Stuck on Second Form Latin

[wycheck]

Hello. I apologize if this question has been asked before, but I'm not even sure what to search for.

My 8th-grade son is working through Second Form Latin. He seems to understand the Word Study and Grammar and Declension sections, does pretty well on Form Drills, but struggles on the Translations. When I tell him the correct translation, he usually gets it. He is finishing Lesson Nine.

I have no background in Latin so I'm not sure how to help him. The only thing that I can think of is to select some examples and have him translate them again. I don't want him to move on until he "gets it." Any ideas? Thanks!

[pickandgrin]

Do you notice a difference between his ability with Latin to English and English to Latin translations? The latter is much more difficult.
How is he with Latin to English?

[pickandgrin]

One more question: Is he getting the meaning correct but the details wrong?
(E.G. Does he properly identify the word as 'table' but misses that is a direct object in the sentence? Or does he get the correct verb meaning but not the tense?)

[wycheck]

Thanks, Jessica! He says it used to be easier for him to do Latin to English but now they both feel hard. His vocabulary is good, he gets the endings incorrect. I think if he had a better teacher he'd probably get it. I'm hoping that he can finish this form by the end of the year so he can do an online Latin course next year.

[pickandgrin]

Helpful info. How was his translation ability at the end of First Form? How long was his break between FF and starting SF? Did he do any review during that time?
How were his translations the first few weeks of Second Form? Can he (or you) pinpoint where it started to go off track? How did he do on his Unit I SF test?
I'm curious it he's feeling a little bewildered by the third declension i-stem nouns and adjectives. It may be that he needs to pause and redo a few lessons to regain confidence. I do recommend you stop moving forward and take a week, or more if needed, to find the trouble spots before moving on.

Please encourage him that it's ok to be stuck. The next job after stuck-ness is to sleuth out the issue and become unstuck which usually involves getting help. That's an applicable lesson for Latin and beyond!

[wycheck]

I think we took almost 2.5 years on FFL. I wanted to make sure that he understood and I had another baby in that time frame. He intellectually matured a lot at the end of last school year. He finished FFL and did the first unit of SFL. I can't remember how long we broke with Latin but it was at least 7 weeks.

He had a hard time with translations in FFL, but then made a huge improvement with the last unit-very few errors. He started SFL at the end of last school year and was great. I was surprised at how well he was doing with practically no help from me. I can't remember how he did on SFL Unit 1 test.

I am planning to review for a while. My question is how. I can do oral things, but since he filled out his workbook I would have to type some questions from there (so I had the correct answers). There aren't supplemental pages for each lesson, are there? If I knew I was going to have to review, I could have bought the book that's meant to be used over the summer. At this point, I don't want to wait for it to be shipped.

[pickandgrin]

Ah, so are you saying that he did the first unit of SF In the summer and then took a break and picked back up with the second unit this fall?
In other words, he did not just restart SF from the beginning, right?

[enbateau]

I'm about where your son is in my own trip through the book.

• The one thing I struggled with in Latin to English translations was figuring out the job of a noun with an ending that could be multiple cases/numbers. A 1D feminine noun ending in -ae could be the genitive singular case (of/possessive case), the dative singular (indirect object), or nominative plural (subject). Teach your student to always find the verb first, parse it and write the initial translation, then see if any of the nouns could be the subject, remembering that not every sentence will have a separate subject (i.e., not embedded as a pronoun into the personal ending).
• SFL loves to have one sentence with an explicit subject, and the next sentence will have the verb with an embedded pronoun. Teach your student to expect this! You can look over the answer key yourself and warn him in advance.
• Teach him to be careful with first and second person pronouns, as vos can be two different options, the 2P-Pl nominative or accusative (subject or direct object). If it does NOT agree with the person & number of the verb, it will exclude it as a subject in the sentence. This "test" helps me greatly. The same goes for the 1P-Pl pronoun nos.
• Make sure he is drilling the selected FFL & SFL grammar form flashcards daily so that those endings really stick out to him. He should start to "see" certain endings (-am/-as, -em/-es, -um/-os as accusative, -i/orum, -ae/-arum, -is/-um, -ūs/-uum, -i/-erum as genitive, then -o/-is, -ae/-is, -i/-ibus, -ui/-ibus, -ei/-ebus as dative). You can scroll through one case in each declension and list off all the endings to start to see the pattern.
• Drill sentence order in Latin. One thing Jon Christianson told me that seemed to disappear in text but become apparent after the reminder is that genitive nouns (and the adjectives that modify them) will come (before or after...usually after) the nouns that they modify. So, the teacher's words (or words of the teacher) would be "verba magistri" because the genitive word magistri is going to be in the same position as an adjective describing the quality of a noun. In English, "of the teacher" would also get diagrammed off of the noun "words" as it answers those adjective questions from EGR: which one? what kind? how much/many?
• Any kid with executive functioning issues is going to struggle with the procedures of translation, so drill, drill, drill procedures. I'm not saying this is the case, but many kids do. Do a few translations together. Which word do we always mark first? The verb! Make sure he is drawing arrows from the adjectives to the nouns they modify. Drill that adjectives of A/S (amount/size) go before a noun and adjectives of Q (quality go) after a noun. Word order will help with the rest. For quizzes and tests, tell him he can write Latin and then English word order for common sentence patterns at the top. English: S-V-IO-DO. Latin: S-IO-DO-V. Sometimes it looks like IO-DO-V (plus all of each word's modifiers) because the pronoun is embedded into the verb at the end. When students know that the first word isn't always a subject, it frees them to see the endings that can take multiple cases and assign its correct job in the sentence.

