Learning Latin With Dyslexia
There Were Dyslexic Students In Ancient Rome — And They Learned Latin Too
I used to hear this all the time: “Latin… You’re dyslexic, are you sure that’s not going to be too hard for you?” or the more demoralized “Yeah, I took Latin for a few years too, but I stopped because I’m dyslexic.”
Some common traits of dyslexia include flipping letters, recognizing some words as other words, flipping the word order of a sentence, seeing letters as closer together than they actually are, and trouble translating what we hear into what we write. All of these can take a toll on our reading comprehension and spelling. This does not mean a foreign language will be too difficult to learn.
Because of the way it’s discussed, Latin isn’t presented as a learning-disability-friendly subject. Few classes send dyslexics running for the hills like Latin. Because of the way it’s often taught, not many dyslexic readers end up reaching the upper levels of the language, even though about 1 in 6 people have dyslexia. If you’re a teacher, I can almost guarantee that you have a dyslexic student in your class, whether they are diagnosed or not.
But with the huge spike in awareness and interest around learning disabilities over the past five years (especially common ones like dyslexia, ADD, and ADHD), I’ve noticed a change in tone among Latin students and teachers: “I’m dyslexic, so I’m trying to study this differently” or “I’ve got a dyslexic student, any tips for how to make studying more effective for them?” Yes! I want to jump for joy whenever I hear this.
The mere fact that more Latin teachers have this mindset is a massive win for classroom inclusivity. People finally seem to understand that extra time on exam day is great, but if you’re dyslexic, you’re dyslexic all the time. You also don’t need to stop reading Latin in favor of an ‘easier’ subject, you might just need to approach it differently.
Were it not for my own high school Latin teacher’s patience with me and love of the language, I probably would have stopped studying Latin long ago. He was a medieval studies Ph.D. from St. Andrews who taught Latin at a girls’ school and radiated joy. Everyone talked about how great he was, and I was excited to take Latin. I knew I was dyslexic going into his class. After the repeated experience of grade school parent/teacher conferences ending in “something might be wrong here,” I got tested for learning disabilities at the start of high school. I didn’t think dyslexia would be a problem in the Latin classroom since most of my previous teachers were willing to overlook misspellings on exams and slow reading in class, while I was willing to put in the extra hours to keep pace with my classmates.
Unfortunately, misspellings in Latin class translated into mis-conjugated verbs and faulty declension charts. Slow reading meant an inability to learn the vocabulary words in time for quizzes. My brute force study strategy didn’t work in high school because there just weren’t enough hours in a day to memorize everything. That first semester was a slog.
At the same time, I was so fascinated by the language and the access it was giving me to peoples and cultures geographically and temporally removed I couldn’t give it up, especially when we started reading Biblical Latin and Roman mythology side-by-side. Nothing provides the same level of escapism as Latin. The language became representative of two extremes in my mind: the excruciating tedium of grammar charts and principle parts that thwarted me daily and frustrated me to no end, and the pinnacle of beauty which I found in Latin poetry. One extreme was a kind of penance, the other a reward, and the first was the gateway to the second (I was a dramatic kid).
Two things helped me change my attitude and towards Latin and my strategies for learning it. First, my Latin teacher reminded me that we aren’t here to suffer. Latin literature wasn’t some kind of reward for the pain of learning the Latin language. The process was supposed to be fun, not just the end result. Then, my music teacher, a former college professor and fellow dyslexic, suggested I try and engage my auditory memory more while I studied. This had worked for him and he’d made it through the upper echelons of academia. I abandoned the grueling ‘over-time’ plan of attack and started experimenting with different ways to more easily absorb the language.
Over the course of about six years of trial and error with different tactics, Latin has gotten a lot easier for my dyslexic brain, and I never had to give it up. I ended up majoring in Latin literature as an undergrad and am currently in a Classics Ph.D. program. This isn’t a tale of hard work and discipline ending in just recompense. It’s about learning to work around the system presented to you and finding an easier way.
For any fellow dyslexic Latin learners out there, or teachers interested in helping out a dyslexic student, I want to share some of the language learning tricks that were most useful for me and helped get me through high school, college, and grad school Latin. I should include this caveat, though: I am not a learning disability specialist and I don’t have the authority to diagnose anyone; I’m speaking from life experience and experiences shared with other dyslexic students. I should also note that not all forms of dyslexia are the same. It’s a spectrum, and I fall in the “moderate dyslexia with functional reading” category. In my experience, the grand unifier among dyslexics is that none of us have won a spelling bee, but there is great variety in our other experiences. These tricks will help some dyslexics more than others.
With that said, here are five major tools I’ve picked up from ten years of studying Latin and conversations I’ve had with other dyslexic language learners and teachers.
1. Use your voice and your ears.
It’s uncommon for a dyslexic to be diagnosed before they are in primary school. This is because a lot of us don’t have trouble learning to speak, just trouble learning to read, so there isn’t much that hinders us from accessing language orally. When we learn our native language, we learn to speak first, then read. Even if we are slow readers, we aren’t left out of the language completely.
