LRC Week 4 – 15 minutes/day Repetita Iuvant

This week we’ll increase our daily reading:

Read Latin for 15 minutes each day.

At this point your daily reading may start to have a noticeable impact on your schedule; it’s no longer something you can just squeeze in to a few spare minutes. Hopefully, by establishing your routine with shorter increments, it will be easier to stick with it for longer reading sessions. Think about whether the time you’ve chosen to read each day will work with this longer commitment.

Repetita Iuvant

About a week ago I finished reading Historia Apollonii regis Tyri. Depending on what reading you’ve chosen, you may be in a similar situation. Rather than looking for my next selection, I simply went back to the beginning and started reading again.

The value of repetition goes beyond simply drilling charts for rote memorization. A number of studies have shown that listening to familiar rather than unfamiliar music results in greater emotional engagement. How often have you read a favorite book from childhood, or watched a favorite movie, and experienced those positive feelings all over again? This positive connection to your reading can help increase motivation, and create a stronger connection for learning.

In addition to the emotional impact, rereading something familiar has a pedagogical benefit. Once you know the general plot of a text, rereading allows you to focus on the finer details and textual elements. After reading through once, you’ll know a greater percentage of the vocabulary and structures, and can focus on certain phrases that the author tends to use.

Repetition can also be useful during your individual reading sessions. As we work on getting more out of our reading sessions, repetition will be a starting point for interacting more with the text.

More for this week’s assignment

Even if you haven’t finished your selection, consider going back to the beginning, and rereading what you’ve completed so far. You’ll find the experience much easier than you did a few weeks ago. While you are reading, pick a specific section of text. This could be a paragraph or a page. Read that section three times before moving on to the next section and repeating. Hopefully things that were unclear the first time through will make more sense by the time you move on.

Don’t forget to post about your daily reading, and follow other people’s progress in Twitter, under #LatinReadingChallenge