[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
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Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
Author : jthnews
Score : 237 points
Date : 2021-03-28 11:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (selfstudyclassics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (selfstudyclassics.com)
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| zetazzed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is John Williams' First Greek Book, but it only focuses
| on one text though ( _The Anabasis_ ).
|
| https://daedalus.umkc.edu/FirstGreekBook/
| carabiner wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah but imagine how distressing it is to make them :) Fixed.
| Thanks for the heads up.
| jchin wrote:
| 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?
| spaced-out wrote:
| 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.
| jthnews wrote:
| timthorn in a thread below suggested http://www.minimus.com/
| for young kids and
| https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/...
| for older ones
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| exdsq wrote:
| 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
| bluGill wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_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_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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Latin opens up ancient worlds.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin.
|
| > _Filiae 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. coronam and Dianam in "Puella Dianae coronam dat quia Dianam
| amat."
|
| > 2. dominis in "Nautae fabulam dominis narrat quia dominae
| fabulas amant."
|
| > 3. Cui in "Cui puellae coronam 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 "Nuntiat 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...
| ), I'd call it an objective genitive.
| wcarey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Certainly not.
|
| The first example of context-sensitive constructions in
| natural language was found in 1985.
|
| http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber8
| 5...
| hakuseki wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Judging by the paper linked sidethread, it's enough that
| some valid sentences cannot be constructed in a context-
| free way. Even if they can be losslessly transformed into
| alternative sentences which can be easily derived from a
| context-free grammar, their existence demonstrates that the
| language is not context-free.
| jthnews wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! As you noticed, the drills are more
| about syntax than reading comprehension, and your understanding
| of syntax is solid. It might be challenging to come up with
| multiple correct translations of each Latin exercise, but I
| will give some thought to how it might be done.
| wcarey wrote:
| One way I've done that in the past is asking explicit
| questions about the syntax, like:
|
| > "If filiae is nominative, how would you translate the
| sentence?"
|
| or
|
| > What cases could agricolae be here?
|
| if you want to introduce the context sensitivity of the
| grammar.
| jthnews wrote:
| Those are two great ideas for question formats. I will
| likely try to work those into future quizzes. Thanks for
| checking out the site!
| wcarey wrote:
| Sure! It's good stuff.
| [deleted]
| wcarey wrote:
| #2 you could read, "[He] tells the sailor's story to the
| mistresses, because mistresses love stories", which does have a
| possessive genitive.
| jthnews wrote:
| Yes, I think that was the original intention. I changed the
| option to - Nautae in "Nautae fabulam dominis narrat quia
| dominae fabulas amant." - for the time being, so at least it
| isnt't flat out wrong while I think of something better.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Fair enough. I might have thought more about that if _nautae_
| had been one of the options for "which word is genitive?"
| jthnews wrote:
| Looking at your second example...that's just a mistake, sorry.
| I figured a couple of those were bound to slip in. I'll get it
| fixed. And again, I really appreciate your taking a look at the
| site.
| billfruit wrote:
| Also Duolingo has had a latin course since some time, worth
| checking it out if you want to get a feel of latin.
| jthnews wrote:
| 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!
| cambalache wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I'll put some thought into this.
| kantord wrote:
| Are you interested in helping with the LibreLingo project?
| 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
| jthnews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| OT: WOW, thank you for creating this platform. It's great that
| free alternatives to corporate platforms exist
| dominotw wrote:
| I've been doing latin on duolingo. This would be a good
| compliment.
| jthnews wrote:
| 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.
| tomcooks wrote:
| 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.
| teataster wrote:
| I think Lingua Latina is an amazing book!
|
| PSA: you only need the first book. The second is pretty much a
| reader. It is still great, specially if you are interested in
| Classics. If you are interested in reading the Vulgate Bible or
| medieval works, you can go ahead with those after the first
| book.
|
| Medieval latin is significantly easier than classics, so it may
| even be worth you while going through those even before going
| further with classics.
| jthnews wrote:
| Agreed! That is unquestionably a great text for those who
| have access to it. Selfstudyclassics is aimed at those who
| might not have access to it, or who are looking for
| additional practice in the form of interactive exercises with
| explanations.
| teataster wrote:
| Oh, I was just riffing on the parent comment.
|
| I've had a look at your tool and I think is great. It
| greatly complements Lingua Latina and it is an essential
| tool for someone going through the traditional path of
| learning latin.
|
| I wish I had something like this when I was learning latin
| in highschool. Furthermore, anything that helps disseminate
| classics is great in my view.
|
| Thanks for your contribution!
