If anyone is interested in learning it, there's nothing better than Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It's entirely in Latin, including grammar explanations, but it starts out incredibly simple and ramps up gradually with lots of repetition. And that's fun AND effective, since you're immersed rather than grinding tables.
As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone.
It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.
As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).
Sure, Ørberg coupled with other books is fine enough. I do think his basic idea (a text that gets progressively more grammatically complex) is important and good, but not without exercises, grammatical elucidation, drills, etc.
Also, you're much better off reading The Hobbit in English. The Latin translation is known to be less than superb.
Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question
If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.
There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability.
I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.
On the flip side, Ørberg is a textbook for children, perhaps teenagers at the latest, and like most such textbooks it is in no hurry, so you’ll need to stick with it for quite some time to get results. That by no means makes it bad or unsuitable to whoever is reading this comment, but I can imagine how it wouldn’t work well in a typical introductory college course, where the instructor’s aim is to cram into the students’ heads as much Latin as possible in the semester or two they are given.
If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.
I think the direct method is essential for speaking fluency, but in that case, you're thrown into a living language. There are more constraints with dead languages.
For all other languages, that is, naturally spoken languages, I would totally agree. You learn them by imersing yourself in the language, culture, country.
But latin is a dead language. What you describe is what it is used for. It is a grammar exercise.
The kind of work Latinists do also require a high degree of expertise in grammatical nuances. Latin isn't taught for the sake of reading modern works translated into Latin.
Intuitive comprehension works much better for Medieval Latin, like that used in the scientific publications of the 16th/17th/18th/19th centuries, i.e. the kind of Latin that would be used by people like Newton or Gauss.
Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.
On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.
The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.
Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.
For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).
There is a good Latin dictionary that is online:
https://www.prima-elementa.fr/Gaffiot/Gaffiot-dico.html
but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.
A large number of Latin books are online at:
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/
Perseus has a couple of Latin-English dictionaries[1,2] along with a large number of texts and translations and tools to go between all three; Wiktionary is also often quite decent. Incidentally, the TEI XML files underlying the Perseus website are downloadable[3,4].
[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[3] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download
[4] https://github.com/PerseusDL
For Classical works, TheLatinLibrary is serviceable, but it's better to use PHI's database, which has the added benefit of being searchable:
https://latin.packhum.org/
There are more Christian and Medieval works on TheLatinLibrary though.
Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way.
The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.
If you speak four languages, in most countries you are an outlier, and you should not assume that what works for you would work for others.
Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.
Now I’m curious; what book of grammar was it? What did the exercises look like? What other languages and strategies did you use?
As someone who also learned multiple languages, the most typical result if grammar focused classes is that you cant use the language at all for years. And yes it is consistent outcome for majority of the students.
Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.
As an aside, do you still teach Latin? If not, any online recommendations for Latin tutors? Thanks in advance.
I've considered picking up a class here or there, but no, I left academia years ago. I have tutored in Latin afterwards, and I also answer questions on StackExchange's Latin site.
Thanks for responding.
If you're interested in a tutoring Latin remotely, please let me know. If not, no worries.
In which case, I’ll drop the books of the late Reginald Foster who taught at the Gregorian University, Teresianum and Urbanianum and worked in the Latin Letters section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State: Ossa Latinitatis Sola, Ossium Carnes Multae, and Os Praesens Reginaldi Docentis.
I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.
"Grinding tables" might be the most accurate description of my language-learning experience that I've come across.
We quoted that book for years (probably because the accompanying audio version had a somewhat amusing cadence, but I do also think it was a lot more beneficial to learning than trudging through classical texts with a dictionary).
I like the approach in Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (sometimes called the "natural method"). I've noticed that it was adapted for other languages too, but most of the adaptations seemed old and outdated.
Recently I was wondering if I should work on a modernization of the concept (using audio and a more interactive medium). If anyone has thoughts on this topic, I'd be happy to discuss more.
Thanks for sharing this! My wife and I have been interested in refreshing our Latin from high school, and we've been looking for good resources.
We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.
I haven't read it in years, and my Latin's pretty rusty now, but it was the most useful and fun thing I used.[1] If you get the book, you might also like Mr. Ørberg's recordings (widely pirated) of himself reading the text with a Classical pronunciation. There are also some good Latin YouTubers; my favorite is Satura Lanx, <https://youtube.com/@SaturaLanx>, but Luke Ranieri, <https://youtube.com/@polyMATHY_Luke>, is also good and very knowledgeable.
