Lessons restart these days — between 7 and 17 September depending on the region — and anyone entering Year 2 with Latin soon notices. In Year 1 you could still translate the versione (the Latin passage you translate into Italian at school) “by ear”: short sentences, one verb per clause, and the sense that came out on its own in the end. From November onwards that system stops working, and not because the student has got worse: because the Latin text changes structure.
At the liceo classico (the classical high school) Latin in the first two years takes five hours a week, at the standard liceo scientifico three. The amount of practice changes, and so does what is really new. At the classical school the block that arrives between November and January — the subjunctive in all four tenses, the participle in all its uses, the ablative absolute, narrative cum, the sequence of tenses (consecutio temporum) — rains down all at once; at the science and language high schools the participle and ablative absolute have already been seen in Year 1, and the novelty narrows to the subjunctive, narrative cum, indirect statements and the sequence of tenses. In every case it is the point where most of the first-term failing grades fall, and almost always not from ignorance of the grammar, but from lack of method.
Below is the method we use in lessons, with a passage annotated line by line.
What really changes in Year 2
The pattern of the year is predictable — this is the classical school’s, at the science high school the same constructions fit into three hours a week instead of five. September–October: deponent verbs, the infinitive and indirect statements; from November to January the heavy block — the subjunctive, the participle, the ablative absolute, the active periphrastic, purpose and result clauses, narrative cum, indirect questions, the sequence of tenses; between February and March comparatives, numerals, compounds of sum, irregular verbs, conditional sentences; in spring the gerund, gerundive, supine, passive periphrastic, clauses with quod and the syntax of the cases.
The practical consequence is just one: in Year 2 a Latin clause no longer matches an Italian sentence. A single period can contain a main clause, two explicit subordinate clauses and two or three implicit constructions — an ablative absolute, a conjunct participle, an indirect statement — that in Italian will become as many separate sentences. Anyone who translates word by word arrives halfway through the period with a heap of pieces that don’t fit together, and starts to guess.
The format of the test does not help you improvise: in the first two years the passage is translated in two hours with a dictionary, and each term there are at least two written tests and two oral tests. Roughly a hundred words, though at the classical school — five hours a week, a denser syllabus — the passage may be longer. Two hours seem like a lot: they are not, if the first ninety minutes go on looking up words without having understood the structure.
The first method mistake: opening the dictionary straight away
The most widespread and costliest mistake is to start from the first word and look it up in the dictionary. It doesn’t work, for three reasons.
The dictionary gives meanings, not function: milites can be nominative or accusative plural, and it is the structure of the period that says which. Latin also has a free word order, with the verb often at the end: translating in sequence means gathering complements for two lines without yet knowing what they are complements of. And there is time — twenty fruitless look-ups are half an hour, a quarter of the test.
The method is turned upside down: first you understand the syntactic framework of the period, then you look up only the words you really need, with a grammatical hypothesis already in hand (“this is a perfect participle in the ablative, so I look for the verb”).
The method in eight steps
This is the procedure we have students repeat until it becomes automatic, and it applies to every translation of the year.
- Read the whole passage once, without translating. Title and notes included: the title almost always says who the protagonist is and what it is about, and gives you the semantic field within which to choose meanings.
- Isolate the periods. A slash at every full stop. Each period is a separate problem and must be solved completely before moving to the next.
- Count the finite verbs (indicative, subjunctive, imperative). Their number is the number of explicit clauses in the period. Underline them all before doing anything else.
- Find the main clause. It is the finite verb that is not introduced by a subordinating conjunction (ut, cum, ubi, si, quod, ne, quamquam…) or by a relative pronoun. Its subject is the pivot of the period.
- Circle the introducers and assign each verb to its clause. Cum + subjunctive, ut + subjunctive, qui/quae/quod, si: each brings a verb with it. Draw an arrow from each subordinate clause to what it depends on.
- Mark the implicit constructions — those without a finite verb, the real novelty of Year 2: ablative absolute, conjunct participle, indirect statements, gerund and gerundive. In Italian they will become independent sentences, so they must be spotted now.
