Concerned by students struggling with verb morphology, Michael Brinkman developed an approach to help lighten the cognitive load. The Path to Easy Mastery of Latin Conjugations introduces his model, providing a way to quickly identify aspect, mood and tense “without having to memorize paradigms.” The Path touts its success boosting student performance and diagnoses an issue of genuine concern for classical languages pedagogy: memorizing as the tactic for acquisition. The proposed cure, however, does not meet our needs.
The Path begins with a series of definitions. It idiosyncratically distinguishes verb (stem) from verbum (stem + ending) and univerbum (amat) from biverbum (amatus est). Tense combines aspect and a temporal point of reference (tempore), while mood conveys “how a statement is to be interpreted” (2–3). Verba are made up of morphemes (“the least count of letters used to express any grammar”) and “any combination of morphemes used to express Aspect, Mood, and Tempore” is called an “Aspect, Mood, and Tempore Construct (AM&TC)” (3). AM&TCs are the basis of The Path’s shorthand for verbal accidence.
Using symbols, The Path identifies and categorizes verba by AM&TC alongside features like stem type, numeric (regular) vs. alpha (irregular) conjugation, and key vowel. The result is a system to describe a verbum’s semantic properties. For example, Λ ΣΥ indicates a verb with incomplete aspect (Λ), subjunctive mood (Σ), and present tempore (Υ), while Δ ΝΧ indicates complete (Δ), indicative (N), past (Χ). Stems are also abbreviated (S-I, etc.) and key vowels, infixes (-b-), etc. added for specificity. Thus, e.g., second conjugation imperfect indicative is described Λ ΝΧ S-Iē+b+a+PE (PE = personal ending). The Path explains the method, then distills it into a “mathematical system” to “identify… Tense and Mood” (47–48).
While The Path might appear to be algorithmically labyrinthine, its logic is straightforward: to address the memorization issue, shrink the quantity of information for rote learning. It does this by reducing the Latin verbal system to its essential parts and encoding them. Users proficient in The Path read Latin “without memorizing” by identifying the AM&TCs of verba and translating accordingly. The text is littered with glossaries, tables, and examples to help users follow the trail, and its mise-en-page echoes a chart-heavy Latin textbook. The upshot is an approach to Latin verbs that seems to decrease material for rote learning.
At the same time, The Path reaches its end not by blazing a new route, but by paving one already well-worn. It presumes some memorization to be needed and optimizes grammar-translation (G/T) pedagogy for that variable. It does not interrogate the foundations of this assumption: if memorization is effective for all students, what material is suited for rote learning, etc. If The Path had done so, it might have led elsewhere. That it didn’t generates two, overlapping challenges I suspect might hamper its reception.
First, like many innovations in pedagogy, The Path’s value proposition is opaque relative to the costs of implementation. Along with G/T concepts which the text presumes, teachers and students must learn a new, even more abstract system. Its idiosyncratic terminology muddies the waters between resources: “definitions in this glossary are intended to explain the meanings of the terms as used in The Path… [the] definition may not be accurate for explaining the meaning of a given term as used in other works” (40). It is unclear whether the effort to overcome these issues is outweighed by the benefit for students.
Second and more importantly, by assuming the premises of G/T pedagogy, The Path turns away from relevant fields like developmental psychology and second-language acquisition (SLA). The former asks how brains change over time (e.g. through childhood); the latter how they acquire languages. Both shed light on processes of memorization and both influenced the SCS-ACL’s 2017 Standards for Classical Language Learning. Engaging with them would have enhanced The Path’s analysis and more thoroughly grounded its methods in the field’s standards for professional practice, further facilitating adoption (esp. in K–12 contexts).
This not a venue to reflect on what instructors could gain from thinking with developmental psychology or SLA. [1] We can, however, get a glimpse of The Path from one not traveled. An inquiry informed by developmental psychology might observe how repetitive chants are very engaging and effective for young children but less so for older learners. This implies that the usefulness of certain approaches to memorization could vary by age. Likewise, a study accounting for SLA might note that acquisition happens via contextually meaningful input. This suggests that abstraction could be less effective for acquisition than a context-driven approach. Both head in different—I suspect more fruitful—directions.
The Path to Easy Mastery of Latin Conjugations is an obvious gesture of care for struggling colleagues and programs. The choice to self-publish ensures this text is affordable for its core audience: teachers and students. Most importantly, this method does seem to reduce the memorization needed for proficiency, redeeming its promise to help people learn Latin “without memorizing paradigms”. I have not tried to teach with it and am not likely to do so. Still, I found in The Path a stimulus for profitably reflecting on my practice from a novel and thought-provoking perspective. It should appeal to anyone interested in the same, whether they follow it to the end or not.
Notes
[1] Interested parties should cf. Shrum & Glisan. Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction 5th ed. (Boston: Cengage, 2015).