Re:The Vatican's Latinist
by schoen on Saturday July 15, 2017 @02:19AM
(#14775261)
> 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. :-)
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. :-)