6 ms·

Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

278 points by jthnews 5y ago

Tomte 5y ago
I'd love to have an interlinear text Latin–German. There are such texts in Latin–English, but if someone klnows about a German one, please tell me.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as one of the options. Unmentioned but possible readings include "The farmers give water to the daughter" and "The farmer's daughters give water [to something determined by context]". If I'm going to be asked to do translation exercises, I'd rather have questions that I need to answer by understanding the text, as opposed to questions that I need to answer by referring to the construction of the question. Follow that sentence with something like Aqua bibita, puellis gratias agit and suddenly we can determine what the first sentence meant regardless of which options we're given. > Choose the word that matches the indicated use. > Genitive of the possesor > 1. corōnam and Diānam in "Puella Diānae corōnam dat quia Diānam amat." > 2. dominīs in "Nautae fābulam dominīs nārrat quia dominae fābulās amant." > 3. Cui in "Cui puellae corōnam dant?" This is much worse; these three sentences between them do not contain even one word in the genitive case. Also, there's a typo in #2, which should presumably say either "Nautae... narrant" or "Nauta... narrat". "Possesor" is a typo too. I picked #2 and was told it was correct. That grayed the question out, so I can't tell whether options 1 or 3 would also have been "correct". > Genitive of the possesor > 3. pugnae in "Nūntiat Galba nautae causam pugnae." This one is at least genitive, but I have trouble characterizing this as "genitive of the possessor". Going by the taxonomy here ( https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/genitive-case https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program... ), I'd call it an objective genitive.
- wcarey 5y ago
  That particular sentence is a really tough knot pedagogically too. As a teacher, you want a short simple sentence that includes a nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and verb to habituate students to thinking about cases. Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of those three options, which means, as you rightly say, that we need context to render the sentence. That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar. If you wanted to separate the introduction of the case system from the introduction of the context sensitivity of the grammar, you could do this sentence: > Filiabus aquam agricolae dant. While that fixes most of the context sensitivity, it doesn't fix all of it, and introduces an irregular declension, also tough right out the gate. Latin is a hard language to teach.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    > That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar. Surely this is a feature of all languages :)
    - Tomte 5y ago
      Certainly not. The first example of context-sensitive constructions in natural language was found in 1985. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...
  - hakuseki 5y ago
    Actually this is an example of ambiguity, not context sensitivity (in the formal languages sense). Context sensitivity means context is needed to construct a grammatical sentence, not merely to parse one. It's actually pretty hard to find examples of this in natural language.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
kantord 5y ago
Are you interested in helping with the LibreLingo project? https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo Although the concept is a little bit different and the book content cannot be so directly adapted, I think it could still be used a nice starting point
- tomcooks 5y ago
  OT: WOW, thank you for creating this platform. It's great that free alternatives to corporate platforms exist
- jthnews 5y ago
  Great project! At first glance it looks like the differences in approach are substantial, but I'll think about it some more and see if there are ways I might be able to contribute.
tomcooks 5y ago
It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.
- twic 5y ago
  One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station that is in Latin 5. work conversations at the Vatican I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation. I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin, and the signalling function of using Latin tags actually requires that you use the incorrect "classically educated Englishman" pronunciation.
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?
    - yorwba 5y ago
      But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless. Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're using the "correct" Latin pronunciation, so long as whatever pronunciation you do use maintains those correspondences.
      - 5y ago
tomcooks 5y ago
in the homepage the videos link leads to a 404.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Thanks! Fixed...
jbarrs 5y ago
As an aside, I'd like to recommend to people the Cambridge Latin Course (https://www.cambridgescp.com/ https://www.cambridgescp.com/) This was the course I followed learning Latin in school. Whilst it may be tailored more towards a school audience, much of the content of their books is available for free online, which includes lots of translation and vocabulary practice. The books and stories are all very light-hearted and fun and teach a lot about Roman history as you learn the language. This could make good supplementary learning material for anyone trying to teach themselves Latin for free.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Thanks for the link to a great resource. I don't mean to detract in any way from any of the other terrific resources available online - free or otherwise. I created selfstudyclassics.com to scratch a very particular itch. When I started to re-learn Latin after many years, I was looking for something which was focused on examples and featured a lot of practice with instant feedback - something like Khan Academy, which I love. My hope is that it is helpful to others with a similar itch.
