Between a bes and a dodrans of my time goes to learning and helping others learn and teach Latin. Our main goals are to be able to read Latin texts; to interact with the products, practices, and perspectives of Latin-using people; and to reap some of the cognitive benefits of knowing multiple languages. I have found that speaking Latin plays a natural and effective part in all these pursuits. I’m far from the first to report this, even in the last decade (see this, this, this, this, and this [pp. 8ff]), but the recognized perks are piling up so high that their explorations should, too.

If you share any of the goals I listed, speaking Latin is a pretty normal thing to do, and not as scary or as hard to start as you might think. It could even make your life easier.

I say this with full knowledge that, for some, the biggest obstacle to speaking Latin is fear. This is true to such a degree that, at the Rusticationes where colleagues and I aim to provide “the safest introduction to spoken Latin on the planet,” we have developed entire sessions and staff roles devoted to helping participants tame the terror. I can assure you that, whatever the fear — fear of making mistakes, fear of tactless correction, fear of sounding silly, fear of being exposed to yourself or others as a fraudulent Latinist, fear of reimagining your curriculum, fear of overwhelming your students, fear of not being able to express yourself — there is a long-lived, large, and swelling community of people with all sorts of experiences, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of shared concerns eager to make the Latin-speaking journey together. Pretty much all of us began this adventure as adults, many deep into our careers, with far fewer opportunities for speaking Latin than there are today.

The most common reason people give for overcoming their fear and choosing to speak Latin is that they want to read Latin better. While the link may not be obvious, and reading comfortably comes largely from reading constantly, we should be surprised to find a deft reader who had not had a habit of interacting with others in the language.

When I say “read,” I don’t mean deciphering a text by accessing explicit knowledge about words, forms, syntax, and style. I mean “read” the way people normally use the term: seeing a sequence of words and simultaneously sensing the unfurling plot or point. Deciphering texts by means of conscious knowledge can yield meaning and pleasure, but the difference between this experience and implicit, real-time understanding is something like the difference between getting a joke only after it is explained and getting the joke right when it is told. (Some people get so fast at deciphering texts that they appear to be reading. This is cool, but still not like getting the joke when it is told. It’s more like having the joke explained to you super-fast.)

Not everyone wants to read Latin the way I’m talking about. The chair of classics at a prestigious school recently told me that it would be tragic for a person to understand Latin in real time, because this would deprive the reader of the boons to mind and character of painstakingly piecing together the meaning. That seems to me like not wanting people to get a joke on the grounds that it would deny them the chance to figure out why it is funny.

But more and more Latinists I work with, at all levels, voice dismay at the fact that they can pick up an English, French, Dutch, or Polish text and understand and enjoy it on sight, but cannot do so with the language they teach and most love. For them and their students, the goal is reading Latin-as-Latin, in real time. This does not preclude analysis — on the contrary, it forms the foundation, along with cultural and other background knowledge, for doing more with a text: relishing its artistry, arguing about it, translating it, or relating it to other texts.

How do we get there? In other words, how do our brains change to be more like the brains of people who process the language intuitively? This matters a lot, because trying to read a language without our brains having undergone such a change is to be in conflict with ourselves: we are trying to do something with a brain that has not been fitted for that thing.

For my students and me, speaking Latin supplies four natural solutions.

1. Latin interaction has turned out to be the most efficient way, by far, to let my novice and intermediate students encounter the vast volume of level-appropriate Latin input required for growing a mental representation of the language. (I wrote about the need for such input, a point of agreement among otherwise disparate researchers, in “Teaching Latin to Humans.”) This alone would convince me of the value of speaking Latin, but there’s more.

2. The healthy human brain is in its element when dealing with speech — even for people who don’t consider themselves auditory learners. Hearing and speaking a language are primary mental acts, in the sense that the human brain has parts and processes dedicated to them. Speech thus differs from reading, a relative newcomer among human activities that needs to conscript several brain processes focused on other things, such as spatial recognition, in order to link marks on a page or screen with meaning. This is not an argument against reading, whose complexity is part of what makes it gloriously human. But to bypass the speech processes so integrated with human biology and so central to human experience is, at best, to give up a potent teaching tool. At worst, it frustrates the very brains we often claim to be training.

What’s more, the brain areas and activities we depend on for reading include ones associated with aspects of speech, such as phonological processing. What happens when a brain attempting to read Horace or Hildegard summons these parts and processes and gets no answer, because the oral-aural core of language has been ignored?

