Lesson video

- Thank you, now, this unit is all about verbs and it is sort of like an addition to the unit number two, which is about the regular conjugation of verbs.

We're going to be looking at two new or extra forms of verbs.

One's called infinitive.

And the other is called the imperative and this lesson, the first grammar lesson of that unit, it's imperatives, no, ah tried to trick ya.

It's infinitives time, okay, let's have a look.

The infinitive, our discenda, or learning objectives are, can I define, recognise and translate the infinitive in Latin? Can I translate the infinitive with all other verb endings and in full sentences? Let's have a little look.

But before we do that, you'll need to press pause, or maybe you won't need to press pause 'cause you'll have brought everything, in which case, thank you so much.

But if you haven't, press pause here, please do go and get these items. Or, you know, if you've got an exercise book, that'd be great in order to do this lesson, okay? Right, what's the learning? I don't like bossing kids to get stuff, I like teaching them.

What's this grammar point actually look like? It looks like this.

Magister, we go back 2000 years into the ancient classroom, the Roman classroom.

We have Magister discipulum docet, discipulus legit.

Now some of these words you may not have seen.

Docet is from doceo meaning I teach, what I'm doing right now.

And legit, what's this student doing? Legit, legit, legit, reading.

Now we've got two sentences here.

We do nominative, verb, accusative.

What letter do singular accusatives end in? M, right, this word, this word, this word.

The teacher teaches the students and then there you have the student reads.

Now I'm going to smush those two sentences together into one sentence, you ready? It's going to be magical, here we go.

Magister discipulum legere docet.

Right? We still do the same thing as this one.

We do this word then the verb.

This is a verb, isn't it? The main verb over here.

And then we'll see what happens next.

The teacher teaches over to, who's he teaching? The students.

What's he teaching them to do? Teaches him.

good, to read.

Legere, what's that "re"? Now if legit means read, what's that "re" mean on the end? It means it's a to form, isn't it? When I say re, you say to, re, re, to.

I should stress here that it's a re, it's a nice confident re sound on the end, all right? Some students do this and they think it's legair, no legere.

Let's have a look at another example with a different verb it won't just be legere this time.

Discipuli, now these students over here, they non laborant.

They don't work, boo! And that is because in fact, discipuli laborare, it's because the students, they non parati sunt laborare.

They are not parati, ready, they're not ready.

What work? They're not ready.

Good, well remembered, ready to work.

Good, the re form is the to.

But what are they ready to do? Well, this one says to this one, discedere debemus.

Discedere, discedere.

Discedere, discedere.

So discedo is I leave, debeo, you might have seen debet in a story recently, debet means owe.

Now with this form of the verb, whatever it's called, it's going to mean something else, it'll mean ought.

Okay and they say, if we start over here, instead of starting with our nouns, there's no nouns, we go straight on this word.

We've got debemus discedere.

Now does this mean to something, debemus? Does it mean to owe? Or to ought? Mus is O, S, T Mus, who's doing that? It's not I, it's we! So he says to his friend, he says we ought something leave.

We ought re, to, leave.

So they leave, buh-bye.

I'm not sure, never do this at a school, okay? You can't just walk out.

I'm not really sure students could do that in the ancient world anyway.

I think they might've been able to actually, depending on, well, you know, the infinitive! What's that all about? So the infinitive is the to form you should have picked up of the verb formed in Latin by adding a re to the stem.

For example, portare is to carry and legere is to read.

What's this look like in terms of our table.

For those who have done the conjugation of regular verbs unit with me, you will know that when we go through these six person endings of a conjugated verb, use your hand actions with fingers and thumbs.

And it's three, two, one, it's oh, sorry.

It's I in English.

I, you, he or she, we, you plural, they.

One more, I, you, he or she, we, you plural, they.

And in latin, that goes like this O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

Would you like, I know we've done it dozens of times, but would you like to join in? Of course you would, after one, two, three, and you start with a finger up in air, you point at the ceiling or the sky if you're outside.

Finger in the air, one, two, three, starting with O, S, T, yep, mus, tis, nt.

One more time, O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

Now what we're adding is this one new thing down here.

This one item of knowledge is today's lesson and that is that there's a new form, re, which means to.

How am I going to mime with fingers and thumbs to, Mr. Ferber? Well you're going to do it like this, to, to.

Why? Because no one's doing the verb, got it? So all these forms here have a person that's doing them, the kind of personless form of the verb is called the infinitive and it's like that, so no one's doing it, that's your to form.