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _PSA: you only need the first book._
|
| If I go to Amazon, the "Frequently bought together" section
| has:
|
| * This item:Familia Romana by Hans H. Orberg Paperback
| CDN$39.05
|
| * Exercitia Latina I: Exercises for Familia Romana by Hans H.
| Orberg Paperback CDN$25.33
|
| * Latine Disco, Student's Manual: Familia Romana by Hans H.
| Orberg Paperback CDN$10.28
|
| Is this a good combo?
|
| It appears that the second book is _Roma Aeterna_ : correct?
| teataster wrote:
| I do not own latine disco. I did work through exercitia
| latina I, and it is great! And yes, Roma Aeterna is the
| second book.
|
| But you only need familia romana. Everything else is cherry
| on top, extremely useful if you want to write latin and it
| will help your learning a lot. However if you are strapped
| for cash, are not interested in writing, don't have lots of
| time, want to jump quickly into reading the Bible... Just
| go with familia romana.
|
| Furthermore op is giving lots of exercises, so that makes
| exercitia less relevant.
|
| But at the end of the day is your money and your choice. I
| am happy I have Roma Aeterna, but I did not finish it, and
| I read medieval works quite fluently. I just wanted to put
| that info out so everyone can make their best buying
| choice.
| twic wrote:
| 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.
| jthnews wrote:
| You might be surprised at the size of the community of Latin
| speakers (outside the Vatican). It gets some attention from
| time to time on HN. For this community a shared pronunciation
| is crucial to being mutually intelligible. And I suppose it
| makes sense to use the one with the most support from the
| experts, even if it will always remain somewhat speculative.
| I take your point - it is possible to study and ready Latin
| without much regard for pronunciation. But I also feel that
| if you approach it this way you miss out on the fun of trying
| to recreate the speech of an ancient culture.
| chrononaut wrote:
| Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin
| could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand
| other related languages?
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Give it a try, it's what people do on a daily basis when
| trying to communicate with English speakers.
| yorwba wrote:
| If you want to use Latin to talk to people, you should
| probably use whatever pronunciation they expect, even if
| it's not "correct".
| bmj wrote:
| I attend an Anglican church (in the U.S.). Our rector and
| deacon are both from England. They endlessly argue about
| the pronunciation of venite.
| wenc wrote:
| The written form, maybe, but the spoken form not likely.
|
| The Youtuber Ecolinguist ran an experiment where he had
| Romance language speakers (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian)
| try to guess at riddles in Latin. Turns out Classical Latin
| is actually very different from most Romance languages,
| which descended more from "Vulgar Latin".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk
| [deleted]
| teataster wrote:
| Correct pronunciation is rather relevant for your first
| point, if you are trying to read poetry.
|
| Both latin and classical greek poetry has a "rhythm" based on
| the pronunciation of each syllable. In latin you won't get
| the rhythm unless you are very knowledgeable of the poetic
| forms or the correct pronunciation of words, since vowel
| spelling is overloaded: there are 10 latin vowels (excluding
| diphthongs) and 5 ways to write them traditionally.
|
| Same goes if you are interested in following a christian mass
| in latin. Songs make little sense without medieval/vatican
| pronunciation. I can read an ecclesiastic text, but I get
| nothing of what they are singing, since I was educated in
| classical latin.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think that none of these require historically correct
| Latin pronunciation.
|
| That is true, but there are questions for which you want to
| know what the historical pronunciation was. For example, it's
| much easier to make sense of ancient misspellings if you can
| recognize that the misspelling and the target word would have
| sounded the same. Something similar holds for ancient jokes.
