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Comment by tianlong | Hacker News Reader

Italian here. We do study at school Roman history, a lot, since 6 years old. Obviously, we are very proud and connected to that historical period. Everyone knows Cesar, Augusto, Nerone and all the other important figures of the time. Mant of us, at high school, study latin. I did a science-based high school (public school) and I studied latin literature and grammar for 5 years, 4 hours per week.

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It’s weird but I, as a Hispanic-American, also feel really connected to the old Roman Empire, I hear latin every Sunday at Mass (traditional Latin Mass), a lot of idioms we use every day can be traced back to the Romans, our food is a mix of European and native ingredients, even our law is based in Roman roots. It’s awesome to feel connected to Aztecs, Mayas, Spaniards and Romans.

Just curious, as a native Italian speaker, how hard did you find learning Latin and what was the hardest part for you?

My native language isn't a Romance language, but I have also spent five years learning Latin in grammar school and for me, learning both the vocabulary and the grammar was hard, hard work. I always assumed that for a native Italian speaking person it would be probably a lot easier.

Not the parent, but... it's not that difficult. You have to apply yourself, of course, but there is a connection (once you get the gist of the declinations, as italian you can understand a certain amount of words without looking at a dictionary). Difficulty varies a lot based on who writes though: e.g. Caesar is very easy, because he purposefully wrote in a simpler, clear way (less number of terms overall, trying to avoid synonyms, straight to the point).

In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).

Hardest part was memorizing all those declinations and verb forms. Which is not unlike what you have to do in Italian, but we start doing that 10 years earlier than we encounter Latin. And the second-hardest part is that learning a dead language when you’re 14 and your hormones are in full swing, tends to fall down the list of one’s priorities. One of my teachers tried to keep us interested by focusing on erotic poetry...

This said, I agree that for us a bunch of things are probably easier, simply because a lot of terms map directly to modern words, so the vocabulary is fairly easy to build. We also tend to ignore any pronunciation rule - we just pronounce it phonetically using Italian rules. I understand “real” scholars actually follow different rules, and Anglo people have their own conventions. Also, there is a lot of Latin all around us in inscriptions and names etc, so if it “clicks” you can find a lot of inspiration and practice with no effort.

I wish Italian history lessons featured also more lessons on the the protoceltic period in northern Italy and how it lead to the creation of what then became north European runes.

A better approach to Latin studies would also be interesting, I wish I studied Latin with a method like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata

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