With me then, a finger in the air.

Actually, I'll do one including re, and then you'll join in after that, finger in the air, O, S, T, mus, tis, nt, re.

With me and O, S, T, mus, tis, nt, re.

Great, one more time, re, good, one more time.

Re and that means to something, got the idea? If you see a mus on the end of a verb, can you show me the hand action? You see a mus on the end, you're thinking, that one, we.

If you see a tis on the end, you're thinking what? Tis goes from we to you singular or plural you? Plural right.

And I might need to get the bongos ready for this.

When I say infinite, if you say re, infinitive , infinitive when I say re, you say to, re , re Infinitive , infinitive.

Re, I'm going to slow it down, re to.

What's this mean? Ambulare is to walk.

Salutare is to greet.

And consumere? To eat, well done.

O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

Your turn, O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

Concentrate O, S, T, your turn and Respondere means? To reply, well done, great.

Put those away, now main task number one is to look at these verbs, infinitives, with individual verbs not full sentences yet, just looking at how we take that re ending and translate it with a verb on the front.

Here is verb and I want to do this one completely by myself.

I don't want anyone to help me.

I want to see if I can do it.

So you'll remember from again, from the conjugation of a regular verbs unit, that we do verbs in an order that you might not anticipate, which is you don't do this bit, when you see them on their own, you don't do the bit on the left and the bit on the right.

Instead you do person then stem and you just look over what you've got and make sure it makes sense.

And also that you've got a full stop on the end, if you need to.

Right, so for this one, I'm doing it, it's me doing it.

I go, so I'm not starting with porta.

I'm going to start with the blue bit, that's the person.

Then I'll do the pink, but blue bit is tis.

Oh, I know that person ending, let's just double check that I know exactly who's doing that verb.

O, S, T, mus, tis, who's doing that? Is it going to be you singular or you plural.

Tis, you plural, tis is done, tick.

Then now I've used two different colours here to show you the difference between the person and the stem endings.

If you have two different coloured pens, please do use them.

It'll be really useful and I guarantee you it'll mean that you'll get everything right.

But if you don't, don't worry about it, just look at me.

Porta, I think, well, that doesn't mean.

Now porto, I've learned is I carry, this isn't going to be mean you I carry, it doesn't makes sense.

Instead, I don't need a pronoun or a person doing it because this is just a stem, it's just the action.

And porta just means carry, as in portable in English.

So you plural, carry, step two's done.

And then step three, check that full stop.

I'm going to put one in there.

You plural carry and we're done.

And porta is translated, all well and good being able to do that and just watch me.

But now I'm going to bring you in.

You're going to give me your hand.

What on earth are we going to do with porta-re? I've never seen that before ever.

What are we going to do? Okay right, stay calm, follow the steps.

We do the blue bit and the red bit.

Re, when I say re, you say? Eh? Ah what was it.

When I say infinitive, you say re.

When I say re, tell me you say, to, lovely! Re is your to form.

Re, I say re, you say to, re, to, re, to.

Infinitive, re, infinitive, re.

Then we switch to our pink, re is done and I'm going to cross it out in pink.

And we've got a tick and porta, we just did it, were you're listening? Mime to me what porta is, mime it to me in three, two, it was something like, that.

Maybe you might want to use your pen that you've definitely got with you.

It'll be do to with carrying.

So portare will therefore, don't worry about that, the therefore bit comes in step three.

Where we look at what we've got and portare looks to me to carry, does that makes sense, to carry.

Yeah, it does, step three is done.

Now, is it done though? Because do I need a full stop? Well, actually, no, one's doing the verb.

It's the infinitive, so therefore I've not got a clause here.

I've not got what we need for a sentence, which is a subject and a verb, there's no subject.

So actually this isn't a verb, is it, to carry? That's just a thing that exists.

So they don't need a full stop for those ones.

Got it, so one more this time, actually, I'm going to give you five seconds to think about spectare.

And then we'll see how we do, so what was that? Portare and now spectare.

Five, four, three, two.

Let's have a little look.

So first things first, nodding heads or shaking heads.

Do we do specta first? Nodding heads or shaking heads.

Shaking heads.

Do we do re first? Nodding heads, when I say re, you say.

Good, re, to, re, to.

And then can you mime to me what specta is, specta it's a verb you may have encountered quite recently Specta means show me, has to do with, Ooh.

Now it's not looking, it's looking at, but specta is more to do with watching.