- Assign the cases to the main nouns. Nominatives and accusatives first: they are the skeleton of the sentence. Ablatives and genitives come after, they are complements.
- Only now the dictionary, and only for the words you don’t recognise. Then reread the translation with the Latin covered: if a sentence in your translation doesn’t stand up on its own, it is wrong even if every word is right.
Steps 2 to 7 take five to eight minutes per period at the beginning, two to three after a couple of months: time that is fully recovered in the translating.
The five constructions to recognise at a glance
In Year 2 most of the work is on five structures: recognising them in half a second is half the task.
- Ablative absolute. A noun (or pronoun) in the ablative + a participle in the ablative agreeing with it, with no syntactic link to the rest of the sentence: castris positis, legatis auditis, urbe capta. It is rendered with “after…”, “since…”, or with a perfect participial phrase. Working rule: its subject does not appear elsewhere in the sentence.
- Conjunct participle. The same participle, but agreeing with an element that is already in the sentence, usually the subject of the main clause: Illi, hac oratione permoti, …. It is translated with a relative clause or a causal or temporal subordinate. The difference from the ablative absolute is all here, and it is the question that comes back in every test.
- Narrative cum. Cum + subjunctive depending on a past tense: “since”, “after”, “having…”. Note that cum + indicative is temporal (“when”) and cum + ablative with no verb is the preposition (“with”): three values, and what tells them apart is what stands next to it.
- Accusative-and-infinitive clause. Accusative + infinitive, governed by a verb of saying, knowing, thinking, ordering: scio hostes appropinquare, “I know that the enemy are approaching”. The accusative is the subject of the infinitive, not the object of the main verb — the hardest mental inversion of the first two years. The tense of the infinitive signals simultaneity (present), anteriority (perfect) or posteriority (future).
- Periphrastics. The active one is the future participle in -urus + sum: daturus est, “he intends to give”. The passive one is the gerundive in -ndus + sum: pax petenda est, “peace must be asked for”, with the dative of agent (mihi, sibi, Caesari) and not a + ablative. Confusing -urus and -ndus means writing “he would have done” instead of “he had to do”.
An annotated passage, line by line
Here is a passage modelled on Caesar’s prose, the Latin you work on between Year 2 and Year 3. First the text, then the procedure.
Hostes, ubi de adventu Caesaris certiores facti sunt, legatos ad eum miserunt. Caesar, legatis auditis, respondit obsides sibi dandos esse; se autem, si id fecissent, pacem daturum esse. Illi, hac oratione permoti, cum diutius resistere non possent, imperata facere constituerunt.
First period. Finite verbs: facti sunt and miserunt, so two clauses. Miserunt has no introducer: it is the main clause, subject hostes. Facti sunt is introduced by ubi, temporal with the indicative, “when”. Certiores facti sunt is a fixed expression (certiorem facere aliquem, “to inform someone”), so in the passive “were informed”.
Translation: The enemy, when they were informed of Caesar’s arrival, sent envoys to him.
Second period. Only one finite verb, respondit: it is the main clause. Legatis auditis is an ablative absolute — a double plural ablative, perfect participle of audio, and its subject has no other role in the sentence: “after hearing the envoys”.
Two coordinated indirect statements depend on respondit. The first, obsides sibi dandos esse, contains a passive periphrastic: dandos is a gerundive agreeing with obsides, sibi is a dative of agent referring to Caesar, so “that hostages had to be handed over to him”. The second, se … pacem daturum esse, has instead the active future infinitive: “that he would grant peace”. The -ndus / -urus contrast is all here: obligation on one side, future intention on the other. What remains is si id fecissent, pluperfect subjunctive, protasis of a conditional sentence inside the indirect speech.
Translation: Caesar, after hearing the envoys, replied that hostages had to be handed over to him; that he, however, if they did so, would grant peace.
Third period. Finite verbs: possent and constituerunt. Constituerunt is the main clause (subject illi) and governs the infinitive facere. Cum … possent is narrative cum with the imperfect subjunctive, so simultaneity: “being unable”, “since they could not”. Hac oratione permoti is a conjunct participle — it agrees with illi, which is already in the sentence, and for that reason it is not an ablative absolute. Imperata is the neuter plural perfect participle of impero used as a noun, “the orders”.