In the Latin classroom, this is flipped. We usually learn to read, then recite the text in front of us (sometimes), then communicate our own thoughts (if we are really lucky). This presents all sorts of challenges for us because our auditory memory is often much better than our visual memory.
To work around this, I recommend doing as much of your studying as possible out loud. Recite the endings you need to memorize out loud. Say your vocabulary words out loud. Speak those principle parts into a recording app and play them back to yourself on your commute. Say anything you need to memorize into a recorder and listen to it later. This will help lift the language off the page and into an auditory space you might be more comfortable with. In addition to reciting your work, listen to as much Latin as possible. There is a multitude of Latin listening resources available now, from Youtube channels like Latinitium to podcasts like “Quomodo Dicitur?”
If you have the option to sign up for an active Latin class or join a community that speaks Latin, all the better. You’ve found a group that also has an interest in communicating in Latin with the side effect of creating a dyslexic-friendly environment.
2) Don’t stress about reading out loud.
This is going to seem counter-intuitive after I just recommended using your voice. However, a commonly shared characteristic among dyslexics is the fear of reading out loud… in any language. We often have to focus harder to make the leap between the letters on the page and the noises they should make, so we can’t focus on the actual meaning of the sentence. This emphasis on pronunciation, as well as the anxiety we sometimes feel at reading slowly or messing up, hinders comprehension.
In grade school and high school, reading out loud was a nightmare. I would struggle through a sentence in front of 30 of my peers without retaining a single word of it. It was much better for me to listen to classmates who could read more clearly while I followed along on the page, creating a stronger link between what was written and the sound of my language.
I’ve had similar experiences in Latin. Because of the comprehension gap, it is essentially impossible for me to read a sentence out loud, then immediately translate it into English. Here is what I do instead when I’m in a situation where I do need to read out loud: I read the sentence aloud once, then I read it again quietly to myself, start to finish, very slowly. The first time is to hear the sound of the Latin. The second time is for actual comprehension. At this point I can translate it, paraphrase it aliis verbis, contradict it, argue with the author, nitpick the grammar, you name it. If you are a teacher who requires reading Latin sentence aloud, you may want to mention this method to your class so dyslexic students feel more comfortable taking their time.
Results will obviously vary depending on the length and complexity of the sentence and the experience level of the reader. But allowing yourself that extra time and a second pass lets you use your voice and increases your comprehension.
If you want to get better at reading Latin out loud, you can always practice while completely alone in a stress-free setting. I also recommend listening to recordings of the Latin you’ve got in front of you while you follow along, then reading that same passage aloud for yourself. Hans Ørberg’s Familia Romana is great for this, as a variety of recorded readings can be found online.
3) Edit, modify, and contort your text.
A common and easily remedied dyslexic complaint: The font’s too small; I could read it, but it’s in size six single-spaced font, so now I can’t keep the letters straight. Dyslexics flip letters and words even when the font is something palatable and familiar, like 12-point Times New Roman. Small font and single spacing aggravate this, as can different fonts. Cursive and loopy letters can be difficult for people without dyslexia, and completely inscrutable for those who have it. In general, if it’s the sort of font that would look gorgeous on a wedding invitation, I don’t want to read it.
But nowadays we are in luck. Writing software makes it easy to restructure your Latin into a readable format. Most Latin you will be assigned or want to read is available for free online. I like to copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, put it in a nice big font size, double-space it, and change it into a font I am comfortable reading. This helps my brain keep the letters straight. I also avoid splitting one word hyphenated over two lines. The first half of a verb on one line with its personal ending on the next line and a hyphen in between is an unnecessary hindrance for dyslexic readers, but having control over a text’s formatting removes this obstacle.
There are even a few open-source fonts specifically developed for dyslexic readers that can be added to Microsoft Word. I like to use OpenDyslexic, which is free, but there are other options, like Christian Boer’s “Dyslexie” font. In such fonts, the weighing of the letters helps to give each letter a more unique shape and there is more space between each letter. This helps prevent flipping and skipping letters when you read.
If you teach Latin, I highly encourage you to think about font size, spacing, and style when you give a student an exam. Easily readable text won’t hurt your non-dyslexic students and it can help a dyslexic immensely. And for the love of God, please stop assigning texts that require a magnifying glass. I’m looking at you, Classics professors.
4) Block the changing endings with a bookmark.
Dyslexics often learn to read by using full word recognition. This means we identify the word more based on the outline shape of the word than the letters in the word. In Latin, the shape of the word changes pretty dramatically with the different verb endings. For example, amare can look like a totally different word to a dyslexic than amabantur. The length of the word has doubled, there’s a hook-shaped letter at the end where there used to be a nice round vowel, and there is a tall letter in the middle where there wasn’t one before. It becomes difficult to recognize the root word when the general shape is so different.
