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Comment by projectorlochsa | Hacker News Reader

There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick.

Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations.

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia...

The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish.

It took me about 2 years to go through both parts and I was amazed at how easy the journey was. Could speak and write Latin fluently without issues.

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Is any book like that available for contemporary languages?

I learned Dutch using a similar approach (https://www.amazon.com/Delftse-Methode-Nederlands-voor-buite...)

Check out https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... :)

This is a awesome resource, thanks a lot! Some of these books are of course quite old. For example I would not recommend trying to learning contemporary German using this [1] book. Reading 'fraktur' alone can be rather challenging …

[1] [Worman, J. H.: Erstes Deutsches Buch, nach der Natürlichen Methode, für Schule und Haus, American Book Company, New York 1880](https://vivariumnovum.it/edizioni/libri/dominio-pubblico/Wor...)

Holy moly, you made a languages nerd's day

Don't you have to have the translations at some point, or at least some side channel (i.e. an illustration that the phrase refers to), in order to "ground the symbols"?

I have this book and I can tell you that it does use illustrations quite a bit (although most vocabulary is ultimately probably defined using other words). The very first chapter presents a labeled map of the Mediterranean region and begins:

"Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Eurōpā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Hispānia quoque in Eurōpā est. Hispānia et Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Aegyptus in Eurōpā nōn est, Aegyptus in Āfricā est. Gallia nōn in Āfricā est, Gallia est in Eurōpā. Syria nōn est in Eurōpā, sed in Asiā. Arabia quoque in Asiā est. Syria et Arabia in Asiā sunt. Germaia nōn in Asiā, sed in Eurōpā est. Britannia quoque in Eurōpā est. Germānia et Britannia sunt in Eurōpā."

There are marginal notes highlighting things that the author wants you to notice or learn from the examples. Especially at the beginning, the marginal notes often do not discuss things in complete sentences but simply highlight particular grammatical features; for example the notes to the part I just quoted say "-a -ā: Italia...; in Italiā", which is supposed to make you realize that somehow the ending -a changes to -ā when something is "in" something (which later will be revealed to be the Latin ablative case), and "est sunt: Italia in Eurōpā est; Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt", which is supposed to make you realize that sunt 'are' is the plural of est 'is'.

I want that, for every language I want to learn!

Edit: Before anyone says it, in my original comment, that should have been an e.g. instead of an i.e.

Thanks to you I just learnt the difference between those two. Thanks! (Also writing this comment reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/1053/ )

Are you aware of something similar for Biblical Greek?

stefan - I'm building http://pingtype.github.io for studying Chinese, and reading the Bible every day to practice.

I already forked the code to make a version to help Chinese speakers learn English.

I thought about Biblical Greek & Hebrew & Aramaic & Latin, but I wasn't sure if there's a market. Evidently there is! The biggest challenge is making a good dictionary. If I write the code, could you help to fix the dictionary?

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