  - jbarrs 5y ago
    Yes I totally understand, and I don't think you've detracted from the others at all. The more resources are available, and the more accessible they are for different learners and different styles of learning, the better.
- gadders 5y ago
  Caecilius est in horto.
  - dbuder 5y ago
    Caecilius est in Matella.
    - wfreeborn 5y ago
      Grumio est in Metella.
dominotw 5y ago
I've been doing latin on duolingo. This would be a good compliment.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Congrats on beginning your Latin studies! Duolingo is a great place to start, and will get you off and running with conversational Latin. Selfstudyclassics is geared more towards vocabulary and constructions you might find in reading, say, Caesar. I agree that they complement each other nicely.
exdsq 5y ago
If someone is interested in learning a new language for the hell of it, however your school days of learning that Caecilius was sitting in the garden fills you with dread, a really cool alternative is Lojban. It is a completely unambiguous language created by the Logical Language Group and has some pretty interesting elements that sit between software and non-computational linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- bluGill 5y ago
  I won't stop anyone from learning anything they find interesting, and Logban is probably easier to learn. However I wouldn't recommend in general that anyone learn a constructed language. Learn the languages that people actually speak, they are much harder to learn, but in return you can actually talk to people, which is the point of learning a language. That is instead of two people learning some weird language why doesn't one of you learn the others and gain the whole world of people who speak that other language instead of a rare language where everyone speaks something else.
  - schoen 5y ago
    This view is a little strange in a thread where the alternative is learning Latin. With Latin, too, you typically have to go to conventions in order to encounter other speakers... I've participated in many spoken Latin events (and loved them), but they were akin to conlang events in that every single person was a non-native speaker, and the majority were not fully fluent. Following the view which I think I took from Ghil'ad Zuckermann (I don't know whether he would phrase it this way) that revived languages like Modern Hebrew are akin to conlangs, it seems that at least the way I speak Latin is akin to the way I speak conlangs -- great reliance on explicit knowledge, little influence from my own or others' native speaker intuition. Another difficulty is the "period speech" issue https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/771:_Period_Speech https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/771:_Period_Speec... where most Latin speakers are happy to use vocabulary from any period almost interchangeably, even though native speakers wouldn't have. On the other hand, even if you don't get access to spoken communication with (almost) any new people (I have only once in my life spoken Latin with another person who didn't also speak English), you do get access to millennia of "Latinity" and a perspective on the origins of modern European languages (even the non-Romance ones because of pervasive borrowings). I want to say that every language is a world and opens new horizons of thought and culture. For conlangs, those horizons may be kind of shockingly minuscule, but they're still there. Even with the intentional extreme limitations of my favorite conlang, toki pona, I've had the experience on rare occasion of feeling like something was easier or clearer for me to express in toki pona than in my native English. But yes, learning modern languages has paid much huger dividends in being able to communicate with hundreds of millions of new people and participate to some limited extent in very vibrant cultures... Edit: in the specific case of Esperanto there's a widely-held but controversial theory that it helps prepare people for the experience of learning other languages, maybe by helping them develop some grammatical concepts or practice certain language-learning skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... I actually find this less plausible than I used to (it seems like many of the grammatical concepts you get from Esperanto won't map that well onto other languages), but some experiments with this did show positive results.
zetazzed 5y ago
Has anyone found good interactive resources for learning (Attic or Koine) Greek? I started self-studying (with Jones’ book and Great Courses online) and found that I liked the focus on real classical texts (as opposed to Ecce Romani) style. But ultimately it wanted to move too fast to grammatical completeness (banging out one conjugation after another). I felt I didn’t get enough practice or vocab, and interactive lessons would’ve really helped.
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  There is John Williams' First Greek Book, but it only focuses on one text though (The Anabasis). https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/ https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/
billfruit 5y ago