Any of the letters in this new word shape might be liable to jump around as well. Amabantur could look like amubantar or ambaantar. It’s pretty hard to identify that imperfect ‘ba-,’ 3rd person plural ‘-nt’ and passive ‘-ur’ when letters don’t seem to stay next to each other.
I didn’t really know how to combat this problem until college when my first-year ancient Greek teacher showed me this trick. I find it works really well with Latin. I take a bookmark and start at the beginning of a word, covering up all but the first letter with the bookmark. Then I reveal the letters one by one, stopping where I need to and identifying different pieces of the word. So, if I start with amabantur, 3 letters in, I only see ‘ama-.’ This is a shape I know. The ‘b’ doesn’t flip with the second ‘a’ and the ‘a’s can’t trade places with the ‘u.’ At this point, that first shape is locked in place and I move the bookmark to reveal ‘-bant’, a shape I recognize from reciting all those imperfect endings out loud to myself. After that ‘-ur’ appears, and I can sound out these two letters to hear that passive ending. If a word is too long and its letters too jumpy, I can always use the bookmark to start covering up the front of the word once I’ve gotten to the end, and that will keep the letters from moving in the other direction.
Looking back, I can’t believe it took me four years to encounter this trick. It’s brilliantly simple and dead useful. You can’t flip letters with other letters that you can’t see yet. Covering one half of the word to focus on the other half is similar to putting your glasses on in the morning. It snaps things into a kind of clarity, and it’s just easier to see everything.
I know this sounds like it must take me ages to read one sentence in Latin, but this is just a training tool. I don’t have to do this for every single word, or even all the time. After a while, you don’t need to do it. Your brain catches up to the changing shapes as you read Latin more frequently, and you start to read at a nice pace. The bookmark helps keep you sane early on, while you learn the letter combinations. This can be really useful when you need to write a verb paradigm or conjugation chart: write the verb out a piece at a time and cover it over as you go, when needed.
I still keep a bookmark with me when I read Latin and use it for the occasional word that I’m not comprehending. For example, I have problems with recognizing ‘proficiscor’ variants and combinations pretty often, but I just take it a piece at a time and soon enough I’ll recognize the word. I use a bookmark on paper or even up against my computer screen; when I don’t have one, I just use the other page or my finger.
5) Be open about your dyslexia.
This one will be the hardest one for some dyslexics. When I first started telling teachers and fellow classmates that I was dyslexic, it was clear people expected some kind of apology to accompany this confession. I started to worry that teachers would think I was just making excuses, or other students would think I was just not that smart. I didn’t want to be seen reading with my bookmark sounding out the Aeneid like a child learning to read Green Eggs and Ham. I felt like my different methods were some kind of hindrance and not the useful adaptations that they are. As I started using more auditory resources and getting involved with the spoken Latin community, I had instructors react like I just told them I was a space alien sent to infiltrate the Classics department. Don’t let this get to you. There are a variety of different ways to learn a foreign language and you don’t have to stick to any single one to be legitimate in your efforts.
In college, I didn’t want to tell any instructors that I was dyslexic. That was a bad inclination because more language teachers have tended to be sympathetic and want to work with me than not. There will be the occasional oddball, but for the most part, telling people has worked out for the better. As time went on, people stopped expecting that apology. Very few professors in my undergraduate classes had bad reactions. Not a single one in my graduate program has. Disclosing that you are dyslexic isn’t an excuse; it’s an acceptance of your reality that you can now thrive in, instead of suffering in a state of denial.
If you are a Latin teacher and also dyslexic, you may want to tell your students. Drop it into casual conversation so that it’s normalized. It doesn’t stop you from doing your job every day or keep you from enjoying Latin. It also helps them to see what can be achieved. My Latin teacher’s acceptance and my music teacher’s own dyslexic experience got me into the right mental space to be able to be a happy dyslexic Latinist. When I teach Latin, I mention it now and I usually have a couple of students say, “Oh, me too!” The stigma around learning disabilities is dissipating and simply letting such students know they are welcome to take part in a ‘difficult’ subject can do wonders.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve learned a lot of Latin and a lot about how I learn it. I consider myself really lucky. If some of the things hadn’t gone right in the beginning — if I had had a teacher who was a little less patient and caring, if I’d never been told to try different methods, or if I hadn’t known I was dyslexic and just assumed Latin was too hard for me — I would have missed out on one of the core parts of my life. I would have missed out on the beautiful because of the painful (I’m still dramatic). Instead, I just get to enjoy it every day. The Latin got easier, but it never got any less beautiful. To my fellow dyslexic Latin readers, take your time, try different things to see what works for you, and enjoy the ride. Just because you’ll never win that spelling bee doesn’t mean you can’t have great Latin.
AnnMarie Patterson is a Ph.D. student in Classics at the University of Southern California. She loves active Latin, Roman architecture, and Italian food.
