Latin for Coffee Drinkers

Just for fun, I decided this week to pick up a book I bought many years ago on teaching yourself basic Latin. I did part or all of the course some time ago but didn't retain much of it; thinking it might be useful in the future, I decided to make another go at it.

I've taken the text and a notebook with me to Starbucks a couple of times, and I've got to say that that hasn't been the best environment for conjugating verbs, which is mostly what I've been doing. Reading, making notes, and even writing haven't been much of a problem for me in noisy coffeehouses, but trying to switch from one language to another in your head and on paper is a different story. It obviously draws on a different area of the brain than do reading and staring off into space occasionally, which is what I usually do at Starbucks. This feels more like programming or doing math.

After wrestling around today with such verbs as "dicere," "videre," and "habere," I was ready to throw the notebook down and go for some light summer reading. I was doing pretty well on the translations, except for figuring out which vowel goes before the endings, but it wasn't that much fun. I tell you this in case you ever wondered whether going to Starbucks to do a little Latin grammar might be an easy way to pass the time. It isn't. For this type of study, I think you need a quiet room.

To make it a little more lighthearted, I tried coming up with sentences of my own, which may or may not mean what I think they mean. One of the things I learned the other day was the word "quia," meaning "that." I put together the sentence "quia interrogo," which I was rather proud of, and I hope it means "I question that" (though maybe it doesn't). Today I tried to put together a sentence describing something I saw, but my book isn't really that great on lists of vocabulary words. I can vouch for "video" ("I see"), but my attempts to render "I see an annoying person" fell short. I just couldn't get there.

While all of this was going on, I started thinking of the movie title Quo Vadis. I thought at first that "quo" means "what," but apparently it doesn't: "what" is "quid." I know that "vadis" is the second person singular form of a verb, but what verb? I haven't gotten to it yet in the book, but I know it's a common one, and it seems similar to the French verb "to go." A quick Internet search yields "where" as a possibility for "quo," which I had considered, since "Where are you going?" or "Where do you go?" makes sense. Unable to stand the suspense, I just looked it up. Quo Vadis does indeed mean, "Where are you going?" (From all of this, it's probably obvious that I haven't seen the movie, or if I did, I didn't retain it.)

The other thing that really gave me fits was the right way to conjugate the verb "to give." A drawback to the book I have is that it gives you the first person singular conjugation but forces you to do the others yourself. So I had a lot of trouble with "dare," and just to settle the question, here are the right forms, hot off the Internet: "do," "das," "dat," "damus," "datis," "dant." I was way off on that one, having ended up somehow with an extra syllable in the middle, but at least now I know.

My memory of doing introductory Latin the last time is that things really got complicated once you left the present tense. There may or may not be a future in trying to make that leap at Starbucks, but at least I got past the "quo vadis" thing, and I know that "ignoramus" is the first person plural form of "ignorare" (to not know). I was practicing the conjugations aloud in the parking lot at the grocery store the other night, and though it turns out I had the infinitive wrong (I was working backwards from conjugations), there was some fun to be had from saying the words "ignorant" and "ignoramus" aloud--and to have a perfectly innocent reason for doing so. They'll tell you in school that there are many benefits to be had from studying languages, and they could be right.