Also Duolingo has had a latin course since some time, worth checking it out if you want to get a feel of latin.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Yes, the Duolingo course is great if you are interested in conversational Latin. This tool is focused more on reading ancient Roman authors. No reason you can't do both, though!
billfruit 5y ago
I have been interested in learning Latin by self study, but memorizing conjugations and declinations seems like a chore. There are some modern variants of Latin that seems to simplify these aspects mainly Interlingua and Latine-sine-flexione(LSF). Are these worth while to learn?. For example if one is up to speed in LSF, can one still make sense of classical latin texts and poetry etc?.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Unfortunately I have not been able to find a way to learn Latin that doesn't involve some amount of memorization pain. I find that focused exercises, as opposed to flashcards or other rote approaches, mitigate the pain somewhat. But I'm not sure it can be eliminated completely.
- defterGoose 5y ago
  Declensions and conjugations are actually one of the easier things to memorize though, because they sit in a nice table. Ive never heard of LSF, but my experience with reading Latin has taught me that a solid understanding of the grammar is critical because of the irregular forms and things like gerund/ives. Only having a good sense of vocabulary just isnt quite good enough for good comprehension.
- Sileni 5y ago
  I have no experience with modern variants of Latin, but wouldn't that be akin to trying to read Portugese when you know Spanish? You might get the general gist, but you wouldn't really get the full underlying meaning. You'd certainly miss more complex ideas like idioms. I'd imagine it would depend on your goal. Do you want to be able to work your way through a text, or do you want to be able to appreciate poetry in the language? I'd say it might work for the former, it almost certainly wouldn't for the latter.
- schoen 5y ago
  > For example if one is up to speed in LSF, can one still make sense of classical latin texts and poetry etc? I think that's fairly unlikely, because LSF uses modern Romance techniques of word order and prepositions to substitute for Latin inflections. In Latin the word order is relatively free, especially in some famous classical authors. Check out this passage from the Aeneid: his ego nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum, dum trepidant alae, saltusque indagine cingunt, desuper infundam, et tonitru caelum omne ciebo. diffugient comites et nocte tegentur opaca: speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient; adero, et, tua si mihi certa voluntas conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo, hic hymenaeus erit." - Non adversata petenti adnuit, atque dolis risit Cytherea repertis. If I try to remove all of the meaning that's given only by inflections (leaving singular/plural distinctions), this would be something like these I darkening mixed hail cloud while shake forces and leaps circle close from above wetten and thunder sky all shake. scatter comrades and night hold dark cave Dido leader and Trojan same come; be present and your if me sure will marriage join firm and own call this marital is." - not opposed requestor agree and trick laugh Venus found Looks like the inflections were doing a lot of work here. :-) OK, how about Galileo's Siderius Nuncius? Magna equidem in hac exigua tractatione singulis de natura speculantibus inspicienda contemplandaque propono. Magna, inquam, tum ob rei ipsius praestantiam, tum ob inauditam per aevum novitatem, tum etiam propter Organum, cuius beneficio eadem sensui nostro obviam sese fecerunt. Big truly in this small treatise all about nature speculating to be inspected and to be contemplated propose. Big, say, then because thing itself excellence then because unheard through era novelty, then also because Instrument whose help same sense our apparent themselves make. OK, that's a little more intelligible -- by Galileo's time Latin prose that's not meant to be fancy or showy is more similar to modern languages, and Galileo presumably was thinking like a modern Romance language speaker, using Latin as a foreign language. Going back to Cicero: Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus. Big gods immortal to be given is and this himself Jupiter Stator, most ancient guardian this city, thanks, because this so foul, so horrible, and so dangerous republic danger so often now escape. I guess you can get the idea here too, but the tenses would be helpful, and maybe being able to see where the "of" and "to" go... Vulgate? in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux. et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem ac tenebras. appellavitque lucem diem et tenebras noctem factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. dixit quoque Deus fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum et dividat aquas ab aquis. et fecit Deus firmamentum divisitque aquas quae erant sub firmamento ab his quae erant super firmamentum et factum est ita. vocavitque Deus firmamentum caelum et factum est vespere et mane dies secundus. in beginning create God sky and land. land however is idle and empty and darknesses over face abyss and spirit God carry over waters. and says God make light and made is light. and see God light because is good and divide light and darknesses. and call light day and darknesses night and made is evening and morning day one. say also God make firmament in middle waters and divide waters from waters. and make God firmament and divide waters which are below firmament from these which are over firmament and made is thus. and call God firmament sky and made is evening and morning day second. (That one might be deceptively easy because this text is so familiar...) Cicero's De Finibus, the origin of the text that got corrupted into "Lorem Ipsum"? Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui do lorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur? But so see, from where all that born error is pleasure accusing and pain praising, all thing open and those themselves, which from that finder truth and nearly architect happy life said are, explain. Nobody indeed itself pleasure, because pleasure is, scorn or hate or flee, but because follow big pains those, who reason pleasure follow don't know, nor indeed anyone is, who pain itself, because pain is love pursue drawn to want, but because not never his kind times occur, so work and pain big other seeks pleasure. So indeed to smallest come, who of us exercises any body undertake laborious, except so something from her use obtain? Who however or him right blame, which in that pleasure want be, which nothing bother follow, or him, which pain that flee, which pleasure no give birth? Anyway, I don't think full-scale inflected Latin texts will be any easier or more comprehensible than those above if you learn Latin entirely without inflections. :-)
jchin 5y ago
I've recently come across Latin as I was reading "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book describing how to provide a "classical education" to kids at home. (I'm homeschooling my two young kids this year and reading everything I can about how to homeschool.) The author strongly recommends having the kids learn Latin. In case anyone is interested, some resources/curricula for homeschooling Latin she mentions in the book include Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, Song School Latin, Latin for Children, The Big Book of Lively Latin, The Latin Road to English Grammar, and Latin Alive!. Anyone have experience/thoughts/opinions on teaching their kids Latin? Or even learning Latin as a kid?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Not really "as a kid" but I had Latin for a couple years in high school. Pro I guess is that it lets you read some classical literature although in 2 years I never got remotely proficient. In some ways it's easier than a modern language because you're mostly learning to read. Con is mostly the obvious. You could be spending the time learning a modern language. (I also took 4 years of high school French. Never got very proficient in that either. It helps a bit when I visit France but I never spent enough time living it to get good.)
- jthnews 5y ago
  timthorn in a thread below suggested http://www.minimus.com/ http://www.minimus.com/ for young kids and https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/key-stage-3/subjects/latin https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/... for older ones
- spaced-out 5y ago
  I took a few years of Latin as a kid. I remember that I enjoyed learning about Ancient Rome, but realized I didn't want to sink hundreds of hours learning a language just to read some old books. I ended up spending a few years studying Spanish in college, I'm reasonably conversational now and met my wife, who's from Puerto Rico, in the process. Even if my wife wasn't Puerto Rican, I would teach my kids Spanish. Grammatically it's far easier than Latin and will connect them with culture and millions of speakers that are alive today.
jedberg 5y ago
I took Latin in high school. I barely remember any of it, but what it helped me with the most was understanding English grammar. I learned more about English grammar in my Latin class than I ever did in my English classes.
carabiner 5y ago
> You don't need a user account to use the practice tool, but you're progress may not be saved if you're not logged in. Distressing to see errors like this in a language text.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Yeah but imagine how distressing it is to make them :) Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
cambalache 5y ago
Some feedback: Have some link in your header clearly named "Course" or "Lessons" as it is right now it is totally confusing. Embed the videos in your site. Include the text in your site if possible.
- jthnews 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I'll put some thought into this.
frodetb 5y ago
I have been studying Latin by my self for the past couple of years, and would recommend anyone looking at this to instead consider learning Latin by the Dowling Method. It is simpler and much more straightforward than any course. It essentially boils down to memorizing all of Latin's regular grammatical forms, and then reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata with those tables fresh in mind. It may seem old-fashioned, but I think this is the best strategy for learning such a highly inflected and essentially dead language, especially if you only have experience with mostly analytical languages to begin with. Much of what makes this work is the work of genius that is LLPSI, but I have come to see the value of this strategy for language learning in general. If you are as convinced of the input-hypothesis as me, then you might agree that this is the quickest way to get reading independently in Latin, which is where most learning will take place. The only objection I have with Dowling's method, is that you should start reading LLPSI immediately, rereading chapters over and over while you are memorizing the tables. Only pace yourself, and don't rush on to chapters covering grammar that you haven't started memorizing yet. If you get bored with old chapters, pick up the companion books, like Fabellae Latinae, for more reading materials.