If you've not encountered that before, then how we look at it now, okay? Specto, I watch, and I put a full stop in, I don't need one, but you know what? If you want to put one in, that's fine by me.

Okay, spectare, to watch, right.

Make sure you're fully clued up on your O, S, T, for the next task 'cause you'll need to know those person endings and also the extra, the seventh ending I'm adding is this re to re to thing.

There's two things you must know, One is that when you see a re, you add a to, and the other thing is it's called the what, the inf- the infinitive, good, okay.

Time for you to do some of these on your own.

So here are 10 verbs, press pause to have a go at these in three, two.

Now, if at any point, don't do it now! If at any point you don't know your endings and you're thinking, oh I need to check that, I've forgotten You may, but I would recommend trying to do them from memory.

You may have a look at slide two on the worksheet for a version or just a copy of that verbs table that I showed you at the beginning.

So pressing pause to get on with these in two and go.

Okay, right, how did we do? So we should do a different kind of pen and let's have a look at those answers, so press pause here to mark your answers.

Great, now for the you's, can you make sure you still got it right, technically, if you just wrote you but can you make sure that you write in either singular or plural in a different colour pen if you missed them out.

Number nine, if you wrote, you plural wait for, that's fine, If you wrote you plural expect, that's okay.

But I would prefer wait.

Vident was next, it can be see or look, not to be confused with specto which is watch or look at.

What do these look like, not just involved on their own, but in full sentences.

But before we look at any full sentences, we need to know what verbs or phrases we're going to see with the infinitive.

So the way this works is, and we already saw these in the introduction that first bit in the lesson with the teacher and the students is you're not just going to get a sentence with an infinitive, the Mr. Ferber to something, that wouldn't make sense, you need a verb to kind of introduce the infinitive or go with it We had, for example, the teacher teaches the student to read.

So there was teachers to read.

We ought to leave.

That's what the students said when they ran away, remember? Right now, your one, two, three, four, five, verbs or phrases are as follows.

Debeo you will have seen as I O as in pecuneum debeo.

And it's obviously the root of the English word debt.

It can also take the infinitive, and when it does that, it becomes, I ought.

So you owe money, but debeo, but you ought to pay money back when you're in debt, debeo, I ought.

Exspecto we've already seen in the previous task, meaning I wait for, you either wait to something, or you wait for someone to do something, got it? And then you have these two phrases with sum.

Paratus sum, paratus on it's own means ready, Paratus sum would be I am ready, Paratus est would be he or she, Paratus est is he is ready, parata est would be she is ready and you are ready to do something, you're ready to something, ready to learn, ready to work was our one in the intro example.

Perterritus, similarly to paratus, I am terrified, territus, terrified.

You are terrified to do something.

And then last of all, peto, you may have learned as I make or I attack or something like that.

It means I seek, as in, I seek to learn Latin.

I strive or I endeavour to do something, peto.

English words, like appetite, or impetus.

Alright, we get from peto right.

I believe I said something about looking at full sentences.

Didn't I? Yeah.

Well, here's a full sentence over here.

And dormire exspectamus for the first example, I'm going to do it all by myself, I don't want any help.

I want to see if I can do it on my own.

As always, when we're doing full sentences there's a step number one, we don't want worry about, oh, I know what that means.

oh, I know what that is.

We just get our ingredients.

We just look at the word beginnings, all right? We don't just do that, that's just the first step.

But we look, now dormire, I'm doing this one.

I know that has to do with sleeping, sleep and exspectamus is to do with wait, let's put the for in brackets, always remember it's there.

So step one is done.

Now I then find my infinitive.

I label the infinitive and I add the to.

So of these two, dormire or exspectamus, which one? When I say infinitive you say re.

So it's the re one and that's the infinitive.

INF that's my short for infinitive.

Don't just leave it there, step two, done.

Let's move on, this is a classic mistake.

I know that's the infinitive.

What do I need to add to my translation now that you know, that's the infinitive? Well, when I say re, you say to, so infinitive and I'm going to actually have add to full stop.

And here's the to here.

Yeah, infinitive, to sleep, now, step two is done.

Then we look at everything else.

Now, luckily in this sentence, we don't have any nouns We've just got an infinitive and a verb.

So for verb, we check the person, all right? Exspectamus is a verb and mus on the end, who's doing that? O, S, T, actually, I think I've got it now.

I think I've learned that, I think mus means we.

Let's check, O, S, T, mus.

