Work On Yourself, Because No One Else Will

When you’re in your youth, all you have is time and energy. It may not feel like it, but it’s true. You have relatively few responsibilities and your main job is essentially to just try different stuff and work on yourself. A youth well spent should be filled with numerous experiences aimed at producing maturity and rounding out physical, intellectual, and spiritual faculties. Manhood, by contrast, is wrought with responsibilities, commitments, and covenants that must be kept. Time and energy become precious commodities in manhood, increasing the temptation to not work on yourself anymore. Fathers are busy, and often let themselves go as a result.

If you’re like me, you feel like you’re behind where you ought to be. Intellectually, many of our forefathers were educated far beyond us in original languages, logic, rhetoric, and classic works. By contrast, our public school education nowadays leaves most of us functionally illiterate in an age of confusion, at the tail end of decades of decline in Protestant intellectualism. We were not adequately prepared to handle the modern world; no wonder we feel like the lost boys generations.

But like many other things, if you want to reclaim what our forefathers once had, and you have to do it on your own time.

Patterns and Antipatterns

The luxury of youth is that large chunks of time can be dedicated to specific improvements. Most adults don’t have large blocks of free time. If they do, they waste many of them with fruitless distractions.

Instead of dedicating large blocks of time to learning, or working out, or writing, or acquiring a new skill, you must learn to utilize the small gaps of time between your larger tasks. I used to spend hours in the gym when I was in college, but I can’t do that anymore. But of abandoning training altogether, I now adapt my training to the time that I have now by altering the programming and content of my workouts. Sometimes I can dedicate an hour to training late at night, and I can do this consistently for weeks. Other times, all I have time for is a 10 minute sandbag workout, or just some bodyweight exercises, and training is very intermittent. The key is to do less work more frequently, seeking to utilize all your available time.

The same pattern can be used for almost anything that can be crammed into a spare moment. Have 10 minutes sitting at the DMV? Read a few pages of your book. Doing mindless chores? Recite some Latin paradigms. These short but consistent reps will compound into long-term improvement.

However, there are a few antipatterns to avoid. Learning and training are work; if it doesn’t feel hard, it probably isn’t worth it in the long run. An unpopular opinion of mine is that podcasts, YouTube “edutainment”, and gamified learning are unproductive antipatterns. They have laughably low information content. The same amount of information in an hour long podcast, including all the nonsense ad reads and unscripted commentary, could probably be condensed down to a few paragraphs that could be read in several minutes. Compare reading a book for an hour versus listening to a podcast for an hour. There is no comparison. Podcasts are entertainment, and that’s fine. People listen to them because they like to hear other people talk, not because they’re a learning hack. Gamified learning is similarly lacking. It doesn’t feel like real work, because it isn’t. You can’t hack your dopamine cycle into making yourself a better man.

How To Learn Latin, 10 Minutes At a Time

Why Learn Latin

There are many reasons to learn Latin.

Firstly, you should learn Latin because you already use it daily. English is an amazing language; it is essentially two languages in one, a combination of Latinate and Germanic. Have you ever noticed that many concepts have two different words in English? We can be “thinking”, or “pensive”. We can “do”, or “execute”. We can own a “abandon”, or “relinquish”. These are the Germanic and Latin components of English vocabulary, allowing it great expressive precision. When you learn Latin, you will learn the vocabulary of your own language better.

Secondly, you should learn Latin because it will teach you grammar. Grammar is not taught in the public schools anymore. The difference between the indicative and the subjunctive moods of a verb, or the direct and indirect object of a sentence, are two of numerous grammatical concepts that are simply lost on Americans today. We do not know how to read and speak and write because we do not know grammar. Latin forces you to learn these grammatical concepts, because in Latin the spelling of a word tells you its grammatical function; there is a difference between amo, the present indicative active “I love”, and amor, the present indicated passive “I am loved”.

Thirdly, broader intellectual engagement requires some knowledge of Latin. Latin terms are common in all Western intellectual pursuits, including law, philosophy, and theology, and many important works contributing to Western thought are written in Latin. You may write “etc.” to denote a continuing list of things, an abbreviation of et cetera, “and the rest”. You may say give an example with “e.g.”; exempli gratia, “for example”. You may say that some thing is essential to another by referring to it as the sine qua non, “without which it is not”. Was Congress wrong to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War? Is Descartes’ maxim cogito, ergo sum, a sound basis for epistemology?