278 points by jthnews 5y ago

I'd love to have an interlinear text Latin–German. There are such texts in Latin–English, but if someone klnows about a German one, please tell me.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as one of the options. Unmentioned but possible readings include "The farmers give water to the daughter" and "The farmer's daughters give water [to something determined by context]". If I'm going to be asked to do translation exercises, I'd rather have questions that I need to answer by understanding the text, as opposed to questions that I need to answer by referring to the construction of the question. Follow that sentence with something like Aqua bibita, puellis gratias agit and suddenly we can determine what the first sentence meant regardless of which options we're given. > Choose the word that matches the indicated use. > Genitive of the possesor > 1. corōnam and Diānam in "Puella Diānae corōnam dat quia Diānam amat." > 2. dominīs in "Nautae fābulam dominīs nārrat quia dominae fābulās amant." > 3. Cui in "Cui puellae corōnam dant?" This is much worse; these three sentences between them do not contain even one word in the genitive case. Also, there's a typo in #2, which should presumably say either "Nautae... narrant" or "Nauta... narrat". "Possesor" is a typo too. I picked #2 and was told it was correct. That grayed the question out, so I can't tell whether options 1 or 3 would also have been "correct". > Genitive of the possesor > 3. pugnae in "Nūntiat Galba nautae causam pugnae." This one is at least genitive, but I have trouble characterizing this as "genitive of the possessor". Going by the taxonomy here ( https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/genitive-case https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program... ), I'd call it an objective genitive.

wcarey 5y ago
That particular sentence is a really tough knot pedagogically too. As a teacher, you want a short simple sentence that includes a nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and verb to habituate students to thinking about cases. Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of those three options, which means, as you rightly say, that we need context to render the sentence. That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar. If you wanted to separate the introduction of the case system from the introduction of the context sensitivity of the grammar, you could do this sentence: > Filiabus aquam agricolae dant. While that fixes most of the context sensitivity, it doesn't fix all of it, and introduces an irregular declension, also tough right out the gate. Latin is a hard language to teach.
- andrepd 5y ago
  > That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar. Surely this is a feature of all languages :)
  - Tomte 5y ago
    Certainly not. The first example of context-sensitive constructions in natural language was found in 1985. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...
- hakuseki 5y ago
  Actually this is an example of ambiguity, not context sensitivity (in the formal languages sense). Context sensitivity means context is needed to construct a grammatical sentence, not merely to parse one. It's actually pretty hard to find examples of this in natural language.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago

kantord 5y ago

Are you interested in helping with the LibreLingo project? https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo Although the concept is a little bit different and the book content cannot be so directly adapted, I think it could still be used a nice starting point

tomcooks 5y ago
OT: WOW, thank you for creating this platform. It's great that free alternatives to corporate platforms exist
jthnews 5y ago
Great project! At first glance it looks like the differences in approach are substantial, but I'll think about it some more and see if there are ways I might be able to contribute.

tomcooks 5y ago

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

twic 5y ago
One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station that is in Latin 5. work conversations at the Vatican I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation. I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin, and the signalling function of using Latin tags actually requires that you use the incorrect "classically educated Englishman" pronunciation.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?
  - yorwba 5y ago
    But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless. Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're using the "correct" Latin pronunciation, so long as whatever pronunciation you do use maintains those correspondences.
    - 5y ago

tomcooks 5y ago

in the homepage the videos link leads to a 404.

jthnews 5y ago
Thanks! Fixed...

jbarrs 5y ago

As an aside, I'd like to recommend to people the Cambridge Latin Course (https://www.cambridgescp.com/ https://www.cambridgescp.com/) This was the course I followed learning Latin in school. Whilst it may be tailored more towards a school audience, much of the content of their books is available for free online, which includes lots of translation and vocabulary practice. The books and stories are all very light-hearted and fun and teach a lot about Roman history as you learn the language. This could make good supplementary learning material for anyone trying to teach themselves Latin for free.

