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Re:Speaking Latin by farleykr on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:10AM (#28524205)
This couldn't be more timely. I've been wanting to get back into learning Latin. I took it in high school but faked my way through unfortunately. Does anyone have any recommendations for good resources to learn Latin outside of the obvious language learning apps/sites like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone?
Re:Speaking Latin by yawboakye on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:42AM (#28525577)
There's 2 lively Latin Discord servers. One for general Latin and the other for everyone learning Latin using Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, a popular book for self-guided learning. Once in the community you'd easily discover resources like YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, podcasts etc. It's amazing how large and niche the community is at the same time!

LLPSI Discord: https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4

Latin Discord: https://discord.gg/latin

Re:Speaking Latin by sterlind on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @06:31PM (#28532398)
I love LLPSI. The approach of just building up without requiring translation into another language really feels like how we're supposed to learn - naturally, incrementally, through immersion.
Re:Speaking Latin by Quillbert182 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:16AM (#28524293)
One thing commonly recommended is the textbook Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It uses illustrations to help you learn only in Latin.
Re:Speaking Latin by handrous on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:50AM (#28525706)
Is there a name for this kind of book? I have one, titled "Mein Erstes Buch", that, in one small and slim volume, takes you from "Dick & Jane" and "See Spot Run" levels, to an ~3rd or 4th grade reading level, entirely in German. I picked it up because it looked neat but tried reading it one day, made it about a third of the way through, and sure enough, I could follow along. Doesn't teach you pronunciation and it doesn't replace focused practice & drilling, but it was pretty damn cool. I'd like one in French, especially, but I don't know what term to search for. "The Natural Method" from that link yields some promising results, but are there other terms?

(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)

Re:Speaking Latin by urubu on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:25AM (#28526255)
Here's a website with a list of such textbooks for various languages:

https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio...

Re:Speaking Latin by dvaun on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @02:23PM (#28528677)
This is amazing, thank you!
Re:Speaking Latin by maw on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:15AM (#28526105)
In LLPSI's marketing materials, they call it the "natural method." (I've also seen "nature method.")

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.

Re:Speaking Latin by coyotespike on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:42AM (#28526479)
Yes, the terms I've seen are "natural method", "comprehensible input", and "extensive reading."

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.

Re:Speaking Latin by abecedarius on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:52PM (#28528252)
For French I liked https://www.amazon.com/Mon-premier-dictionnaire-Roger-Pillet... which I picked up after some basic grounding with Duolingo. It's not a textbook but it is all in French yet for second-language learners.
Re:Speaking Latin by jan_Inkepa on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:42AM (#28524659)
That and Wheelock's Latin are the main book recommendations. Other than that, there are a bunch of subreddits and a large discord which might be nice if you want to get some daily active practice in (including voice chat). Or just see if there are any courses running near you - active training can be handy, but the style of course is very country-specific - every country has their own tradition for teaching Latin (or multiple), and the style/goal may not suit you.

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 ]

Re:Speaking Latin by HPsquared on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:39AM (#28524628)
What's interesting is that the book is 100% Latin - you need to figure everything out from context and examples. It's almost a logic puzzle, and learning Latin is a side effect.
Re:Speaking Latin by OJFord on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:53AM (#28524816)
I really tried but ultimately found it frustrating - I think I honestly do learn best with a good amount of structured tables, going through grammar etc. Certainly that's how I've been learning Hindi (via Wiktionary & Snell, supplementing Duolingo) in which I've progressed far beyond where I ever got to with Latin via LLI.

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.

Re:Speaking Latin by mabub24 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:05AM (#28525958)
It's just not a grammar book, it's a language book in the sense that it teaches how the language is used rather than "constructed".

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).

Re:Speaking Latin by OJFord on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @05:48PM (#28531856)
Yes exactly, but I think the trouble is that it's too popular to say 'people learn by immersion, not by grammar and tables, immersion is how we learnt our first language after all'; when actually, some people do prefer (or at least benefit from additionally) such rigid grammarian teaching.

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).

