As many of you already know, I've been learning GCSE Latin in a year. I started shortly after my birthday in July 2012 and took the exams in June 2013.

Well, the results are in and I'm fairly happy, though my disaster in Latin Prose Literature is pretty easy to spot...

Latin Language 1: A (82/100)
Latin Language 2: B (76/100)
Latin Prose Literature: U (13/100)
Latin Verse Literature: B (73/100)

Overall Grade: C

Although I'm obviously well happy with the A grade in the first paper which covered all the core latin stuff, I'm actually more pleased with the B grade in the second paper which covered all the really hard stuff.

The U in the third paper - well, as I said at the time.. What an idiot. It was entirely my own stupid fault. I should have known there was a set text from the OCR Anthology but I didn't becaus I naively assumed that my GCSE Latin textbook would teach me all I needed to know for a GCSE Latin exam. Idiot.

An important lesson learned - always thoroughly read the notes from the examination board. They will tell you what you actually need to do. For instance, spending six months memorising the set text would have really helped. Fortunately, I still had three days to memorise the set text for the fourth paper which must have gone alright because I got a B on that one.

I has been suggested that I might enquire in to the possibility of resitting the papers that went wrong but I'm not going to do that. My purpose in taking these exams was to see how successful I had been at learning GCSE Latin in a year and if I do resits, well, I've been learning Latin for more than a year now.. it wouldn't be the same.

Overall, I'm happy with the outcome. I've got an A and a B on the core stuff so I know I did reasonably well, I've got a U to keep me humble and a C overall counts as a "pass" at GCSE which means I can say, yes, officially, I really did pass GCSE Latin in a year.

Latin has a reputation as being super hard and yes, if you are fourteen and you didn't do your homework then it's not a subject you can muddle your way through. To adults however, who put the time in, it's suprisingly rewarding.

In fact, I highly recommend it.

As you may know, I've been teaching myself Latin this year from the appropriately named "So you really want to learn Latin?" books. The "So you really want to learn Latin?" claim to take the reader to GCSE level and beyond so I booked myself in for a GCSE exam to see how I would get on.

Well, it was a mixed bag. All in all I think it turned out okay but it wasn't without adventure.

The GCSE in Latin consists of two core exams and you know the first one is going to be fairly straight forward because it's the one sat by people doing the "short course" GCSE in Latin. That one went well, which made me happy and complacent. It's not a good idea to be complacent when you are sitting Latin exams.

Of course, if Mr Examiner couldn't put the harder stuff in core exam number one, where is he going to put all the hard stuff? That's right... core exam number two was... well... let's just say there were some kids talking about it on Twitter afterwards and their words are not suitable for a family blog. It was hard but I think it went okay. Mostly... I did have to guess one or two words...

Never fear though because from now on things were going to be plain sailing. The remaining two exams are drawn from a bank of modules and people on the "short course" choose from the same modules so no more hard stuff. I watched a movie the night before my "Latin Prose Literature" exam, strolled in confidently, opened my paper and... what!? The Latin on this paper.. It wasn't Latin I had forgotten - it was Latin I had never learned. No glossary either... I struggled and struggled through this one.

Reading about exam afterwards on Twitter, I noticed some kids talking about the texts on the paper before the exam. Are they cheating? I wondered... no... wait... It turns out that OCR publish the set text for the exam a year in advance. I could have known that Latin. I should have known that Latin. I should have read the tedious notes for teachers on the OCR website instead of thinking how easy the first paper had been and how amazing I was and how I didn't need no advice from nobody. What an idiot.

Fortunately for me, I'm sitting these exams for my own amusement and not to impress ladies at dinner parties.. yet I can't help feeling dissapointed. Not so much because I wanted an awesome grade (who am I kidding, of course I wanted an awesome grade) but because I wanted a fair assessment of my Latin skills after a year's study and now, no matter what grade I get, I'll always know it was mangled by a stupid oversight that had little to do with my ability to read Latin.

Oh well...

Determined not to make the same mistake again I found the set texts for my fourth and final Latin exam - "Latin Prose Literature" and I did read it before bed and every morning the weekend and two days that I had left before the exam. I even sat down with a dictionary and translated it word by word... It paid off, because in this exam I did better - way better. Maybe even better than the first one.

A special word of thanks to the wonderful people at Pocklington school - getting oneself booked in to a GCSE exam as a private candidate is harder than it sounds and I was on the verge of giving up when a friend who homeschools suggested I try Pocklington. The chap there was great and even though I had to drive 45 minutes to every exam, at least I got to sit the exams in a converted railway station which is a very awesome place to sit a GCSE Latin exam.

So, now I sit back and wait for my grade. I don't really know what to expect - after my disasterous third exam it's anybody's guess. I just hope it's not too embarrassing...