jthnews 5y ago
Thanks for the link to a great resource. I don't mean to detract in any way from any of the other terrific resources available online - free or otherwise. I created selfstudyclassics.com to scratch a very particular itch. When I started to re-learn Latin after many years, I was looking for something which was focused on examples and featured a lot of practice with instant feedback - something like Khan Academy, which I love. My hope is that it is helpful to others with a similar itch.
- jbarrs 5y ago
  Yes I totally understand, and I don't think you've detracted from the others at all. The more resources are available, and the more accessible they are for different learners and different styles of learning, the better.
gadders 5y ago
Caecilius est in horto.
- dbuder 5y ago
  Caecilius est in Matella.
  - wfreeborn 5y ago
    Grumio est in Metella.

dominotw 5y ago

I've been doing latin on duolingo. This would be a good compliment.

jthnews 5y ago
Congrats on beginning your Latin studies! Duolingo is a great place to start, and will get you off and running with conversational Latin. Selfstudyclassics is geared more towards vocabulary and constructions you might find in reading, say, Caesar. I agree that they complement each other nicely.

exdsq 5y ago

If someone is interested in learning a new language for the hell of it, however your school days of learning that Caecilius was sitting in the garden fills you with dread, a really cool alternative is Lojban. It is a completely unambiguous language created by the Logical Language Group and has some pretty interesting elements that sit between software and non-computational linguistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

bluGill 5y ago
I won't stop anyone from learning anything they find interesting, and Logban is probably easier to learn. However I wouldn't recommend in general that anyone learn a constructed language. Learn the languages that people actually speak, they are much harder to learn, but in return you can actually talk to people, which is the point of learning a language. That is instead of two people learning some weird language why doesn't one of you learn the others and gain the whole world of people who speak that other language instead of a rare language where everyone speaks something else.
- schoen 5y ago
  This view is a little strange in a thread where the alternative is learning Latin. With Latin, too, you typically have to go to conventions in order to encounter other speakers... I've participated in many spoken Latin events (and loved them), but they were akin to conlang events in that every single person was a non-native speaker, and the majority were not fully fluent. Following the view which I think I took from Ghil'ad Zuckermann (I don't know whether he would phrase it this way) that revived languages like Modern Hebrew are akin to conlangs, it seems that at least the way I speak Latin is akin to the way I speak conlangs -- great reliance on explicit knowledge, little influence from my own or others' native speaker intuition. Another difficulty is the "period speech" issue https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/771:_Period_Speech https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/771:_Period_Speec... where most Latin speakers are happy to use vocabulary from any period almost interchangeably, even though native speakers wouldn't have. On the other hand, even if you don't get access to spoken communication with (almost) any new people (I have only once in my life spoken Latin with another person who didn't also speak English), you do get access to millennia of "Latinity" and a perspective on the origins of modern European languages (even the non-Romance ones because of pervasive borrowings). I want to say that every language is a world and opens new horizons of thought and culture. For conlangs, those horizons may be kind of shockingly minuscule, but they're still there. Even with the intentional extreme limitations of my favorite conlang, toki pona, I've had the experience on rare occasion of feeling like something was easier or clearer for me to express in toki pona than in my native English. But yes, learning modern languages has paid much huger dividends in being able to communicate with hundreds of millions of new people and participate to some limited extent in very vibrant cultures... Edit: in the specific case of Esperanto there's a widely-held but controversial theory that it helps prepare people for the experience of learning other languages, maybe by helping them develop some grammatical concepts or practice certain language-learning skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... I actually find this less plausible than I used to (it seems like many of the grammatical concepts you get from Esperanto won't map that well onto other languages), but some experiments with this did show positive results.

zetazzed 5y ago

Has anyone found good interactive resources for learning (Attic or Koine) Greek? I started self-studying (with Jones’ book and Great Courses online) and found that I liked the focus on real classical texts (as opposed to Ecce Romani) style. But ultimately it wanted to move too fast to grammatical completeness (banging out one conjugation after another). I felt I didn’t get enough practice or vocab, and interactive lessons would’ve really helped.

