Lesson 4

This week, we're going to plough ahead onto Stage 3, look at subjects and objects again, but in a little more detail, and (if you choose to) you're going to have a go at a comprehension exercise (which you haven't done before, for this course anyway). And Caecilius is finally going to leave his bloody house and show you a bit of downtown Pompeii! As always, I'll give a list, with some helpful notes underneath. And as always, think of the starred items as "compulsory", and the unstarred items as extra practice.

• ** Learn the words on Vocabulary Checklist 2 (page 26). **
• Do the comprehension questions on the story "tonsor" ("the barber"). See note below for guidance on how to approach this.
• **Read the grammar note "About the Language" on page 32. **


Notes:

• VOCAB – When learning vocab, try to spot links between Latin words and words in English (or other Romance languages you know) to help you remember them. So, for instance, looking down Vocab Checklist 2, we see amicus, which gives us words like "amicable", or the French ami / Spanish amigo; ancilla gives us "ancilliary"; dominus gives us "dominate", "dominant" etc; dormit gives us "dormant" and "dormitory"; laudat gives us "applause" (that one's harder to spot because "applause" has a prefix); and salutat gives us "salute". Also, if you want to test yourself, there's an online vocab tester if you follow this link: CSCP - CLC - Unit 1 - Stage 2 and click on the "Stage 2 vocabulary" link. You can set up the vocab tester to test your knowledge of either just the words in Stage 2, or of words from both Stage 1 and Stage 2.

• COMPREHENSION – When doing a comprehension exercise, you don't have to fully translate the passages. It just tests your general ability to get meaning out of a passage (if you want to translate the whole passage before doing the questions, you may find it helpful, but it's more time-consuming that way). Make sure you use the mark scheme – so for instance, Question 7 is worth 2 + 1 marks: this means that there are two parts for the question, and to answer it fully you need to give two details in answer to the first question, and one detail in answer to the second.

• GRAMMAR – First thing to note is you're not learning anything new here, just getting a bit more detail on something you've already learned last time: subject and object. So remember the two core lessons from last week (objects end in "m" , and they usually come after the subject and before the verb in a sentence). Essentially, the passage just points out that there are, in Latin, three types of noun (actually there are more, but for now let's just say there are three!):

1) FIRST DECLENSION NOUNS (e.g. Metella, ancilla): These are FEMININE, and they end in "a" in the subject form (or nominative). They form the object (or accusative) simply by sticking an "m" on the end of the word (e.g. Metellam, ancillam).

2) SECOND DECLENSION NOUNS (e.g. Caecilius, servus). These are MASCULINE, and they end in "us". They form the object (or accusative) by changing the last "s" into an "m" (e.g. Caecilium, servum).

3) THIRD DECLENSION NOUNS (e.g. Grumio, mercator). Think of these as the random category. They can be EITHER MASCULINE OR FEMININE. There is no fixed form for the nominative (subject), so for now just think of them as anything that doesn't end in either "us" or "a". In the object (or accusative) form, they end in "em", and there is sometimes a change to the word itself when forming the object (e.g Grumionem, mercatorem).


Hope that's all okay. Best of luck!