Speaking Latin
psyche.co
psyche.co
(p.s., don't bother looking this up in Google translate. It's terrible on Latin.)
I’m skeptical that “active” is the way to teach beginners Latin. My daughter took 4 years of Latin in high school with this method, and they never got around to covering all the grammar (which is normally covered in two years).
Spending too much time on the conversational stuff means less time actually being able to read the classics, which is, IMHO, where the real value of Latin is.
Details about the broadcast: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/yle_ends_latin_news_servi...
Broadcast archive: https://areena.yle.fi/audio/1-1931339
Just hit too many blocks where I sort of have the understanding of what it must mean, but I want to ask someone 'why is it inflected in this way here but different there?', and of course there's no explanation of that. (By design, I just don't like it.)
Perhaps my ideal would be something like LLI but interspersed with grammar-oriented explanation between chapters.
I always recommend people learn the use of a language before the grammar at the beginning, and then transition into much more intensive grammar study later, likely exactly at the point when you got frustrated is when introducing grammar would be perfect. This is especially true when the written grammar of a language can look very different than the sound of a language (especially if written differences are hidden by identical sounds in the language, like in French).
I've learnt so much more from studying conjugation/declension tables on Wiktionary than I have from trying to converse with fluent/native speakers, who can't explain to me why or tell me how to spell it (sounding/typing it in the English alphabet).
BUT, the natural method plays well with extensive reading/comprehensible input, where you just read a lot at a simple, pleasurable level, allowing it to ramp up gradually.
This is how I learned much of English as a native speaker, after all!
So I intend to use this approach with other languages in the future as well.
It's super low-effort, but I had fun with the (modern) light novellas by Andrew Olympi and kin - in some sense they're too easy above a certain level and made me over-confident in a way that was damaging to my confidence when I looked at actual classical latin texts, on the other hand it's nice to just be able to pick up a small book and read some beginner-level Latin without requiring any effort/strain.
[ note: I've only been learning Latin for about a year, with very mixed success - I'm very much a beginner still and can't read any classical texts with any fluency/comfort, nor write without a dictionary to help with inflections ]
(just checked archive.org, and sure enough, they've got a scan of the book I have, but it's a limited preview: https://archive.org/details/meinerstesbuch0000unse/mode/2up)
Another term is "comprehensible input" -- but I am not certain precisely how the two relate to each other. But hopefully they're enough for you to go on.
The latter two refer more to a large volume of simple reading materials which let you work up on your own, practicing and slowly learning more grammar and vocabulary.
https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio...
For spoken Latin, there are Corderii colloquia, which are also made into an audio book.
it is definitely hard to get started with latin/greek when your native tongue is a highly positional language like english, but I don't think it is intrinsically harder. the same information is there, it's just encoded in word endings rather than order. in english, the word order is only really important within individual clauses. you can still write very complicated (and syntactically correct) english sentences with clause orderings that are very hard to parse. I'd argue this requires just as deep of a mental "stack" as latin/greek.
anyways, that's just my two cents as someone who studied, but never fully mastered, latin and greek in college.
LEGEMANVALEMFVTVTVM (Ancient Roman programmers' adage.)
LLPSI Discord: https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4
Latin Discord: https://discord.gg/latin
Caesaris Bellum Helveticum: Scriptores Antiqui Romani Imaginibus Ornati by Karl Heinz Graf Von Rothenburg
https://www.amazon.com/Caesaris-Bellum-Helveticum-Scriptores...
ScorpioMartianus https://www.youtube.com/c/ScorpioMartianus
At least it will create some intellectual barrier for policy makers.
I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed Latin as much at school though had I had to speak it. I found something calming about doing translation. But perhaps I would have learned it more thoroughly.
Getting my German to the same level I understand and speak English (or Dutch) is such a massive project that I've never really bothered making time for it. I always have more interesting things to do. And if I don't there's work. Learning a language is a big time commitment and the in between state where I can't really use it without sounding like an idiot just isn't that useful to me.
I've also forgotten most of the French I knew even though I was getting quite good at it by the time I dropped the subject 30 years ago. I chose science heavy classes instead of language heavy classes (the Dutch system makes you choose). So German, Latin, and French were out. The endless & mind-numbing memorizing of words, grammar, etc. was a big contributor to that choice. And I also enjoyed other classes a lot more generally. However, I had English until the end (six years) and was actively reading English books, watching BBC, etc. by the time I entered university. In university some of my books were in English. A lot of online content was English. Immersing yourself like that is what needed to master a language.
English has kind of taken the place of Latin. It's the world's most popular second language. Without it you are a bit marginalized to specific areas or groups of people.
But we might not need it much longer if translation tools keep on improving. The key moment will be if you can have an intelligent conversation with somebody without having a single language in common. Even if it is just in written form, it would matter a lot.
I've neglected my German and French since school, but found that I could still get to a basic level of conversation later in life by just trying when I was on holiday in those countries while still living in the Netherlands. YMMV.
I do well in German and Swiss German, so I can sometimes parse other Germaninc influenced languages, but it is a matter of luck which words are used.
> The history of language is the history of politics, society and religion - and in the case of Latin it is a story of incredible staying power, the tongue sturdily outliving the Roman empire. As Nicholas Ostler points out, by the end of the first millennium AD Latin was the language of religion from Iceland to Sicily, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, from Poland to Portugal; and 500 years later it was still the language of organised life throughout western Europe.
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/08/featuresreview...
Lastly, "By the mid-19th century, however, the increasing dominance of national languages over Latin was causing alarm to some readers" stuck out for me. Johannes Brahms wrote his breakthrough hit (as it were) with his German Requiem right about then. Prior to that, requiems were always in Latin. Having sung that, I'm really glad it's in German.
I was taught to pronounce it like English "w".
Am I wrong, are they wrong, are there different competing approaches to "correct" Latin pronunciation, or are the two sounds in free variation?
In areas where Catholicism has predominated, it's more likely that the ecclesiastical pronunciation will dominate. As I recall, the German exchange students I had in some of my classics courses used the classical pronounciation (their big weirdness was pronouncing θ as an aspirated t (like in Goethe) rather than a th sound.
> How should one pronounce the cae- in caelum (sky): kai, as it was in Rome of the 1st century BCE, or che, as used in Christian liturgy and modern Italian?
but then later concludes when discussing a meeting of students held in Latin:
> The meeting removed, however, any concerns I had about sound and style in speaking Latin actively. Differences of pronunciation and expression mattered as little as if I were conversing in English with students from Scotland, Germany or Japan. What mattered was that the language was intelligible, meaningful, accurate and alive.
So in short, if people understand you, that's what matters, and the differences can be thought of as differing accents.
Americans pronounce 'r' where British do not. Not a problem. There is no "correct" in a language which lived for centuries and does no more.
During the evolution of the language, the pronunciation of Latin "v" has changed to that of English "v", so this is how all Romance languages pronounce it.
Actually the sound "v" did not exist in the ancient Indo-European languages, but only the English "w".
The change in pronunciation from "w" to "v" has affected most European languages, not only those descended from Latin, unless they have lost completely the original "w", like Greek.
English is an exception where the ancient pronunciation of "w" has been conserved, even if other sounds have changed more than in most languages.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vox-latina/0D460CEF06E5...
If you are still at the point of translating in your head, you are not a competent fluent listener. Someone who is fully competent in Latin won't do that.
http://www.arlt.co.uk/method.html
Greek composition courses, too.