___
1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.
Duolingo has a Latin course.
Duolingo Latin is not useful as your only course. I would say it’s not useful at all, except perhaps if your normal Latin class is on break and you want something, anything at all, to jog your memory a bit.
On one hand, it is really short. There are very few words assembled into very few phrases, and they are not even particularly popular words. (New Latin for “New York”? I mean, I guess, but was that really the best you could do?..)
On the other hand, for how short it is, it confronts you with quite a bit of grammar. As is customary for Duolingo, you’ll have to infer that grammar from the examples—except, per the previous point, you won’t get nearly enough examples. (It’s cute that some usages of the Latin verb “studeo” correspond to the English verb “study”, but the Latin one governs an unusual case, which depending on declension looks exactly like one of the other cases, so perhaps having it be one of the first verbs is unwise, especially when a lot of your target audience ostensibly has no concept of “govern”, “case”, or “declension”.)
On the gripping hand, because of how short it is, there is a lot of grammar that it does not even hint at. Including parts that any classical text will hit you in the face with within the first paragraph, and that will completely befuddle you unless you’re aware of them. (Like the quaint custom of plopping the preposition in the middle of its complement, as in “qua de causa” lit. “which for reason” i.e. “for which reason” i.e. “therefore”, or for that matter “magna cum laude” lit. “great with praise” i.e. “with great praise”.)
By comparison, Ørberg excels at this to a downright supernatural extent. It’s like La Disparition except instead of writing a (pretty natural-sounding) novel without using the most popular letter of the language he wrote a third of a (pretty natural-sounding) textbook without using the most popular category of nouns and adjectives in the language, and his version is actually useful. And it’s like this for any grammar concept he wants to defer. His way does take quite a bit of time, though, I’ll give you that.
After trying Duolingo a bit myself and seeing my family members try it, I've become convinced that Duolingo is worse than doing nothing, because it does a much better job of convincing you that you're learning than it does actually teaching you.
The courses vary a bit. The Welsh course, for example, is not that great. I have heard that off both serious learners and native speakers.
I've found it fairly useful for picking up other alphabets, as opposed to languages.
Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.
It sure does a little bit, but a) quality varies a lot - some courses can get you from zero to dos cervesas por favor, some are just poorly structured noise that has no chance of sticking in mind; b) doesn’t explain grammar (it’s an exception when it does), so results greatly vary on preconditions like languages you’re already familiar with and can relate - anything too foreign and you’ll have hard time trying to understand how those examples generalize.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
Duolingo does work for those A1-B1 levels it has courses for. At minimum, it got me where I was able to switch to netflix.
Do avoid.[1]
1: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/11413/is-duolingo-...
Duolingo has a tenth of a Latin course.
Source: I did the whole thing before I learned Latin from a different course. Duolingo's is unfinished.
I've seen Scanlon's Latin which was written I think to help people pray the Divine Office in latin
Lifehack: Latin is much easier if you already know a Slavic or a Baltic language (except Bulgarian). While declension patterns are different, the case structures are very similar. Not identical, but close enough that you actually just need to learn the differences.
Most other grammatical structures are also directly comparable.
So you can make your life easier by studying a Slavic (or a Baltic) language first.
(mwahaha!)
Or you can find learning a Slavic (or a Baltic) language easier if you learn Latin first. The bonus being that there are more useful cognates in Latin than in Slavic languages (although while learning Czech, I was a bit amused to discover that many of my childhood friends’¹ surnames were just Czech words for colors). Latin has fewer cases than Czech (five³ versus seven) and fewer declension patterns (there are five declensions with most nouns falling into the first three. In contrast, Czech has twelve and the adjective declensions differ from noun declensions (as opposed to Latin where adjectives follow either a first-second declension pattern or a third declension pattern).
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
⸻
1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
> The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline
That pipeline has since dried up as well, especially since 2004 when immigration began to shift toward the EU. And since then, we see the reversal of that process, with far more Poles returning home from abroad.
So, Polish immigration has effectively ended. Old Polish neighborhoods are in the process of being displaced by new immigrant groups and yuppies.
(Curiously, even under foreign occupation, a good deal of Polish immigration was intended to be short-term. Poles would move to places like the US to earn some money and return home. Naturally, immigration is “sticky”, so a good number stayed behind and assimilated.)
Do you find it better than Wheelock’s? As a casual language observing hobbyist, it’s really scratched my itch of learning why Latin is the way it is.