	I want to be clear: it is important to learn structures of grammar. The meaning of ‘grammar’ itself has to do with small parts of language (perhaps, each part has the mass of one gram), and learning about parts helps in understanding the whole. The problem comes from trying to teach those small pieces before teaching the whole. The ancient Greek mathematician Euclid says “the whole is greater than its parts.” I would like to elucidate what that statement means for teaching Latin in an analogy: teaching Latin as a system of grammar, before the student understands how the language functions as a whole, through experience and knowledge of that whole, would be like giving tires, bolts, belts, leather—all of the pieces that are necessary to build a car—to someone who doesn’t know what a car is … and expecting that person to build a functioning automobile!
	Also, it is very important to be able to express or translate Latin texts—especially those of our Church—in accurate English forms. One of the problems, though, is that teaching in this manner to beginning Latin students actually complicates the learning process. For a simple example: if you teach that the Latin word arbor means tree, the mind treats “arbor” as a word that means “tree,” and then must connect an image of a tree, or some additional meaning, with that word. This process would be like telling a child to read aloud “Tree” for the first time: “Yes! ‘Tree!’ A tree is a ‘woody perennial plant having a single usually elongate main stem generally with few or no branches on its lower part’!”
	I know that is a simple example, and it sounds kind of silly. If you wish to see how serious and complicated such matters can be I can refer you to a long argument in Church history regarding the phrase (part of the Nicean Creed) Filio-que procedit. One of the problems with translation in the more complex example is: how can we express, through language, the mystery of the Trinity? It is easy to say Filio-que procedit means the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son,’ but a large number of Christians (including the Russian Orthodox) claim that meaning of the words translating that phrase suggests a diminution of the power of the Father, while others claim that it does no such thing! [I know that there are many other factors that caused the break between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and please do not think that I have any desire to marginalize that schism as a translation problem. All I wish to emphasize is that translating into a language is complicated, and most suitable for advanced language scholars.]
	I do not think it prudent to begin the study of a new language by teaching the memorization of English meanings for Latin words, and memorizing and analyzing Latin in grammatical terms. Prior to all of that, it is important to teach the meaning of Latin words and the grammar structures through context with every-day experiences. I want students to learn through experience, that every day I greet one student individually with salve, but that I greet more than one student with salvete. I want students to learn through experience that fluvius is what the Missouri is, but that Missouri and Mississippi are fluvii. Only after many months—even years!—of simple, direct experience with the language should the student be expected to analyze its grammar, and translate, or explain the meaning of texts. (This progression of knowledge mirrors experience with our native language. A student enters grammar school only after several years of learning in the home.) It is the direct, simple manner of oral immersion and instruction that is most memorable and educative, and conducive to resuscitating the common language of the Catholic Church.