[jen1134]

Are you using the new edition of SFL? It walks you through each translation step-by-step. If he’s using 1st edition, I think switching could be a game-changer for him. We switched my daughter to the new edition of FFL even though she had completed the first 11-12 lessons. She LOVES the updates.

[wycheck]

Hi Jennifer.

Thanks for the tip! I'm using the first edition. Is the second ed. workbook compatible with the first ed. videos? I made the decision to stick with Glen Moore when it came time to purchase SFL.

[wycheck]

Jessica,

No, he didn't just start SFL recently. He started before we took a summer break. Maybe it is a matter of new material pointing out what he didn't internalize earlier.

ENBateau,

How are YOU working through the Forms? That sounds like what I need to do. I feel like I was "exposed" to FFL with my son but that I'm comprehending so much more from FFL because I'm helping my daughter through Latina Christiana.

[enbateau]

Jessica,

No, he didn't just start SFL recently. He started before we took a summer break. Maybe it is a matter of new material pointing out what he didn't internalize earlier.

ENBateau,

How are YOU working through the Forms? That sounds like what I need to do. I feel like I was "exposed" to FFL with my son but that I'm comprehending so much more from FFL because I'm helping my daughter through Latina Christiana.

To Jessica's point, he may need to catch back up after the break. For me, 3 days is too big of a gap. I start losing a lot. Money doesn't grow on trees, but I would highly recommend grabbing a 2nd edition Student Workbook for SFL for him and yourself plus a Teacher Key. Use the coupon code in the newest issue of Classical Teacher to save $5. I can PM you if you don't have it.

Yes, the 2nd edition workbook is compatible with the 1st edition Teacher Manual! This is how I am using it. I did order the new tests and quizzes, because it syncs better on the concepts learned therein, and you definitely need the latest edition of the teacher key, but the Student Text and TM are the same!

[pickandgrin]

So I think that's it! Agreeing with enbateau that he needs a complete restart of second form, which I think is only eight lessons going with what you said earlier. If he starts back at lesson one (which is the first of the four FF review lessons), then he will very quickly come back up to speed and find out if he has any holes. It might also feel really great to prove that he knows most of it, which it sounds like he does. The second edition workbooks are completely worth the money! I would also recommend second edition key, and the second edition quizzes and tests. He can keep the first edition workbook to help if any extra practice is needed. The forced parsing in the second edition is a tremendous asset to a student! I'm a huge fan!

If starting back at lesson one feels demoralizing, then another option would be to have him simply take the lesson one quiz and then subsequent quizzes until he hits a wall and needs to review those lessons. Where he finds trouble, he can review there.

He could even plan to do two lessons per week, which would have him up to speed in one month. If he wants to continue into third form in the fall, then the best thing he can do is get a good handle on second form the school year. It's just the beginning, and he has so much time to do so!

(Voice to text, not going back to capitalize everything!)

[enbateau]

As far as how I am working through the SFL program myself, I have made it a top priority. I devote about 25 minutes a night to it at least 3 days a week and a block of about 2 hours on the weekend. I have been able to move through it more quickly than my 5th-grader would because I have a firm grasp on the English language and am pretty decent at languages in general. I barely knew Latin existed prior to MP, save that I new Spanish and French were "Latinate" languages that I studied for over 8 years. It's embarrassing that you can get a degree in English (to teach, no less!), excel on the NCTE exam, and not know a thing about Latin. I digress...

I read the TM, write the vocab in a spiral, and look for ways to memorize content. I highlight endings that stick out, create memory tricks, and make notes where I struggle. I have stickies and extra notes on many pages. If I have a question that I can't figure out from reading the 700 pages of material before and after the lessons (just kidding), I call MP and ask...and now I email. Then, I complete all of the workbook pages, every single one. Nothing is wasted, and every exercise has been beneficial. I am starting to "see" those endings as signifiers of case. I don't think that was all set in my mind in FFL. Now, the picture is coming together. Having my own copy of the workbook used to seem like an incredible waste of money. Going to Sodalitas/Teacher Training changed that. Jessica Watson said she has a stack of something like...six?...Latin student workbooks she has completed. If the pros are doing this, the lay should certainly give it a try!

I wish I could speak to the Glen Moore video aspect. I only know that the TM has not changed editions, and neither has the Student Text, so you might be good to go. I would expect that if this is a 100% student-directed course that your child will take a little more time to move through at mastery-level. A cottage school teacher told me that she has students move through the material until they get a 96% or better on each quiz or test. Definitely redo the material and drill forms until it's second nature. That is the level of mastery required of ME before I feel confident moving on. I have a couple of Post-it notes on my bulletin board in front of my desk where it forces me to run through the vocab words I struggle with the most. Usually these are the ones that are so similar. For me, these words are: (sick/ill, field, rough/harsh), heavy/serious/severe, (book, children, free), shameful/disgraceful, the 3D i-stem m/f and n endings, and 3D 2-terminal m/f and n adjective endings. Everything else is review of LC or FFL. There is a surprising amount of review from LC, and so many of the vocab words are easy for me b/c they are actual French words!

My final tip is that the only help I will ever give my student on a quiz or test is this: "What are the two ways to retrieve a word you don't remember?" My student replies: "Does it have a derivative? Is it part of a prayer or Latin saying?"

[jen1134]

Hi Jennifer.

Thanks for the tip! I'm using the first edition. Is the second ed. workbook compatible with the first ed. videos? I made the decision to stick with Glen Moore when it came time to purchase SFL.

Totally compatible with Mr. Moore’s DVDs 😊