Hic vs. ille: What's the difference? Learn it now with Comprehensible Input!

The demonstrative pronouns and adjectives "hic, haec, hoc" and "ille, illa, illud" are extremely common Latin words. I provide lots of practice for them here with comprehensible input & interactive spoken Latin.

Many students struggle to "feel" the difference in meaning between "hic" and "ille". They are often told that "hic" means "this" and "ille" means "that", but simply telling students to equate the Latin words to English words often gets students muddled up and blindly reproducing the wrong "this" or "that" word without appreciating the underlying meaning, since students are often not consciously aware of the difference in meaning between "this" and "that", despite being able to use the words correctly in English. "hic" refers to what is relatively closer to the speaker, and "ille" is used for pointing at something further away.

A second problem is that, being common pronouns, hic and ille have certain irregularities in their inflexion which take some getting used to.

Here we encounter hic and ille in a wide variety of genders, cases, and numbers, in a communicative and interactive context. Through 116 pictures and sentences, the forms of hic and ille are reinforced multiple times with interleaving practice.

Rooting the meaning in body language is important. In a natural setting, demonstratives are supposed to be used while pointing or gesturing, even if only with glance of the eyes or a tilt of the head. Here I use a laser pointer to point at closer and further objects to give as much exposure as possible to the connection between the act of pointing and the demonstratives used to describe that pointing. I constantly point while asking for "hic" or "ille" because my goal is not to create misleading or tricky "gotcha" questions, but to use the language in communication, thus providing the appropriate stimulus material for the brain to pick up patterns.

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