HDMI_Cable 5y ago
There is John Williams' First Greek Book, but it only focuses on one text though (The Anabasis). https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/ https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/

billfruit 5y ago

Also Duolingo has had a latin course since some time, worth checking it out if you want to get a feel of latin.

jthnews 5y ago
Yes, the Duolingo course is great if you are interested in conversational Latin. This tool is focused more on reading ancient Roman authors. No reason you can't do both, though!

billfruit 5y ago

I have been interested in learning Latin by self study, but memorizing conjugations and declinations seems like a chore. There are some modern variants of Latin that seems to simplify these aspects mainly Interlingua and Latine-sine-flexione(LSF). Are these worth while to learn?. For example if one is up to speed in LSF, can one still make sense of classical latin texts and poetry etc?.

jthnews 5y ago
Unfortunately I have not been able to find a way to learn Latin that doesn't involve some amount of memorization pain. I find that focused exercises, as opposed to flashcards or other rote approaches, mitigate the pain somewhat. But I'm not sure it can be eliminated completely.
defterGoose 5y ago
Declensions and conjugations are actually one of the easier things to memorize though, because they sit in a nice table. Ive never heard of LSF, but my experience with reading Latin has taught me that a solid understanding of the grammar is critical because of the irregular forms and things like gerund/ives. Only having a good sense of vocabulary just isnt quite good enough for good comprehension.
Sileni 5y ago
I have no experience with modern variants of Latin, but wouldn't that be akin to trying to read Portugese when you know Spanish? You might get the general gist, but you wouldn't really get the full underlying meaning. You'd certainly miss more complex ideas like idioms. I'd imagine it would depend on your goal. Do you want to be able to work your way through a text, or do you want to be able to appreciate poetry in the language? I'd say it might work for the former, it almost certainly wouldn't for the latter.
schoen 5y ago
> For example if one is up to speed in LSF, can one still make sense of classical latin texts and poetry etc? I think that's fairly unlikely, because LSF uses modern Romance techniques of word order and prepositions to substitute for Latin inflections. In Latin the word order is relatively free, especially in some famous classical authors. Check out this passage from the Aeneid: his ego nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum, dum trepidant alae, saltusque indagine cingunt, desuper infundam, et tonitru caelum omne ciebo. diffugient comites et nocte tegentur opaca: speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient; adero, et, tua si mihi certa voluntas conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo, hic hymenaeus erit." - Non adversata petenti adnuit, atque dolis risit Cytherea repertis. If I try to remove all of the meaning that's given only by inflections (leaving singular/plural distinctions), this would be something like these I darkening mixed hail cloud while shake forces and leaps circle close from above wetten and thunder sky all shake. scatter comrades and night hold dark cave Dido leader and Trojan same come; be present and your if me sure will marriage join firm and own call this marital is." - not opposed requestor agree and trick laugh Venus found Looks like the inflections were doing a lot of work here. :-) OK, how about Galileo's Siderius Nuncius? Magna equidem in hac exigua tractatione singulis de natura speculantibus inspicienda contemplandaque propono. Magna, inquam, tum ob rei ipsius praestantiam, tum ob inauditam per aevum novitatem, tum etiam propter Organum, cuius beneficio eadem sensui nostro obviam sese fecerunt. Big truly in this small treatise all about nature speculating to be inspected and to be contemplated propose. Big, say, then because thing itself excellence then because unheard through era novelty, then also because Instrument whose help same sense our apparent themselves make. OK, that's a little more intelligible -- by Galileo's time Latin prose that's not meant to be fancy or showy is more similar to modern languages, and Galileo presumably was thinking like a modern Romance language speaker, using Latin as a foreign language. Going back to Cicero: Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus. Big gods immortal to be given is and this himself Jupiter Stator, most ancient guardian this city, thanks, because this so foul, so horrible, and so dangerous republic danger so often now escape. I guess you can get the idea here too, but the tenses would be helpful, and maybe being able to see where the "of" and "to" go... Vulgate? in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux. et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem ac tenebras. appellavitque lucem diem et tenebras noctem factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. dixit quoque Deus fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum et dividat aquas ab aquis. et fecit Deus firmamentum divisitque aquas quae erant sub firmamento ab his quae erant super firmamentum et factum est ita. vocavitque Deus firmamentum caelum et factum est vespere et mane dies secundus. in beginning create God sky and land. land however is idle and empty and darknesses over face abyss and spirit God carry over waters. and says God make light and made is light. and see God light because is good and divide light and darknesses. and call light day and darknesses night and made is evening and morning day one. say also God make firmament in middle waters and divide waters from waters. and make God firmament and divide waters which are below firmament from these which are over firmament and made is thus. and call God firmament sky and made is evening and morning day second. (That one might be deceptively easy because this text is so familiar...) Cicero's De Finibus, the origin of the text that got corrupted into "Lorem Ipsum"? Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui do lorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur? But so see, from where all that born error is pleasure accusing and pain praising, all thing open and those themselves, which from that finder truth and nearly architect happy life said are, explain. Nobody indeed itself pleasure, because pleasure is, scorn or hate or flee, but because follow big pains those, who reason pleasure follow don't know, nor indeed anyone is, who pain itself, because pain is love pursue drawn to want, but because not never his kind times occur, so work and pain big other seeks pleasure. So indeed to smallest come, who of us exercises any body undertake laborious, except so something from her use obtain? Who however or him right blame, which in that pleasure want be, which nothing bother follow, or him, which pain that flee, which pleasure no give birth? Anyway, I don't think full-scale inflected Latin texts will be any easier or more comprehensible than those above if you learn Latin entirely without inflections. :-)