I do mean we, so yeah, then we add the we in similarly.

Good, done.

Now you'll remember with verbs, this verb goes to two, at least two English words, one Latin verb, that results in at least two different words in English.

Therefore it needs to be labelled twice and it's going to be verb plus who's doing the verb.

So it's verb plus nominative okay.

Because that helps when we get down to step four, when we're going to go in this order, nom, verb.

We don't worry about accusatives yet, because we've not got any in our sentences, nom, verb, infinitive, this bit, this bit, this bit, and it is actually quite counterintuitive, but I think quite interesting that the order is not left to right, but in fact, right to left, look at that.

We wait to sleep, one more time.

We don't do, sleep to wait we.

We wait to sleep.

We don't need the for, so write it down, we wait.

to sleep with a full stop at the end.

Take a good look at it, 'cause it's going in three, two and one, as am I.

Laborare petitis means which of those two? In three, two, one, the top one.

As I said, I'll just talk us through, you plural, seek to work.

You translate the main verb first and then add the infinitive to it.

So don't just because you've got this word on the left and this one on the right.

Don't think it's going to be you work to seek, some students do that sometimes.

That means you seek, that means to work.

You can't sort of splice the tos and the yous the person endings and the infinitive endings.

What's this mean? Answer in three, two.

Great, well done, did we get it? So we do the bit on the right then the bit on the left.

I am ready to wait.

Now, example number two and this is where a student has made a mistake and you're going to figure out what that mistake is.

How Patrem mum, mum, mum, mum, ma ma ma patrem.

Spectare, remember spectare was when we got it, it's watching, exspectamus.

What is wrong with that sentence today? You've got 10 seconds.

Two, one.

So look, the key thing is, what the student has done is absolutely classic and we will be revisiting it again and again and again, over the course of this course, is this is what's known as an accusative first error, right? Where extremely counter-intuitively.

So it's not what you would expect.

The first word of your Latin sentence is either the last or nearly the last word in your English translation.

So here we got patrem spectare, where do we start? Well, let's find out where they went wrong.

Step one, we're beginning, it says they've got the word for father here, yes, have we got spectare meaning to watch, yeah.

So that means actually step two is done as well and exspectamus, we've got the ingredient there, meaning waiting, yes.

So where we went wrong here is in step three, which is an important step if ever there was one, we just checked our case and we just checked our person and then change what we've got.

What letter does our infinitive end with? What letter do singular accusatives end in? M! What letter do singular accusatives end in? M! So we've got an accusative here.

Now over here, we have our verb and then we should know by now off the top, tell me if we've got it, mus means after one, two, three, mus means one, two, three, we, thank you.

So plus nominative and we know that there needs to be a we in there somewhere and what have we got missing here? We've got no we, so the first problem is it should be a we here, with no s.

Now we've got, the father we wait to watch.

How are we going to change this? We'll look, then we go to step four, step three is done now.

Go to step four, it's going to be in the order of nominative, verb, accusative, or the accusing can go either side of the infinitive, Cause either the accusative can be receiving the verb or it can be receiving the action of the infinitive.

So nominative we, verb wait, to and then infinitive, we either can do we wait for, this thing can actually mean two things, which is quite confusing, it can either mean we wait for the father to watch or it can be we wait to watch the father.

Which one do we think makes more sense? I think it's the second one.

We wait to watch the father.

Do we see how though, the key thing is, we wait to watch the father.

Do we see how patrem, accusative first word, which means it's going to be the tail end of your sentence.

It'll either be the last word or it'll be the sort of middle word 'cause it might be, we wait for the father to watch.

Alright, so accusative first word, M on the end of the first word, not, not the first word of your English translation, do you understand? However, if you've got pater here, all right, is that an accusative? What's gone wrong here, another 10 seconds.

Two, one, and right, so look, we're going to jump straight to this person's got all the ingredients, they found the infinitive, 'cause to visit is translated and even Mr. Ferber, person ending, O, S, T translated as he waits, we got that haven't we? That's good.

Case, case, case, case, case is all about step three.

We go to pater, now this person has done nearly a forgivable mistake.

It's not forgivable because it's not about forgiveness and also because the answer isn't right, and that is where they've gone wrong.

Well look, in Latin you never translate.

Never ever do you translate the first word or does the first word end up being the first word in Latin, being the first word you're translating in English Instead what I know now, is you do this weird thing where you go to the end and you go that bit, that bit, that bit, that bit, that bit oh, thank goodness.

