Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0341: Memorize Latin grammar

Episode Date: June 29, 2015

Gina asks about learning Latin grammar. How do you memorize the hundreds of conjugations and declensions that Latin grammar demands? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 341. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day, and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Gina asked a question in an email about memorizing Latin grammar. The trouble with Latin grammar, of course, is while word order isn't very important, the noun cases and verb conjugations are what make that work, and there are hundreds of different declensions and verb forms to memorize.

Is there a way to memorize these effectively? So, Gina, the principle to start with is learning the most frequent words and concepts deeply, and the rest will come together easily. This basically flips over the way that most people learn languages which is actually starting with some of the most infrequent words such as the basic forms of nouns and verbs but what we do at Master of Memory and what I strongly recommend for attacking a new language is to start with the most important concepts, the concepts you're going to have to start with the most important concepts, the concepts

you're going to have to use all the time, which for foreign languages includes basically all of the cases and the declensions, and then learning that for the most frequent words, and the rest will come together easily. So let's start by talking about frequency. So if you learn, let's say, the top 200 words in practically any language, living or dead, you're going to have more than 50% of the language. Now, you're going to be able to find your own frequency lists yourself. That's fairly easy.

So I'm going to spend most of this episode talking about the noun declensions and the verb conjugations because that's something that will apply both to the most frequent words and then to the rest of the words afterwards. So based on the results that we've gotten from accelerated Spanish and the way that we've put that course together, I would start with the number one most frequent verb for verb conjugations and learn every essential conjugation with that verb. Maybe not all the conjugations, but all the most frequent ones. So you want to learn all the conjugations with different tenses in different places, and for Latin, that means there will be about 10 locations,

including all the conjunctives. So you have the ones that are not conjunctive, you'll place those in separate places. And then the conjunctives, you'll put those in their separate scenes, a total of about 10 locations. Now, what I would suggest doing is memorizing all of these in a memory palace that has those different locations for the different conjugations. And you know there are six per location. And as we've shown with the accelerated Spanish course, which you can find for free at Spanishin1month.com, I would suggest having six different characters in those different places, each to represent the different persons. And so you can base your mnemon characters in those different places, each to represent the different

persons. And so you can base your mnemonics in those places with those persons, so that the first person, second person, first person plural, second person plural, and so on, will be represented by different people in the places that you've designated for those conjugations. The third thing you're going to do as far as the verb conjugations go is you're going to study far and wide for all the ways that these conjugations are used, and you'll keep these locations in mind so that you can understand the terminology and soon apply that to other verbs. For example, if you get to figure out the way that a particular second person plural present tense conjunctive is used, you could replace this, you know, the ese form, with that of any other verb, and it would work grammatically. So through this process, you're not just learning ese, but you're learning actually how the different conjugations are used.

So you're learning everything about how verbs work in Latin through this process, through just one verb. That's what we do with the verb ser in the Spanish course. Next, I would suggest learning two to four verbs the same way, two to four other verbs, and see if you can understand the grammatical equivalence between using the same tenses of different verbs, like going back to that second person plural present tense conjunctive. You do that with one verb, you do it with another verb, and make sure that you can correlate those so that you can easily switch them out in a conversation. Then fifth and finally, I would just start learning the regular verbs in mass.

The most frequent verbs are probably going to be the least regular verbs, as is the case with Spanish and with English. If you just think about the way that these words are conjugated, like to be is conjugated is, was, were, and so on, whereas most verbs are just, you know, walk, walked, talk, talked, and so on. It's the most common verbs that are the most difficult. so once you get past the most frequent verbs in Latin, the rest of the verbs will be able to be learned in mass because they simply follow regular rules. With noun declensions, you'll follow a similar process. So you'll use five to six different buildings for the five to six different declensions,

depending on if you decide to distinguish between the normal third declension or the third declension with the i-stem in your system, that's up to you. In Spanish, we actually decided not to distinguish between er and ir verbs because they're actually conjugated the same way, essentially, with some very, very subtle differences that don't really matter as far as the way that you speak that much. So we've decided to group those together. So it's really up to your own judgment. The second thing I would do is start with an extremely frequent noun, probably the noun animus, which is a second declension noun, and do the same thing with that noun as we did with the first verb.

Study far and wide for all the ways that these declensions are used, keeping those locations in mind that we are using for that, you know, one of those five to six buildings so you can keep all the grammar straight. Then just go straight down the frequency list with further nouns, adding mnemonics to the other buildings, not just the second declension building, but the other buildings, when you come across nouns in other declensions. So take those first 10 nouns, studying them far and wide like we did with the first 5 or so verbs, and then this will probably cover all the declensions.

The first 10 nouns will probably represent the 5 or 6 declensions in Latin. Then start learning nouns in bulk like we started learning verbs in bulk, simply mnemonically attaching them to one of those 5 or 6 buildings so you can always remember all of the declensions as soon as you remember the noun. I hope that helps Gina, and for anyone else who has a question about learning anything, leave your request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.