In the meantime, I've got a book to read!

This afternoon I will be joining the many thousands of young people who are sitting GCSE examinations this summer.

Unit A401 (1 hour)

The Latin passages on this exam paper tell a story or stories drawn from mythology or Roman domestic life. You will answer some comprehension questions and translate a small extract of Latin into English.

It's just a bit of fun for me, but for them it's a serious business - so say a prayer and wish them luck! Not that they should need it... kids these days... they should get some work done! Etc, etc, grumble, grumble...

Is it possible to go from knowing absolutely nothing about Latin to being ready to sit a GCSE exam in less than a year? I'm going with yes. But you have to really want to do it...

A friend told me he was really enjoying learning Latin and finding it both easier than expected and also more useful. That seemed unlikely. Still, he suggested a book called "So You Really Want to Learn Latin" and after reading some reviews about how it was a terrible, old fashioned book that puts latin teaching back in the 1950's I couldn't help but order a copy.

Which I duly left on the shelf until I was interested.

I'm not sure what latin teaching looked like before it was put back in the 1950's but this terrible old fashioned teaching consists of telling you things that you ought to know and then getting you to answer questions based on the knowledge you just acquired. Gasp. I know. It's awful.

Anyhow, to my suprise I discovered that it was nothing at all like learning a language at school and more like a sort of puzzle game which appealed to me because I'm a nerd. Somewhere around chapter three I realised I had been doing a chapter a week simply for fun and I thought to myself "hang on, if I keep doing a chapter a week then in thirty weeks I will have learned Latin!"

Yes, well... it didn't quite work out like that. Week thirty has just finished and I'm only on chapter twenty-six. Still, pretty good going and I have learned a lot. In fact, it's gone well enough that I have booked myself in for a GCSE Latin exam (actually, four one hour papers) in June this year.

It hasn't been all sunshine and giggles. The interesting fun puzzle feeling wore off pretty quickly and there were weeks when I just didn't want to do it at all, but I pushed on. Being a dad has been good training for doing things I don't want to do. Getting up in the night, changing a nappy, conjugating a verb. It's all the same really...

So there you go. It is possible to mostly learn GCSE Latin in a year...

But you do have to really want to.

By Victor Lams... h/t Mark Shea

No.

From the documents of the Second Vatican Council...

"care must be taken to ensure that the faithful may also be able to say or sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them."

[Sacrosanctum Concilium 54]

Is such care being taken?

When I said I didn't know this, the Bishop said "shame on you". He said that "It's part and parcel of being a Latin Rite Catholic to at least know the Our Father".

In our parish there is no Latin ever. That's because the opinions of our Bishop are largely irrelevant here. If I want to experience things that are "part and parcel of being a Latin Rite Catholic" I have to go on YouTube...

Isn't technology wonderful.

When I interviewed Bishop Drainey, we had the following exchange...

I explained that most young people in Middlesbrough diocese don't know the Our Father in Latin. "Well," he replied. "I think that's very sad if that's the case. It's part of our heritage and I feel very strongly about that."

[link]

He is going to need to feel very strongly if he is going to do anything about it. He is not up against one or two hippy priests, he's up against a cultural phenomena, as Jeffery Tucker describes in his preface to Msgr Marini's address...

Every Catholic has experienced it at some level, that culture of disdain for the past that has afflicted Catholicisim in the postconciliar period. It happens at our parishes, when a special guest lecturer talks about the supposed horrors Catholic school back in the day, or of how ridiculous it was that the Mass was in Latin, that we attempted to sing chant and did it so poorly, or that we went to confession behind a screen. We read about it in our catechetical materials, that contempt for what has gone before in the great age of ignorance and oppression that was finally swept away in the liberating Age of Aquarius. How unfortunate those people were and how fortunate we are in this enlightened age.

Or so we've been taught. So pervasive has this attitude been that we can speak of self-hating Catholics as a widespread cultural phenomenon. Even in our own parishes, the absence of a positive self identity seems almost required as an ground rule for every conversation. "I don't want to go back to the past of course," we are expected to say before adding any critique of the present. This attitude - this hermeneutic of discontinuity, this positing of a great divide between preconciliar and postconcilar faith - has cut us off in a strange way. Wondering used book stores we find pre-1965 books on the faith and read them like relics. We don't recognize the pictures, understand the words, or even see a familiarity in the disciplines then and now.

link

You don't fight a culture by quietly pottering away in the Cathedral and making sure Masses there contain the occasional bit of Latin. You fight a culture by doing things openly and publicly in such a way that it becomes a widely known fact that, as Bishop Drainey said to me: "It's part and parcel of being a Latin Rite Catholic to at least know the Our Father or to be able to sing the Creed and the basic things [in Latin]."