Ditto. I totally wasted the years I had to sit in a Latin classroom...

I've bought a book of Latin stories that we used in school, and I'm looking forward to diving back in. If my 13-year-old self knew that, he'd be horrified.

Any advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?

My suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg

Thumbs up for this suggestion.

My advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek).

I studied Latin to degree level a decade-and-mumble years ago, and to my great shame have not kept it up at all. On the rare occasions that I am required to translate some Latin - an inscription in a church, for instance - I try my best, but I am usually a far cry from Indiana Jones. (I do have a moderately extensive selection of pretentious phrases in Latin that I can deploy when necessary.)

We used Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and The Cambridge Latin Course at school; I think the latter starts pretty much from the basics, and the former covers probably all of the grammar you'd ever need to know. I think you can get some of the Harry Potter books in Latin, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. Once you've acquired a moderate mastery, you will find something like Caesar's Gallic Wars to be quite an easy read (though stylistically he ain't much cop).

To add to that, the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter, which is a concept pretty much entirely foreign to many familiar with English prose.

Word order in general being at the whim of the writer is the bane of the modern learner, although we can be sure that this is a stylistic device and that the spoken word order would have been much more standardised. There's a wonderful line in "The Loom of Language" (wonderful book, wish I could find my copy) berating "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" vs the language he'd use to bawl out his slave.

> the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter

What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but it seems like you must mean something different?

I'm guessing that the issue is just that in poetry many authors are willing to use word orders and constructions that would otherwise be regarded as questionable or ungrammatical—"metri causa".

I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.

That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer.

However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.

That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).

Quite. Though, if by any chance you have reached a sufficient mastery of English prosody to understand the iambic pentameter, the dactylic hexameter really isn't such a stretch, notwithstanding one being based on stress and the other weight.

I so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.

> you can't practise talking to real people

Not to native speakers, but to semifluent and (rarely) fluent 2L speakers, you can. While there's always an argument that the loss of native speakers radically impoverishes our sense of a language and its potential, and that what we can figure out from writing is just a portion of what the language used to consist of, you can definitely have fun practicing spoken Latin with experts and dramatically improve your understanding of the language.

There are several spoken Latin programs, some of which use immersion methods, mentioned in the article. I spent a week at one of Nancy Llewellyn's programs about a decade ago, and mehercule can she speak fluently and extemporaneously about anything she chooses in Latin. :-)

If you are in the Seattle area, you can practice Latin, among others, at the ancient language Meetup. Latin is by far our biggest meetup (average 6 people ha). All skill levels welcome!

> you can't practise talking to real people

I have not tried this myself, but there is a skype channel used to converse in Latin [1]. I'm sure the quality varies widely, but it is there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o

Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg.

https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...

Current Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.

I took Latin in college (having not taken it in high school), and found the Wheelock text book pretty helpful (https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 ). If you're looking for Latin texts, check out the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) and the Latin Library (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/).

If you get stuck on something, swing by the Latin StackExchange (https://latin.stackexchange.com/).

This is a stretch but there is a cottage industry that churns out translations of children's books into Latin. Search for "Winnie Ille Puh" or "Cattus Patasatus" and that will lead to several others. This was likely started by Charles Schulz and company who had a Latin version of the Peanuts Philosophy published, a version which is now a rare collector's item. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-...

Go for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster:

"Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."

I have a fondness for Latin myself, but this is absurd. There are lots of languages with a similar case-driven grammar and nobody makes such claims about those. Russian is about as case-driven as Latin and non-indo-european languages like Finnish and Estonian actually have more cases.

Would love to hear details on why this is true compared to other languages.

Labor omnia vincit!

One of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.