for clarity, while also rearranging the Latin syntax to somewhat match that of English.

Hamilton combined this methodology with a literal interlinear gloss, copying the system that had been developed by The Reverend Dr. Stirling in the editions published in the latter years of his life.

These specialised texts enable a beginner student to jump right in with extensive reading. These interlinear texts can be interesting, authentic texts, as there are no vocabulary constraints.

There are also no vocabulary lists in this method, no vocabulary testing, and no constructive exercises at all. You just read, and trust your brain to do its job of pattern recognition.

The Latinum Method adds a few extra layers to the original system: Instead of presenting original literature, new material has been developed for the lessons, specific to each language and culture.

Each lesson has as its backbone a highly frequent word, but apart from this word you can expect to find a wide range of vocabulary. Lessons are suited to all levels of learners. Each lesson is independent from every other lesson.

Because the construed or interlinear text necessarily does some violence to the natural syntax, the material is repeated in a second part, labelled B, with alternating full sentences in the two languages, in a natural idiomatic syntax.

The construed format (all text on the same line, separated typographically) is used, instead of Hamiltonian below-the-line glosses. This gives a more seamless reading experience. Then, the entire lesson is repeated a third time, C, in the language you are learning.

This third section is the closest you will come to a test in this reading system. There is also a grammar section in part D, that looks at a few main points in the lesson, and a relevant literary quote is also given, which undergoes the same treatment as described above, plus some cultural background information.

Each lesson has a second part, called the Genre section, where you are exposed to a wide variety of writing styles -memoirs, travelogues, dialogues, descriptive prose, commercial language, instructions, etc

This gives you a large amount of structured and varied extensive reading.

Another approach to Extensive Reading is the production of specialised graded texts, with artificially limited vocabulary and syntax. Texts like these are also useful, but it is hard to engineer a text for out-of-classroom use, where you know with certainty that the reader will know 98% of the vocabulary. In a classroom this can be controlled for. This is the reason I think glossed texts are better for extensive reading for self study.

They are also very efficient at imparting language and vocabulary knowledge quickly and painlessly. Providing a translation into your main language is the most rapid method to explain a new word. Other methods ( pictures, paraphrases in the language being learned and so on) don't always work as well, if the educational research is correct.

The modern Extensive Reading movement is largely centred in Asia. Interestingly, Asia is still the last area where some countries are still using Hamilton’s system in the school classroom, with encouraging evidence based educational research carried out on the method, notably in Iraq.

In Europe there is one provider of modern Hamiltonian style resources, aimed at teaching the English high school Latin curriculum set texts.

Extensive Reading with the glossed system Latinum uses solves one major problem common to all traditional productive methods,(including online ones) and that is the vocabulary problem.

Research shows that most college language courses only impart a vocabulary of some 3000 words. This is also the average amount on some well known online learning platforms, with some languages only giving a vocabulary of 1500 words. Extensive reading of advanced artistic texts is not really feasible with such a limited vocabulary.

The problem is systemic and structural. Only so much new vocabulary can be introduced and learned productively and tested before patience runs out. Too many words, too fast, and it gets discouraging, and just too difficult. This psychological reality acts as a limiting factor on all such courses that involve testing and active learning, no matter how structured.

Most people have a limited capacity for learning through drilling and testing, gamified or not. The productive system with it's exercises, tests, multiple choice questions and so on and so forth is slow, and gives a false sense of progress to the student. Hooray, you have learned 800 words! 1000 words! Not much use when you need not 8,000, but more like 16,000.

The Latinum Method resources can be used alone or as additional lessons for other courses you are taking elsewhere.

If you read these lessons regularly, you will surely find your language skills and vocabulary will develop faster, but you do need to read a lot.

Good luck!