The Sunday Shift: How Latin and Greek Taught Me to Think Backwards

By: Abdelhamid Arbab

Reading Time: 6-8 Minutes

For most, a Sunday evening is a time for winding down, a gentle slope towards the demands of the coming week. For me (and, yes, I did regret it at first) Sunday evenings consist of a pilgrimage to the tree-lined streets of Edgbaston, past Greenfield Crescent and St Georges Church, for a marathon session of classical languages at The Classical Institute. That initial regret stemmed from a simple, practical calculation. My language learning capacity was already filled, or so I thought, with French and Persian, living languages that I felt had some immediate application. To dedicate my one free evening to tongues no longer spoken on any street corner felt, at best, like an indulgence; at worst, a misallocation of precious time. The prospect was, on its face, intense hours of Latin and Greek, back-to-back, demanding a deep and sustained focus. Yet, the shared enthusiasm of my TCI peers was infectious, and they consistently encouraged me to put my reservations aside and give it a real try.

Fortunately, the rigour of the environment was always softened by its comforts: the scent of warm green tea, the soft clinking of ceramic, and on good days, the welcome sight of freshly baked brownies. I’d settle into my chair and wait for the words that set the process in motion, spoken with calm authority by John Claughton: “parse and construe.”

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was stepping into more than just a classroom; I was entering a living tradition. There is something profoundly unique about the pedagogy at TCI, a quiet and steadfast commitment to a method that has been honed over centuries. We are learning Latin and Greek in the same way John Claughton learned them, the same way his teachers learned them, and their teachers before them, in an unbroken chain stretching back through generations of classical education. Here is a man who taught Classics at Eton for 17 years, who served as Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, at the very top of his field, yet who has emerged from retirement to spend his Sunday evenings with a group of curious adults, passing on this ancient tradition with the same care and precision that shaped centuries of classical scholars before us. This should not be mistaken as a failure to innovate. Rather, when attempted, the method is immediately appreciated as a conscious and deliberate preservation of a pedagogical discipline that has resistance to the modern educational impulse to constantly reinvent and replace.

This stands in stark contrast to many contemporary approaches to classical language instruction. There is a strong and growing movement to teach Latin and Greek using the natural method, the same immersive, communicative techniques used for modern languages, with the goal of achieving faster reading comprehension and a more intuitive feel. The appeal is understandable; it promises to make these ancient texts more immediately accessible. Yet, TCI’s adherence to the traditional grammar-translation method, while it may initially slow down the raw speed of comprehension, serves a different and, I would argue, a deeper purpose. It aims to cultivate not just readers of Latin and Greek, but thinkers whose minds have been shaped by the logic and precision of these languages. The goal, as I understand it, is a fundamental re-engineering of the intellect.

I saw this philosophy in action after weeks of wrestling with the basics. Having finally grasped the first two Latin declensions, the first verb conjugation, and the confusingly named ‘2-1-2’ adjectives, our small class achieved a moment of collective triumph: we translated a full sentence from Latin into English. A palpable sense of relief and accomplishment filled the room. Just as we were savouring this victory, John set the next task: to translate the sentence from English back into Latin. A wave of stunned silence, followed by a few chuckles, swept through the class. We had just learned to read the map, and now we were being asked to draw it from memory.

That moment captured the essence of the TCI method. This was to be a process of “double translation.” It wasn't enough to passively decode the text; we had to actively re-encode it, forcing our brains to internalise the grammatical structures, not just recognise them. The act of parsing, of breaking a sentence down to its atomic parts, was the first step. But the second, translating it back, was the true test of understanding. It compelled you to think within the language, to make the choices a Roman author would have made. This, then, is precisely the skill that John Claughton and TCI are helping us build: not the superficial ability to ask for directions, but the profound capacity to understand language itself as a system of logic, structure, and meaning. The philosophy at TCI operates on the principle that the meticulous, granular study of Latin and Greek is one of the most effective forms of intellectual training available. The goal isn't just to read ancient texts, but to use them as a whetstone to sharpen the mind.

The systematic grammatical knowledge I was acquiring began to inform all my other studies. I could suddenly see the architecture beneath the surface of a French novel or a Persian poem with newfound clarity. The study of these ancient languages has started to reveal the skeletal structure beneath the flesh of any language. And on a practical note, the hybrid environment made this all possible. On evenings when I couldn't face the bus journey to Edgbaston, joining remotely was a seamless experience, with TCI ensuring we were just as involved as anyone in the room (though this convenience did come at the cost of any available brownies).

My journey began with a question of instrumentality. I have since learned that the most instrumental educational tools are not those that provide the quickest answers, but those that permanently upgrade the quality of the mind itself. The discipline of double translation, practiced on those focused Sunday evenings, did more than teach me Latin and Greek; it welcomed me into a long tradition that rewires how we think. The initial regret has long since faded, replaced by a profound gratitude for the intellectual rigour I once tried to avoid.