jchin 5y ago

I've recently come across Latin as I was reading "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It's a book describing how to provide a "classical education" to kids at home. (I'm homeschooling my two young kids this year and reading everything I can about how to homeschool.) The author strongly recommends having the kids learn Latin. In case anyone is interested, some resources/curricula for homeschooling Latin she mentions in the book include Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, Song School Latin, Latin for Children, The Big Book of Lively Latin, The Latin Road to English Grammar, and Latin Alive!. Anyone have experience/thoughts/opinions on teaching their kids Latin? Or even learning Latin as a kid?

ghaff 5y ago
Not really "as a kid" but I had Latin for a couple years in high school. Pro I guess is that it lets you read some classical literature although in 2 years I never got remotely proficient. In some ways it's easier than a modern language because you're mostly learning to read. Con is mostly the obvious. You could be spending the time learning a modern language. (I also took 4 years of high school French. Never got very proficient in that either. It helps a bit when I visit France but I never spent enough time living it to get good.)
jthnews 5y ago
timthorn in a thread below suggested http://www.minimus.com/ http://www.minimus.com/ for young kids and https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/key-stage-3/subjects/latin https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/... for older ones
spaced-out 5y ago
I took a few years of Latin as a kid. I remember that I enjoyed learning about Ancient Rome, but realized I didn't want to sink hundreds of hours learning a language just to read some old books. I ended up spending a few years studying Spanish in college, I'm reasonably conversational now and met my wife, who's from Puerto Rico, in the process. Even if my wife wasn't Puerto Rican, I would teach my kids Spanish. Grammatically it's far easier than Latin and will connect them with culture and millions of speakers that are alive today.

jedberg 5y ago

I took Latin in high school. I barely remember any of it, but what it helped me with the most was understanding English grammar. I learned more about English grammar in my Latin class than I ever did in my English classes.

carabiner 5y ago

> You don't need a user account to use the practice tool, but you're progress may not be saved if you're not logged in. Distressing to see errors like this in a language text.

jthnews 5y ago
Yeah but imagine how distressing it is to make them :) Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

cambalache 5y ago

Some feedback: Have some link in your header clearly named "Course" or "Lessons" as it is right now it is totally confusing. Embed the videos in your site. Include the text in your site if possible.

jthnews 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I'll put some thought into this.

frodetb 5y ago

I have been studying Latin by my self for the past couple of years, and would recommend anyone looking at this to instead consider learning Latin by the Dowling Method. It is simpler and much more straightforward than any course. It essentially boils down to memorizing all of Latin's regular grammatical forms, and then reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata with those tables fresh in mind. It may seem old-fashioned, but I think this is the best strategy for learning such a highly inflected and essentially dead language, especially if you only have experience with mostly analytical languages to begin with. Much of what makes this work is the work of genius that is LLPSI, but I have come to see the value of this strategy for language learning in general. If you are as convinced of the input-hypothesis as me, then you might agree that this is the quickest way to get reading independently in Latin, which is where most learning will take place. The only objection I have with Dowling's method, is that you should start reading LLPSI immediately, rereading chapters over and over while you are memorizing the tables. Only pace yourself, and don't rush on to chapters covering grammar that you haven't started memorizing yet. If you get bored with old chapters, pick up the companion books, like Fabellae Latinae, for more reading materials.