|
| > I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of
| mediaeval Latin
|
| This is vague; the syntax and pronunciation of Latin change
| continuously into Italian. The rest of Italy has a better
| claim to be speaking "some derivative of medieval Latin" than
| the Vatican does; the Vatican's version presumably reflects
| mostly-arrested development after a certain point, as far as
| syntax goes.
|
| As for pronunciation, I tend to assume (without any relevant
| knowledge) that the Vatican's Latin pronunciation is just how
| the same written words would be pronounced in standard
| Italian. You can find similar conventions for other dead
| languages -- it's the only option available for Chinese where
| we just plain don't know what the pronunciation was in 600
| BC, and it's "Reuchlinian pronunciation" in Greek. This
| approach has quite a bit to recommend it, most prominently
| that it's easy to find fluent models of the pronunciation of
| a living language.
| tomcooks wrote:
| > One of my Latin teachers did try to teach us a proper
| pronuncation once, but quickly gave up.
|
| Basically what happens in Europe when students need to learn
| English pronunciation, but no way to give up.
|
| > But i wonder, what is the point?
|
| By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn
| romance languages, which will allow you to understand and
| communicate with a much larger share of the world.
|
| Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people
| outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect
| English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not
| being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't
| bother returning the favour (while at the same time
| complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos)
| umanwizard wrote:
| I don't think there's any evidence that learning Latin
| helps you learn Romance languages any faster than learning
| a Romance language does. Why should learning Latin and then
| French be any faster than Spanish->French ?
| bshimmin wrote:
| I studied Latin and French from the age of 11. When I
| spent a year in Bologna as a student on the Erasmus
| scheme (studying Latin, in fact), I can _assure_ you that
| my schoolboy French was the more useful of the two as a
| starting point for learning Italian.
| Grieving wrote:
| > By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you
| learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand
| and communicate with a much larger share of the world.
|
| As someone else said, you can just as well learn a Romance
| language and you'll have the same benefit when learning a
| second. My grandfather's first language was an obscure
| French dialect, and he's able to communicate with Mexican
| Spanish speakers without much trouble.
|
| > Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people
| outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak
| perfect English (and get the usual banter about
| pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere
| generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the
| same time complaining about being treated as uneducated,
| rude gringos)
|
| I don't know if this holds true elsewhere in the
| Anglosphere, but in my experience Americans who are
| interested in learning foreign languages are generally
| eager to perfect their pronunciation (whether or not they
| succeed is another question entirely, though to be fair the
| same is true about most English learners). That
| "uneducated, rude gringos" are a long-standing negative
| trope in popular American media reflects this insecurity.
| And with regard to classical languages in particular, the
| Anglosphere has been mocked for reviving 'spotless'
| classical pronunciations instead of simply using, for
| example, modern Italian or Greek pronunciation.
| mudita wrote:
| When you're learning latin, it's usually not mainly about the
| practical application, anyway, and aesthetically it feels
| somehow so much more pleasing to use the "correct"
| pronunciation - to me at least.
|
| Furthermore it can help to understand historic and linguistic
| relationships in unexpected ways:
|
| For example the German word for emperor "Kaiser" looks very
| different to the Latin "Caesar" and the relationship between
| those words remains obscured by the way most Germans
| pronounce Caesar. But it was a revelation to me, when I
| learned that "c" and "ae"are actually pronounced the same way
| as the "k" and "ai" in the German "Kaiser". We literally
| still call emperors Caesar in German!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Aren't the "s" and the "s" different, though? And the "r"
| and the "r"?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It's pretty dang close for 2100 years!
| ferkad wrote:
| ad 4. If you are referring to Nuntii Latini then it is no
| longer broadcasted. The final news service was emitted in
| 2019.
| wrycoder wrote:
| A review of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata on the excellent
| polyMATHY channel:
|
| https://youtu.be/5oJctKy_r6s
| jthnews wrote:
| Thanks! Excellent text and excellent channel.
| coldcode wrote:
| I learned Latin in a public high school in the 70's, took 3
| years of it. The teacher taught us correct pronunciation as
| best he could. It was actually the most popular class in the
| whole school due to the quality of the teacher. Sadly I don't
| remember much now.
| dghf wrote:
| > It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong
| (English based) pronunciation.