3. Regular interaction in Latin softens the distinction between easy and hard grammar and, with it, the thud of “advanced grammar.” There really is no such thing as advanced grammar. There is only language one has met enough, in meaningful enough ways, for it to feel normal, and language one has not. Are gerunds and gerundives and jussive subjunctives and indirect questions really that much harder to process than personal pronouns? Not if you hear every day, “est tempus scribendi,” “nunc est legendum,” “quaeso finem faciatis,” and “quis scit quota hora sit?” A fear clause isn’t some sneaky switcheroo. It’s just how you tell someone what you’re afraid of. Sequence of tenses isn’t a minefield of moods. It’s just what emerges when you say what you mean.

Some syntax is supposedly so sticky that it can’t be learned until late in a course or textbook. Unfortunately, this makes it the syntax to which students have had the least exposure before meeting the texts it is supposed to help them understand! There is no way around this if we limit ourselves to explicit instruction. We can’t teach everything at once, and we can’t constantly review. Infusing everyday interactions with a wide range of Latin phrases and usage is a practical and efficient strategy.

4. There is a big difference between taking occasional advantage of an already known language and treating Latin as though it makes sense only in terms of another language. Many students — and, alarmingly, many teachers — seem to think that Latin words mean English words, or that Latin constructions mean English ones. There’s nothing wrong with using another language to illuminate a Latin word or an obscure passage. I often use English for this purpose. But the English serves only to approximate meaning, not create it; the Latin means something already. Speaking Latin makes this real and normal for participants in the conversation.

As my students and I interact in Latin, we build both brains and a community for which the expression of thought in Latin means something in real time. When my students read, they see preserved on a page what they already understand as sound. Do they meet new words and literary modes of expression? Yes, and these can be grand encounters. Do they need help with tricky texts? Of course. As in general literacy development, though, their Latin literacy starts as the recognition on a page of language that they would also understand as speech, and continues, in more artificial literary registers, as an affair with words, word-relationships, and styles that adorn or redeploy a language that students are already used to engaging on its own terms.

What I am describing is not cold, contextless symbol-processing. It gives life to our experience of the products, practices, and perspectives of the Romans and of those who have thought and written in Latin since. Yes, we learn about baths and brothels, slaves and circuses, weddings and wars — often in Latin. But regular input and interaction in Latin take us farther, tweaking our brains to be literally more like a Roman’s.

I don’t want to share Caesar’s attitudes. But I do want to sense as suddenly as possible what he says of a druid, a traitor, or a moose. I don’t covet Ovid’s mind or life. But I want to crumble at nec iam pater. I don’t wish Heloise’s pain on anyone. But I want to squat in the soul that squeezed out

Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo praesidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, carius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix. As God is my witness, if Augustus himself, master of the whole world, did me the honor of marriage and established the entire globe as my eternal possession, it would still seem dearer and more proper to me to be called your whore than his empress. (Heloise to Abelard, Ep. 2)

Even when it’s not plunged into a literary sea, a Latinized mind can, I think, deepen one’s understanding of, even empathy for, the people of other times and places.

Academic articles on the cognitive payoff of communicating in multiple languages abound. The reported benefits include heightened empathy, along with above-average ability to handle ambiguity, find multiple solutions to problems, toggle between tasks, pay attention, remember things, employ high-order reason, and, indeed, defy old age. Though the outcomes are sometimes sensationalized, we risk nothing by supposing them, as they are byproducts of communication in another language, germinating in cerebral soil we were going to water anyway.

For me, these benefits largely subsume, if not supersede, one I used to single out: logical thinking honed by grammatical analysis. My students think logically and analyze grammatically, but I’ve come to consider such analysis less and less definitive of a course in language and literature, and the desired results less and less contingent on grammatical analysis.

The way grammar is presented and organized in textbooks and reference works is not the way it seems to be represented in the heads of people who know a language. This has two major implications. First, even virtuosic knowledge of grammar as arrayed in textbooks does not cause the changes in the brain required to read Latin in the sense considered in this article, though it may help one explain aspects of Latin texts to oneself or others. This is something most present-day Latin teachers and learners, including some of the most respected of our time, have confirmed through experience.