Translation: They, struck by this speech and unable to resist any longer, decided to carry out the orders.
Three periods, five implicit constructions: the dictionary is needed for three or four words, the rest is analysis.
The traps that come back in every test
They are always the same: it is worth keeping a list in your notebook and going over it before handing in. And if on the day of the test the problem is anxiety more than method, the guide on how to manage test anxiety applies to Latin too.
- Ablative absolute mistaken for a conjunct participle (and vice versa). The test: does the subject of the participle appear elsewhere in the sentence? If so, it is conjunct; if not, it is absolute.
- Purpose or result? Ut + subjunctive can be either. The clues are in the main clause: tam, ita, sic, adeo, tantus, talis announce a result clause. And the negation: ne introduces the negative purpose clause, ut non the result clause.
- The ambiguous quod. Neuter relative pronoun, causal conjunction (“because”) or declarative (“the fact that”). If there is a neuter antecedent it agrees with, it is a relative.
- The accusative of the indirect statement read as an object. Dico Marcum venire is not “I tell Marcus to come” but “I say that Marcus is coming”.
- The dative of agent translated as an indirect object. Mihi legendum est is “I must read”, not “one must read to me”.
- The sequence of tenses translated literally. An imperfect subjunctive governed by a past tense expresses simultaneity: in Italian (and English) it almost always becomes an imperfect indicative or a participle.
- The first meaning in the dictionary. Virtus in a military text is not “virtue”, it is “courage”; res only takes on meaning from the context.
The dictionary and the principal parts
The dictionary is a tool for confirming, not for discovering. Look up one word at a time and only after the analysis: if you have established that auditis is a participle, go straight to audio. Read the whole entry and not the first line — in long entries (res, ago, fero, peto) the right sense is further down, signalled by the construction (peto aliquid ab aliquo) or by the field. And use the grammar pages: tables of paradigms, irregular verbs and the summary of subordinate clauses are allowed in the test and are worth more than ten look-ups.
One last piece of advice that is worth a grade: learn the principal parts in blocks. Twenty verbs a week, reviewed the next day and after a week, are worth more than two hundred verbs read once in May. The principal parts are the part of Latin that cannot be reconstructed by reasoning: without them, even a well-analysed passage remains half translated.
How we work in lessons
Latin lessons are taught by a tutor of the GL Ripetizioni team who specialises in the subject, and always start from the real translations set at school, not from a standard programme.
The first meeting is for working out where the chain breaks: some students have not consolidated the morphology (third declension, principal parts, the perfect), some know the grammar but have no method for analysing the period, and some have both problems. In the first case we go back over the morphology in parallel with the current translations; in the second we work almost only on the procedure, with passages analysed without translating them — you break up the period, find the main clause, mark the constructions, and stop there.
The order is then reversed compared with how it is usually done: first the student tries alone with the eight-step analysis, then we look together at where they got stuck. Correcting a translation already done teaches more than watching someone translate. Syntax diagrams, tables of constructions and corrected translations stay in the personal area for review before the test.
On timing we are honest: to make the method automatic, with the morphology already in place, four or five lessons are needed; if the Year 1 grammar also has to be recovered, eight to ten meetings over a couple of months. Lessons are online, one-to-one, with offline payment after the lessons; for the cost of the single lesson and the 10-lesson package see the pricing page.
On the page for Latin tutoring you will find the full programme — grammar, translations, literature, making up a failed subject and the classical school’s second maturità paper — and in the humanities section the other classical-school subjects we work on.
If the problem is recognising the structure of the sentence, you first need clause analysis. For Greek, in the same year, there is the aorist. To see what the second Latin paper at the maturità asks, try the site’s Latin practice test.
If you want to arrive at the November block with the method already in hand rather than afterwards, write to us for a free 30-minute introductory call on the contact page: we look together at one of your marked translations, work out where the chain breaks and tell you frankly how many lessons you need.