How To Learn Latin

The best way to learn Latin for busy dads is a modified version of The Dowling Method. This method checks all the boxes: it will give you a solid understanding of the Latin language, it can be applied in short time spans, and it is applicable to learning other languages in the future, such as Greek or Old English.

There are two main tasks in the Dowling Method:

1. Understanding grammatical concepts.
2. Memorization of paradigms
3. Meticulous translation

Understanding Grammatical Concepts

Before the specifics of Latin are understood, the general concepts of grammar must be, such as noun cases, verb tenses, parts of speech, and so on. The best resource for this is A Student Handbook of Latin and English Grammar, which outlines grammatical concepts with both Latin and English examples.

Memorizing Paradigms

Once grammatical concepts are understood in abstracto, they are internalized in concreto for Latin by memorization of paradigms. Paradigms are tables of forms of a word that correspond to different grammatical functions. For example, this is the paradigm for the first declension noun porta, portae (“gate”):

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	porta	portae
Genitive	portae	portarum
Dative	portae	portis
Accusative	portam	portas
Ablative	porta	portis

Paradigms are the connecting point between the abstract cases learned in the previous step, and their concrete declensions in Latin, i.e. when you read portarum, you know that this is “gate” in the plural genitive case. There are other paradigms for verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and other parts of speech. The Dowling Method recommends that you memorize all of them by writing each down 100 times before you move to translation.

Here are my own recommendations. Firstly, paradigm tables for Latin may only list the suffixes, e.g. a, ae, ae, am, etc., and recommend that you memorize just the suffixes with “chants”. This is wrong. Memorize the paradigms by writing the tables with whole Latin words on flash cards. The goal is to be as concrete as possible; we are learning Latin, not pieces of Latin words.

Secondly, I have found that my memory is good enough that 30 or 40 reps is sufficient to engrain a paradigm. 100 reps is quite daunting and unnecessary, at least for me.

Thirdly, you don’t have to write down the paradigms to memorize them. Luke Ranieri created the Ranieri-Dowling Method which involves the learner listening and speaking the paradigms, instead of writing them down. Writing is great for memory, but speaking is far more portable as it doesn’t require pen and paper, allowing for greater accessibility on short notice for busy dads who want to learn Latin. It’s also faster than writing, allowing you to do more reps in a shorter period of time. I can bang out all the active indicative conjugations of sum (“to be”) in under a minute, much faster than I can write them down.

Meticulous Translation

Once you have the hang of a paradigm, you can start translating. The best place to start reading Latin is Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. The entire book is Latin, but begins with very simple sentences and introduces new paradigms and grammatical forms the further you go. If you’re looking for a source for paradigm tables, they can be found at the back of the book.

For this reason, contra Dowling, I don’t think you have to wait until you’ve mastered all paradigms to begin translation. Just memorize the paradigms you need to keep going with translation.

One thing that is important to do in Dowling’s instruction is to meticulously translate. Do not be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of a sentence; you must apply the memorized paradigms to each word in order to explain the grammatical function of every word in the sentence. This will become more natural the more you do it, gradually building a “bridge” to the land of Latin.

Some words may not have apparent meaning from context. In those cases, I recommend consulting the Bantam New College Latin & English Dictionary. Avoid apps or searching online for translations; a physical dictionary will allow you to “stumble across” the meaning of other words as you search, and it will keep you from getting distracted.

Doing the Work

Once the necessary materials are acquired and the strategy is defined, the rest is execution. I have a rather wide wallet where I keep my Field Notes journal, and it easily accommodates some Latin paradigm flashcards. I can recite paradigms whenever I get a spare moment.

Lingua Latina is a relatively slim book that can be easily carried around in a backback. I usually translate a couple sentences at a time, and use a book dart to easily pick up where I left off. Some days I focus on memorization, and other days I focus on translation. Then it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating. Aim for frequency of repetition, not volume; if you can get some Latin in every day, you’ll see results over time.