Mark Clark and Jack Clark wrote How To Teach Your Children the Latin of the Church based on their experience teaching and learning Latin. They wanted to teach and to learn Latin well enough to speak, read, and write it, and close friends of theirs, notably David Morgan and Jim Dobreff, helped them learn and learn how. The main principles are simple: learn by sounds whenever possible; and learn from things that are most familiar first. All humans speak mainly using figurative language by the time they're teenagers and even well before, but young children first learn primitive significations, the building blocks of all languages and language learning. The authors thought about how to do this in Latin for others without pointing out objects around the house and the yard and the town, and using the biblical text, and especially well-known narratives, occurred to both as the best and simplest way to create that situation. Anyone using this book will want to read and imitate everything aloud, from the biblical excerpts in the vocabulary lists to the exercises to the stories themselves. Most will know the stories in their native tongues, and once readers work the Latin in this book into their senses, from their ears to their mouths etc., making sure not to think in English, it won't be long until the brain does what it does best, which is to think in whatever language it's absorbing.
