Reading, like speaking, is something that is easy to take for granted. Your eyes skip along a page without thinking about what you are really doing, and what you are really doing is quite amazing! Let's slow down the process and see what actually takes place.

Setting punctuation aside, the smallest unit in writing is a letter of the alphabet. Odds are, though, that when you read you don't scrutinize each individual letter and produce the sound it represents. Even if the word is very long or new to you, you probably sound it out by syllables or by familiar clusters of syllables. When most readers read, they see words, and those words are actually little more than shapes. People who read quickly can also misread words of similar shapes, leading to some bizarre sentences that cause double takes.

Still, reading is more than seeing a series of words. Words cluster into phrases, much like syllables group into words, and the phrases cluster into clauses. Reading, then, is a process of seeing and digesting discrete linguistic chunks, and we chunk as we read naturally, without conscious reflection. Try reading down Column A of the chart out loud, giving a slight pause before starting each new line.

Then read Column B, also pausing briefly between lines. Column B probably sounded better — smoother, more natural, and, frankly, more intelligible. The chunks find themselves by their own logic, not by any mathmatical formula!

The same is true when reading Latin. Your temptation will be to go word by word like a child, and that's okay at first. You must remember, however, that Latin is an inflected language, not an analytical one. In English, syntax (i.e., the way words show their relationship to each other) is governed by word order. Because of a word's position in a sentence, you know whether it is acting as a subject or an object, and words are free to bear virtually nothing more than a meaning. In Latin, things are very different. Word order doesn't matter much at all. The syntax information lies encoded in the endings. The upshot of this is that when reading Latin words, you have to take into consideration the endings as well as the meanings!

The downfall of many a novice to Latin is tripping along a sentence, taking in only the meanings of words as if they were in English. When this is done, the result is a jumbled mass of meanings. The real danger — not to mention frustration and disappointment — comes if you start wandering around in a sentence looking for meanings that sound nice together. The original Latin is usually abandoned at this point, as you arrange and rearrange words like so many Scrabble tiles. This is not a good approach. Translation and understanding by this method are doomed to miss the mark.