I took my Latin exam a few months ago, but my Latin journey is not over yet! I’ve started from the beginning of an OCR GCSE textbook which is extremely fast-paced, so I can race past the stuff I already know and get onto something harder. Indeed, it really is getting pretty difficult now having to remember a hundred different declensions, conjugations, tenses and verb endings, how adjectives decline, the different cases various nouns, verbs and adverbs take, add the random odd-ones-out that you have to memorise separately as they don’t follow the pattern. It’s getting really very confusing, especially as what I’m doing with the OCR book is much harder than anything I’ll have to do in a GCSE exam. Translating Latin into English is fairly easy as you can guess the meaning of any bizarre words from the context, but when doing the opposite, you really have to know not only Latin vocabulary but the different tense endings and everything else I mentioned above. Latin prose composition is how the language is taught in private schools, rather than the dumbed-down version they might teach you in local state schools. Having done it this way I imagine I’ll have a very easy transition into A-Level, as I’ll already be familiar with the “basics”!
One annoying thing about the OCR book, though, is that it doesn’t use macron accents on the long vowels, meaning you can often confuse a word with a whole other case, making your translation completely wrong! Also, lots of their answers a completely out, sometimes missing out whole sentences in prose translations. Gah.
Here are a couple of sneaky peeks into what’s involved in my Latin “lessons”.
