Mar 27 2009

Latin Lesson #14: The Third Declension

My latest Latin lesson is up, starting in on the third declension, so I’m back on schedule.  When I started relearning the language, this is where I started having to work at it again.  The first two declensions and everything else up to that point came back to me pretty quickly when I reviewed it, but the third took some study.  Before long I’ll be learning most of  it as I go.

I added a discussion plugin for the lessons, so people can discuss them right there on the pages if they like.  I originally thought I’d direct the discussion over here to give my blog more comments and traffic, but on second thought that’s kind of confusing.  Might as well have the discussion on the same page as the lesson and not make people jump back and forth.

I haven’t done much teaching before, and I’ve certainly never drawn up any sort of lessons, so this has been an interesting project.  The most difficult thing has been keeping track of which words and concepts I’ve presented, to make sure I only use those in my exercises.  I keep wanting to use pronouns, or phrases like “tried to walk”—constructions we won’t learn for several more lessons.  On the other hand, I want to get as much variety into the exercises as possible, so they aren’t the same old sentences about carrying grain to horses and sailing to Italy that we’ve been translating since the beginning.

So I probably spend more time coming up with the exercise sentences than I do on the rest of the lesson.  (I figure it would be a copyright violation to just take them from a textbook.)  Creating a complete story without any unknown words or grammar sneaking in is even harder, which is why I haven’t done much of that yet.

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