Thank goodness I know how to do that so that Mr. Ferber won't be annoyed with me getting it wrong.

What about this? Okay.

Pater, we've got a verb here, verb plus nominative, which is he or she.

This is our infinitive and then we get to pater.

Now what letter do singular accusatives end in? M! It's not patrem, it's pater.

It's not been changed in any way.

Therefore it is what case? Not the accusative, but it's the nominative.

That's that done.

We go back to this and we do nominative, verb, accusative and we've got two nominatives.

And this is just what we did in that first unit, which is that if you've got nominative in the verb, you've got a normative that's actually a noun that's there, you don't need your nominative in the verb.

And actually you just do nom verb, infinitive.

The father, tell me, good, the father waits to visit.

Okay.

To visit with a full stop on the end.

So step four is done.

So look one more time.

If pater, if you've got nominative first word, then that's going to be the first word of English translation, right? The farther waits to visit.

If you have M on the end, accusative first word, will that be the first word of your English translation? No.

Nominative first word.

Will that be the first word of English translation? Yes.

Accusative, so M word first word.

Will that be the first word of English transaction? No.

One more time, what do we think about this? First word, if mater is your first word, is that the first word of your English translation? Two, one, yes, nodding heads, its the nominative.

If you see matrem, first word, is that the first word of your English translation? In three, two, one, it's going to be shaking heads cause that's the accusative.

So that will end up either being in the middle or the end of your English translation.

If you see, canem first word, nodding heads or shaking heads after two, one.

Shaking heads, that's the accusative.

That will not be the first word of your English translation.

It will be in the middle or the end.

If you see puella, will that be the first word of your English translation? It certainly will be, it's nominative.

It's not been changed and that's the form you would have learnt as vocab.

It's not puellam, it's not puellas or or anything, right? What's this mean? Pater spectare perterritus est.

Answer in three, two, and this top one, look, you've got pater, nominative, therefore it's not accusative, cause that'd be patrem, therefore it's going to be the first word of English translation, so pater father, right? The father is terrified to watch.

Filium scribere exspectat, what's that mean? Okay, right, answer in three, two.

And now this one look accusative first word.

Therefore, do we see, look, it's not the first word of your translation.

First word is he or she from exspectat and son is going to be either in the middle or the end.

Here it's in the middle of the translation.

We're ready to get onto these sentences and do six sentences yourselves.

I wrote them.

I'm fine.

So press pause here and you've got six to do.

As with task number one, if at any point you don't know, or you don't know what any of these means, then you go to the worksheet on slide two, so pressing pause here.

So that's for the endings on the worksheet.

Pressing pause here to do these, gives us 10 minutes in three, two, and go.

And to complete the, don't forget the challenge.

Have a look at these, especially tricky sentences, press pause here to have a look at these two sentences.

Different kind of pen at the ready, lets see how we did.

Press pause here to look at your answers.

In a few seconds, my time, I will talk you through any synonyms or anything that might be tricky.

Alright, so pressing pause here, how did we do? Okay, I will accept some synonyms here, if you wrote I am scared to reply, that's fine.

Similarly, to respond is fine, but get used to translating respondere as reply.

Here we wait to work, yep.

The daughter is, if you wrote is prepared to run, that's fine.

For the yous, make sure you tell me whether it's singular or plural, you've still got it completely right if you didn't put that in, that's still fine.

But I would like full grammatical clarity.

And down here you seek to sleep, it's fine.

Now over here, did we get it? I'll be really pleased if you've got that, that dog isn't being terrified.

The key thing here is this is he is terrified, if you wrote she, I'm afraid that's incorrect because that would be you'd need a feminine adjective for it to be she's terrified.

This is he is terrified to greet the dog.

The answers for the challenge are here.

All that's left now is for us to say goodbye to one another.

And after that you're going to do the exit quiz, which is over here.

So before we say vale, let's do one run through of O, S, T including that new bit on the end, that seventh ending, which I believe has something to do with some infinitive or something, I don't know how you translate it.

Let's have a go after three.

One and two and three, finger in the air, O, S, T, mus, tis, nt.

Not just that, re! One more time, O, S, T, mus, tis, nt, re.

When I say infinitive, you say re, infinitive, infinitive.

When I say re, you say to, re, to.

Valete, well done, I'll see you later and well done.

Oh no, I'll see you on that translation lesson for this and very well done on today's lesson.

Valete, buh-bye.