Learning to Pray in Latin

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I learned to pray the Rosary in Latin by just doing it. There’s an app on both Android and Apple called Laudate. It has many prayers, including the Rosary in Latin. Every day, when I would say my rosary, I would just read the Latin prayers from the app. After a few days, or perhaps a week, I had already learned the Ave Maria (Hail Mary) and the Gloria (Glory Be). I would recommend learning Ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, first, though. It’s not that hard; most letters make only one sound. Either that, or listen to the prayers, first, and do your best to read them with the correct accents, hard/soft g’s and c’s, etc. I would recommend learning the pronunciation, or doing both.
 
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Rosary in latin. Reading the first week. A third every day.

It will be enough for you to learn the Credo, the Pater, the Ave Maria, and the Salve Regina by heart in a month at most.
 
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Yes. In fact, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal says that Gregorian Chant enjoys pride of place in the Liturgy. That’s talking about the Ordinary Form.
 
semper_catholicus said:
Yes. In fact, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal says that Gregorian Chant enjoys pride of place in the Liturgy. That’s talking about the Ordinary Form.
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Indeed and our Gregorian schola chants only in the OF. We’re not adverse to doing so in the EF but in the small city where we work there is no licit EF Mass.
 
semper_catholicus said:
Yes. In fact, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal says that Gregorian Chant enjoys pride of place in the Liturgy. That’s talking about the Ordinary Form.
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They’ve had slavonic plain chant around here at times, too.

Not by design–Father helps out at times with RC masses, and has fallen into chant out of habit!
😳

It was very well received, though.

hawk
 
Same!! There isn’t any licit Tridentine masses where I live either!
 
I’m doing the same thing for my rosary. I may not bother trying to memorize the Apostles Creed, Fatima prayer and Hail Holy Queen, though; we’ll see once I can get through the decades.

I have the latin text printed out, handwritten phonetic pronunciation, and the same YT videos in special playlists, repeating themselves. That’s just for my memory and my free-time opportunities, though. It may help you, but good luck if it doesn’t.
 
A quick response to some of the posts above in no specific order –

As many others pointed out, YouTube is probably the best source to hear the various texts read aloud. I would probably try and find an example recorded by a reputable source (a university, for example). Some people’s pronunciations are atrocious! I found that out by doing a search one time for spoken Old English (some really bad stuff out there).

With respect to Latin – there is no such thing as a “holy language” per se; that a church adopts a certain language as its official liturgical language does not somehow make said language any more ‘holier’ than any other. Latin had come to be the language of education and learning in the West so its choice as the liturgical language of Western Christendom seemed rather a natural one.

Sts. Cyril and Methodious did not ‘invent’ Old Church Slavonic – Old Slavonic was the common language of the Slavs and is the natural development from Late Common Slavic. Cyril and Methodious invented an orthography (spelling system) by which this language could be committed to writing. They based it on their native language of Greek and it was eventually named after them (i.e. the Cyrillic alphabet).

The “Aramaic” of the Syrian church is sometimes referred to in linguistic circles as Neo-Aramaic; it’s not quite the same language as spoken in the 1st century AD – this started developing about 400 years or so later. So…when you see YouTube videos of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, it’s Neo-Aramaic (a/k/a Syriac) that’s its recited in. To a speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the Aramaic spoken by Christ would be a bit like what something between Chaucer’s English and Shakespearian English would sound to us.

May posters are spot on with the memorization of Latin prayers just being a string of sounds to them – one of the issues the early Protestant church had with Catholicism – i.e. with the insistence on the use of Latin, most people had no clue what they were hearing at a mass, or saying when they prayed; it was pure rote memorization.

I could teach you a simple song in say Welsh and, with practice, you’d learn it by heart and maybe sing it all the time, but you’d have no clue what each of the words actually meant – only a general translation. Same sort of idea.

Anyway, yes, YouTube would be the way to go - as others mentioned, phonetic “cheat sheets” from hearing the spoken text work well too, but you don’t ever learn how to actually read the language that way. Better to learn to read it – “Church Latin” is really not all that different from learning how to read modern Italian.

BTW - as odd as it may sound, one of the easiest ways to learn to pronounce something in a foreign language is to ‘sing it’ - the tune you use is more of less irrelevant (though the Pater Noster has been done to various tunes - you don’t have to learn Gregorian chant 🙂 )
 
I have found that learning prayers in another language is a great way to slow down and focus on the words. A lot of prayers that I’ve been saying all my life can just roll off my tongue in English, but I pay a lot more attention to the words I’m praying in Spanish or Latin.
 