|
| Really? Still? I was taught Latin many years ago by a very
| conservative teacher, who insisted on classical pronunciation
| rather than the anglicised version (so "mah-ter" rather than
| "may-ter" for _mater_ , etc.)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Same here, I don't think I have ever heard mater pronounced
| may-ter except by public school boys referring to their
| mother in English. I studied Latin from 1st form to 3rd form,
| 1966 to 1969. Hated it then but in recent years I've been
| making desultory attempts to learn it again.
| jthnews wrote:
| Thanks for your interest! I agree about the pronunciation. The
| first of the videos is on that very topic. Also I second your
| suggestion of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. That is a great
| text. My goal is not to replace any of the existing tools, but
| rather to supplement them. There is no such thing as too much
| practice. Also, this presents a free alternative for those that
| might need one.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Ah sorry I didn't mean to sound like that with the comment on
| the pronunciation, it was praise: fortunately someone like
| you is pushing for doing things the right way (and this
| removes the perceived cultural imperialism)
|
| Great job!
| jthnews wrote:
| No apology necessary. I sincerely appreciate any and all
| feedback on the project.
| tomcooks wrote:
| in the homepage the videos link leads to a 404.
| jthnews wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed...
| jbarrs wrote:
| As an aside, I'd like to recommend to people the Cambridge Latin
| Course (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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| I believe the other popular suggestion is Orberg's _Lingua
| Latina_ :
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg
| billfruit wrote:
| I thought the common suggestion for a modern Latin textbook
| is Wheelock.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226#
| HuShifang wrote:
| From my own casual investigations, Wheelock is considered a
| perfectly good textbook (particularly for people with lots
| of experience learning languages, e.g. grad students in the
| humanities), but also a bit "traditional," focusing more on
| learning grammatical rules and less on developing an
| intuition for the language. _Lingua Latina Per Se
| Illustrata_ is at the other, "immersion"-oriented end of
| the spectrum.
| voldacar wrote:
| My latin teacher used both wheelock and lingua latina.
| They complement each other really well.
| jthnews wrote:
| Yes, several other commenters have made that suggestion, and
| I agree it is a good one. This tool is aimed at those
| interested in a public domain text, or people who using other
| tools who are looking for additional practice in the form of
| interactive exercises with explanations.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes! Orberg's is neat in that it's all in Latin, and you just
| infer what everything means from the pictures as you read.
|
| I got referred to it from this earlier HN thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14448974
| cambalache wrote:
| For me it is the best book for language learning I have ever
| seen, irrespective of the target language.
| timthorn wrote:
| Also new this year for Lockdown, the Oak National Academy
| produced an intro course:
| https://classroom.thenational.academy/subjects-by-key-stage/...
| jthnews wrote:
| Wow, this is great. Thanks for the link. I hope to take
| Selfstudyclassics a little farther than this one goes over
| time, but this would be a great place for anyone to start.
| timthorn wrote:
| The other resource you might be interested in is Minimus,
| designed to introduce Primary school children to Latin, and
| to allow non-Latin speaking teachers to lead a course. None
| of the interactive elements you offer, though there are CDs
| :) http://www.minimus.com/
| jthnews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| It's really important that these texts have this lightness of
| mood to engage kids - and the way that so many adults remember
| Caecilius and family is a testament to how effective it is.
| Timeless too - I was amazed and delighted when my daughter used
| the exact same texts. In similar vein, for Greek we used
| Thrasymachus, which follows a plucky kid on his adventures
| encountering various characters from mythology.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| Ecce Romani gets no love despite the exciting saga of the main
| characters being stuck in a ditch for half a book.
| oliverobscure wrote:
| I have many fond memories of learning Latin with Ecce Romani.
| Raeda in fossa est, whatever will they do?
| gadders wrote:
| Caecilius est in horto.
| dbuder wrote:
| Caecilius est in Matella.
| wfreeborn wrote:
| Grumio est in Metella.
| _joel wrote:
| I can almost feel and smell the textbook.
| exdsq wrote:
| Caecilius in horto sedet
| billfruit wrote:
| 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?.
| defterGoose wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jthnews wrote:
| 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.
| Tomte wrote:
| 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.
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