This was exactly my experience with Latin. I learned from Ecce Romani. I found that as soon as I looked at even some of the earlier chapters from Wheelock, I felt almost lost when facing the exercises of translation from actual authors of ancient Latin texts. They were supposed to be easy enough for beginners, I suppose, since they were in the earlier chapters of the textbook, but I found them challenging enough even though I had completed two courses of Latin with solid success. I was discouraged at that. I had too many questions about things in the authentic texts that I didn't have a solid grasp on. I could make guesses, but I didn't know for sure, and I thought I was supposed to know by that point.Barry Hofstetter wrote:My experience, at both the college and high school level, is that students from other institutions who have used highly inductive approaches (e.g., Ecce Romani for Latin), are often able to read the texts they already have read, but have difficulty with anything else. It could be that I am simply locked into my own didactic paradigms and have learned to make them work, but it's hard to argue with success.
It is interesting that you draw from this the principle that inductive approaches are not always successful. I have to think about that. My thought focuses more upon the difference between using Latin that has been constructed by modern authors as opposed to learning from Latin written by actual ancient authors. My feeling was that the Latin I had learned was "dumbed down" a bit, so that when I saw Latin used as it actually was, I found too many variations from the set patterns that had been artificially taught to me in all of my experience of Latin to that point. That was my feeling, at least, upon reflection of my experiences there.