Re:Speaking Latin by fourtrees on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:47PM (#28535033)
Is it even possible to learn exclusively by immersion as an adult? I was under the impression that roughly around puberty, we lose a good part of our ability to just pick up languages and a combination of study and experimentation was required afterwards.
Re:Speaking Latin by nerdponx on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:54AM (#28525787)
Is this a sensible approach to learning any language from a book? Or does it only make sense with a "dead" language that we mostly know from literature and inscriptions?
Re:Speaking Latin by coyotespike on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:44AM (#28526509)
It does make more sense with Latin, because while Latin has always been and still is spoken, much of the value of the language comes from its literature (of which 90% has never been translated).

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.

Re:Speaking Latin by JoeDaDude on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:29PM (#28527174)
This graphic novel could be fun, it is based on the writings of Julius Caesar who was said to write in a fairly simple style.

Caesaris Bellum Helveticum: Scriptores Antiqui Romani Imaginibus Ornati by Karl Heinz Graf Von Rothenburg

https://www.amazon.com/Caesaris-Bellum-Helveticum-Scriptores...

Re:Speaking Latin by em-bee on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:12PM (#28527748)
there are latin versions of the asterix comic published in germany. they are supposed to be of high quality.

https://new.egmont-shop.de/comics/asterix/latein/

Re:Speaking Latin by gnufx on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:27AM (#28525338)
Whichever it is, remember, from a .sig on ancient posts by Vassil Nikolov:

LEGEMANVALEMFVTVTVM (Ancient Roman programmers' adage.)

Re:Speaking Latin by jan_Inkepa on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:41AM (#28525555)
[ For the curious : this is some kind of overly-literal rendition of RTFM "lege - manvualem - fututum", where the grammar appears somewhat strained, but a detailed analysis would be not appropriate on YCOMB for several reasons... ]
Re:Speaking Latin by vlod on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @02:24PM (#28528703)
You might like this youtube channel:

ScorpioMartianus https://www.youtube.com/c/ScorpioMartianus

Re:Speaking Latin by mbg721 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:14AM (#28525148)
In addition to whichever dictionary and textbook you use, as you get deeper in, an Allen & Greenough grammar reference is really handy. Because Latin word-order is looser than English, there are some a-ha! moments where it starts to click, "Oh, this entire clause is acting as the direct object, and it's here because Cicero wanted to emphasize this and this." Quickly being able to look up common constructions and how noun cases are used helps with that.
Re:Speaking Latin by nerdponx on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @10:52AM (#28525755)
The word ordering stuff gets really wild, compared to my native English. I wonder about languages that have more flexible word order, do their speakers have greater ability to retain information in working memory?
Re:Speaking Latin by leetcrew on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:51PM (#28527480)
keep in mind that most of the latin you end up reading in school is rather formal/complex. it's hard to parse in a similar way that charles dickens is harder to parse than casual/informal english. stuff like de bello gallico and some new testament books (greek) can be very straightforward.

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.

Re:Speaking Latin by hyperstar on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:45AM (#28524693)
https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/

For spoken Latin, there are Corderii colloquia, which are also made into an audio book.

Re:Speaking Latin by yepguy on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:58AM (#28524902)
The Latinum Institute provides a lot of audio material for their Patreon subscribers.

https://www.latinum.org.uk/

Re:Speaking Latin by Koshkin on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:29AM (#28526312)
This one is an excellent resource for language lovers: https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol
Re:Speaking Latin by jamesfinlayson on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @03:10AM (#28536160)
I found Cambridge Latin Course (which I used at school) quite good, and it was engaging and interesting as well.
Re:Speaking Latin by sumobob2112 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:48AM (#28524737)
Wheelocks would be my goto, you learn by reading authors, in the original translation.
Re:Speaking Latin by billfruit on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:13AM (#28526069)
You could use a textbook specifically designed for adult learners like the Wheelock.
Re:Speaking Latin by voldacar on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:53PM (#28527506)
I would recommend some combination of Lingua Latina and Wheelock's Latin. That's what my Latin tutor used and they complement each other very well.