Everything is better with Latin 🙂

It’s interesting to hear the “bastardization” of chants done in English that were clearly of Latin origin. Same for things like Veni, Veni, Emmanuel.

Today at Mass, they closed with “Pange Lingua”, but in English. It just didn’t flow well.
 
Same thing at my parish. But it was a bi-lingual mass, so we kept jumping back and forth between English and Spanish the entire time. I saw that “Pange Lingua” was the last hymn. I thought, a perfect opportunity for us to feel united and sing a hymn in Latin after this weird back and forth. But no, they did it in English. 😩
 
How was it translated? If its done in a more medieval way, it sounds pretty good
 
Then if the criteria is that “if God understands it” rote memorized Latin prayers that are repeated by one who has no idea what they mean is OK, then why not simplify prayer even further by recording it once and playing it back every day at prayer time. That’s as bad as a Buddhist spinning a Prayer Wheel. God knows what’s on the wheel. So he doesn’t have to. That’s ridiculous.
 
Well, the OP isint doing that. He’s learning the prayers, not just memorizing them.
Again, if it’s not mortal matter, live and let live. Take your apparent hatred of Latin and go crusade against abortion, or something that matters.

@ajg I took 2 years of high school latin. The first half of the textbook in the attatched file covers basic Latin grammar, syntax, and the like. There are also powerpoints and homework assignments, if you’d like to do them.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5NfqboETkR0YTM0a3BqOHZzS2s
 
Happy studying!

My school taught Latin in a really rigorous manner, so I struggled with it, but I still love the language and find it fascinating
 
Where are you getting the idea that the prayers are rote? I’m not suggesting that they should be. And people can pray rote Our Fathers and Hail Marys in their own native languages too. I don’t understand why people give other people such a difficult time for praying in Latin.
 
Repetition, repetition, repetition, when you are done…more repetition. You will eventually have it committed to memory. Will take you somewhere like 50-100 times of repeating it in latin. Maybe more. Did this with my religion class last-year, a group of 6th grades had it memorized in two days.
 
Depending on how much time you have, rather than mere memorizing, I would recommend learning Latin the old-fashioned way, starting with the 5 declensions, the cases, verb conjugations, etc.

But in the meantime memorizing prayers by rote is fine especially if for liturgical purposes, or for formally structured prayers like the Rosary, for which you don’t need to be paying much attention to the meanings of specific words you are saying with each prayer, instead reflecting on each mystery as you pray Ave Marias out loud, knowing the content of the prayer even if not able to identify each & every particular word you utter.

Once you have Latin prayers memorized, they will roll off the tongue even faster & easier than English.

Why so much negativity here, see word “Latin” and go into a frenzy “must be a RadTrad who hates Vatican II, what’s wrong with English, God can speak English”, the OP clearly can speak English & is able to pray in English but specifically asked to learn to pray in Latin?

Do you have experience with other languages, esp. inflected languages with cases? Latin studies can leap faster when you have internalized the concepts of grammatical cases, number, gender for nouns & verb morphology reflecting concepts like person, number, tense, voice, mood.

My Catholic high school (well Jesuit HS…) offered Spanish, French, Italian and Latin. Students of Latin could easily pick up modern Romance languages (and other languages, esp. those also with inflected case systems from Ancient Greek to Russian) with a bit of self-study.

Spanish, French, Italian all dropped Latin’s comprehensive case system; people I went to school with who studied 1 of the other 3, with only English as native tongue, became adults without ever learning core grammatical concepts found in inflected languages like Latin, Koine Greek, Russian.

In terms of grammar, if you know any Greek or Russian that can actually be more helpful for Latin grammar than Latin’s own Romance descendants.

But modern Romance languages would still help with vocabulary & with verb conjugations, grammatical gender, etc.

English classes nowadays do a lousy job teaching grammar, even the messy grammar of English.

If English is the only language you know & only language you’ve ever studied (or not even studied besides learning it growing up), then it may be of benefit to study English grammar in depth first to be able to recognize a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition, English verb tenses & moods, etc.

Working as a peer tutor in HS & college, I’ve seen many monolingual Anglophones starting Latin be unable to identify subjects & objects & verb tenses & moods in English, so it was no surprise they struggled to make sense of Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative; Infinitive; Present, Imperfect, Future, Perfect, Pluperfect, Future Perfect; Indicative, Subjunctive, etc… which aren’t that complicated beneath the surface, but can appear daunting at first if you don’t know how to express them in English.
 
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