First session of my new Latin course

My Latin course is taking place at Ewert House in Summertown in North Oxford - the same place that Linda took French and Spanish many years ago. Linda once signed up for "Latin 1" but discovered it was too easy for her and gave it up. If I proceed from here onto "Latin 2", maybe Linda would like to do the course with me?

Like last night's course, there are about a dozen of us on this course. And as with last night, most are older than me. Many look to be retirement age. Interesting that they want to do a course like beginners Latin. Our teacher is Alison. She starts by noting some sort of illness that she has which causes her to require vast quantities of drink from one of the nearby machines and has apparently resulted in her being the "large lady" she now is. But whatever she has, it is not contagious it seems.

We have a brief outline of the structure of the Jones/Sidwell Latin course that we are following and then launch straight into some translation. Occasional digressions to consider pronounciation, or aspects of the theatre in Greece and Rome. But generally the theme is that we are there to learn to translate and that one of the most attractive aspects of the J/S course is the focus it places on translation. Grammer, etc, will come through this work. So we are immediately working on a selection from Plautus' Aulularia. We all have to do some reading and translating out loud - which I am not so keen on - but will probably manage ok. Some of the others seem to be returning to Latin after extended breaks (as I suppose am I in theory), and so seem quick off the mark. But overall it seems ok to me.

Jones & Sidwell's main textbook (Grammar, Vocabulary and Exercises) has one of the most intimidating contents sections of any book I know - full of terms that I have vaguely heard of but have no idea what they mean like "ablative", "future participles", "Deponent, perfect indicative", etc. But I need to remember that our 20 week course is aimed at just covering the first third of this. "Latin 2" covers the rest and there is even a "Latin 3". In an ideal world, based on building my knowledge to a sufficient level to be able to work on Medieval Latin science texts, I will spend the next three years doing these courses. There is even a Sidwell book specifically on medieval Latin continuing on from Part 5. I also note that Oxford University runs Latin seminars in the history department. Hard to see myself at one of those, but possible I guess.

So an ok start to the course. We have homework set for the next week. Twenty-odd more lines to translate, a bit of vocabulary to learn. I feel I should try to get a little bit ahead if I can do over the next week, so hope to translate the whole passage by the end of the weekend. I does feel really strange to be studying something like this.