The second implication is that we should be cautious about touting the benefits of training in discrete grammar points, or training in translation that relies on such points, as benefits of learning the Latin language. In fact, they are potential benefits of a particular way of organizing and analyzing data sets that happen to have been generated from Latin texts. Similar treatment of other data might yield similar benefits to mind or character, but the notion persists, partly because it can be deployed as a justification for studying Latin at all, and partly because it allows us to claim that we are killing two birds with one stone, training the brain while helping people read the classics.

I am no longer comfortable making this claim for grammatical analysis, because the type of brain-training being asserted comes not from actually learning Latin, but from a certain way of thinking about Latin — and that way of thinking about Latin has not proven generally successful in helping people read whatever Latin they wish to read. I would rather promote the ability to process Latin as Latin, with side effects linked to bilingualism, which overlap with the benefits claimed for grammatical analysis and are just as attractive.

Does this mean I never teach grammatical generalizations or terminology? Not at all. My own linguistic glee can be contagious, and can give learners yet another way to relish the language. Coupled with meaningful text or speech, a generalization can cue a click for this or that student — in some magical moments, for several at once. Conscious knowledge can help resolve ambiguities in texts above one’s reading level. Comparative grammar helps address the Connections and Comparisons goals in many programs. I am careful, though, not to fall for or foster the idea that “not grasping the grammar in the textbook” is the same thing as, or even very similar to, “not being good at Latin.”

There are plenty of objections to speaking Latin. I’ve answered a dozen here, including the concerns that speaking Latin is not the goal of our courses, that we might model mistakes for students, that some take Latin precisely to avoid speaking another language, and — wait for it — that speaking Latin is too fun. Often, though, what stands in the way of a would-be speaker is neither outright objection nor the fears catalogued earlier, but dread of what it might take to get good enough.

The sweat and tears by which Latinists have earned their chops could fill the Euxine Sea. We don’t need another onus. And yet I see teachers brimming with vim at conferences and online (e.g., here, here, and here), craving ways to stretch themselves and serve their students. So I’m not suggesting that people do something instead of nothing; I’m claiming that training and habits that include hearing and speaking Latin provide some of the highest returns on investment.

In fact, I think teachers’ lives would be easier and more enjoyable if much of the time and effort spent seeking yet another way to spin the supine were spent instead interacting in Latin and imbibing wisely chosen Latin texts— something pretty much all Latin teachers claim to want to do and want their students to do. Teachers could comfortably sprinkle their speech with supines and more, and would have a far deeper and broader knowledge of Latin literature, both of which would multiply their ability to help learners internalize the language and to select texts suited to students’ interests and proficiencies.

Is the journey long? Yes, but it’s less a marathon than a walkathon: every stride extends goodness. And this one winds through some of the best scenery there is, with some of the best company there can be.

While speaking Latin accords with and capitalizes on the nature of the brain, language, and reading in powerful ways, it is not a panacea. It is not even a method. It can serve a variety of approaches, and its success depends on a variety of factors, including the tasks with which it is combined, the supply of Extensive Reading, the trust between teacher and students and between students and each other, whether it amounts to oral drills or rises to actual communication, and the content of such communication.

Every bit helps, though, and you may find that, the more you and your students communicate in Latin, the more pedagogical problems dissolve. I’ve mentioned how we shed the weight of advanced grammar. Organic review happens as we use situationally appropriate language. Communicating in Latin vitalizes our classroom culture in ways that merit their own article. And the capacity of any healthy human brain to build a mental representation of a language under suitable circumstances means that students previously considered “bad at Latin” — by their teachers or themselves — can succeed at all levels. Besides advancing educational equity, the resulting rise in enrollment calms another fear that is too real for many Latinists: the reduction of their programs.

Fortunately, there is solid institutional support for negotiating meaning and investigating culture in Latin, and it’s not that hard anymore to start or continue speaking Latin or to make it part of your classes on a small or large scale, even if you don’t speak as comfortably as you’d like. Also, because reading, viewing, and listening to purposefully selected content (including many well-cached gems) can play a major role in boosting your proficiency, you can get a lot better at speaking Latin without even getting out of bed.

But I think you’ll find a lot worth getting out of bed for.

Justin Slocum Bailey is a linguist by training, a learner by temperament, and a teacher by trade. When he’s not reading something for the thirtieth time or combing the planet for new content in his languages, he operates Indwelling Language, a collection of resources and habits for boosting joy and success in language learning and teaching. He tweets languagy tips and tidbits as @IndwellingLang.