I want to learn Latin!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Abundant
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
A

Abundant

Guest
I took a year of Latin in high school, and now I want to learn more. Does anyone have a great resource for doing so?
 
Yes, Wheelock’s is the old standby, you can find their workbooks, tapes and hardcover readers on Amazon. Memoria Press also produces a variety of Latin Language studies from Beginner to Advanced for Christian Homeschooling.
 
I’m beginning Latin studies as well so I appreciate the wisdom here on sources. Thank you.
 
Attending the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is a start. Consider joining the schola too. Being told how to speak the language is useless; you need hands on experience with it. Don’t worry about “declensions” or any of that as it will just complicate matters; I have no idea what that means and I can pronounce Latin quite well even though I’ve never taken any courses or anything. It just comes out and sounds right. Some priests I find have poorer pronunciation than others which might not help. It should sound Italianate and very fluid. I think perhaps my having grown up listening to lots of Italian opera has also helped.
 
**Bonum est quod tu desideras studere linguam latinam. Suadeo liber vocatum est "Primer of Ecclesiatical Latin by Collins (Catholic University of America Press). Utimur in decuria latina in Seminario Nostro, Sacrum Cor Jesu. **
 
Don’t forget to sign up for the Pope’s tweets in Latin: @Pontifex_ln

Over 300k followers so far.
 
robwar said:
What about Rosetta stone?
Click to expand...
From the little I saw, it looks OK.

I haven’t really done very much with Latin since high school, and that was long long ago.

Since watching youtube vids is more of a review for me than it is learning Latin for the first time, and since it’s free, and since Rosetta Stone looks like it costs money, I think I personally would just go with whatever free online stuff I could find.

When I look at these things, I go “Oh, that looks right, I remember that”, or “Hmm, that seems new to me.”

I’ve tried several languages in the past, including Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Norwegian and German.

When I say tried, I mean that with some of them, German for instance, I only got a few pages into it. On the other hand, I spent about a year on Russian.

I’m not a linguist, although at this point I can see that there are commonalities across languages, so I now go into “learning”(actually, just investigating it a little bit . . .) a language with a bit of familiarity about what is to come.

I’m not fluent at anything but English, and with the possible exceptions of Russian and Japanese, if I attempted to use any of these languages to survive I would have very little advantage over the rawest beginner imaginable.
 
A Primer on Ecclesiastical Latin by Collins, and Latin Grammar and Second Latin by Scanlon. All available on Amazon.

Also flash cards are helpful. I got a set from Barnes.

Get ready for a tough challenge. According to former Vatican Latinist the Carmelite Father Reginald Foster, there are less than a hundred people fluent in Latin in the world today. I’ve been studying myself and it is a lot tougher than one would anticipate.
 
PazzoGrande said:
A Primer on Ecclesiastical Latin by Collins, and Latin Grammar and Second Latin by Scanlon. All available on Amazon.

Also flash cards are helpful. I got a set from Barnes.

Get ready for a tough challenge. According to former Vatican Latinist the Carmelite Father Reginald Foster, there are less than a hundred people fluent in Latin in the world today. I’ve been studying myself and it is a lot tougher than one would anticipate.
Click to expand...
I believe he said there’s only around 100 in the Church who speak it fluently. This is shocking to me. I wonder if my church’s pastor is one of them as he often translates texts from Latin at the pulpit. I suppose this is quite different than conversing in it though. I’ve heard one of the professors at a nearby university who also used to attend the parish is supposedly fluent in it as well. Outside of the Church there are more people with the ability. Harvard for example has students that speak Latin fluently enough to be able to give a several minute speech in it every year. One of them was going on about Star Wars some years back. :rolleyes:
 
I studied Latin in high school, and it was a minor during college. Like any second language, Latin requires intensive study and much memorization to learn well. In my experience, it is a major plus for an English speaker who studies Latin if he or she has a solid foundation in English grammar.

Latin is a “dead” language, which means it is no longer a spoken language in any part of the world. While I don’t know if any of my teachers were fluent in Latin, I had one high school teacher and a college teacher that were very good and could at least speak in Latin. A difficulty for fluency is that a student cannot travel to a place where Latin is the spoken language and immerse him or herself in the language like a serious student could while learning and becoming fluent in Spanish or French. This necessitates an intensive study of the language, I think.

Latin was historically the spoken language throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The empire included the present-day countries of Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Romania and others. Over the course of many centuries, the Latin that was spoken in these countries evolved into regional dialects of Latin. These languages are of course known as Romance languages, and the word “Romance” is a reference to the language (Latin) that was spoken by the original people of Rome. Once one masters one of the Romance languages, the others are not so difficult to learn. This includes Latin, the root of all the Romance languages.

I would also recommend Wheellock’s Latin for independent study though there are many very good sources.
 
As others have stated, Wheelock’s is the “standard” but keep in mind it’s Classical and not Ecclesiastical Latin. The difference is a bit like Chaucer’s English as opposed to say Shakespear’s English; similar but some differences in grammar and vocabulary. The most obvious difference being, of course, the pronunciation.
 
Pat_Albertson said:
From the little I saw, it looks OK.

I haven’t really done very much with Latin since high school, and that was long long ago.

Since watching youtube vids is more of a review for me than it is learning Latin for the first time, and since it’s free, and since Rosetta Stone looks like it costs money, I think I personally would just go with whatever free online stuff I could find.

When I look at these things, I go “Oh, that looks right, I remember that”, or “Hmm, that seems new to me.”

I’ve tried several languages in the past, including Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Norwegian and German.

When I say tried, I mean that with some of them, German for instance, I only got a few pages into it. On the other hand, I spent about a year on Russian.

I’m not a linguist, although at this point I can see that there are commonalities across languages, so I now go into “learning”(actually, just investigating it a little bit . . .) a language with a bit of familiarity about what is to come.

I’m not fluent at anything but English, and with the possible exceptions of Russian and Japanese, if I attempted to use any of these languages to survive I would have very little advantage over the rawest beginner imaginable.
Click to expand...
I had German in high school. I would like to learn Latin, on my bucket list. Dabbling in all these other languages is impressive. Thanks for the advice.
 
Medawlinno said:
As others have stated, Wheelock’s is the “standard” but keep in mind it’s Classical and not Ecclesiastical Latin. The difference is a bit like Chaucer’s English as opposed to say Shakespear’s English; similar but some differences in grammar and vocabulary. The most obvious difference being, of course, the pronunciation.
Click to expand...
Then what would be best of Ecclesiastical Latin?
 
robwar said:
What about Rosetta stone?
Click to expand...
I don’t know this for a fact, but doesn’t Rosetta Stone mainly deal with vocabulary? I tried one disc of it before for another language and I don’t recall there being any grammar exercises.

Thing is, with Latin, vocabulary is easy. What’s hard is the grammar.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top