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I have read many articles across different blogs all highlighting Foster's amazing career. I studied Latin in high school and regret that I was not more engaged
by scop 9y ago
I have read many articles across different blogs all highlighting Foster's amazing career. I studied Latin in high school and regret that I was not more engaged at the time. I am thrilled to learn of the publishing of 'Ossa Latinitatis Sola' and will take it as an opportunity to give Latin another, more purposeful, go in the near future.
- _spoonman 9y agoAny advice for someone like me who has never taken Latin but would like to learn?
- nyi 9y agoLabor omnia vincit!
- petertotleben 9y agoLingua Latina by Hans Orberg. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus...
- scop 9y agoGo for it! Here is a good quote from the article from Fr. Foster: "Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot."
- jhbadger 9y agoI have a fondness for Latin myself, but this is absurd. There are lots of languages with a similar case-driven grammar and nobody makes such claims about those. Russian is about as case-driven as Latin and non-indo-european languages like Finnish and Estonian actually have more cases.
- throwaway7645 9y agoWould love to hear details on why this is true compared to other languages.
- kawera 9y agoMy suggestion would be Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata series, it's brilliant and you can start from zero. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illustrata-series https://www.hackettpublishing.com/lingua-latina-per-se-illus... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg
- tardo99 9y agoThumbs up for this suggestion.
- bshimmin 9y agoMy advice would be to have reasonable expectations. Latin isn't easy to learn - you can't practise talking to real people, it has plentiful grammar, there isn't so much vocabulary (relatively) but many words have a vast variety of meanings depending on context, and sentence structure is entirely alien to English speakers. It is, essentially, quite hard (though easier than Classical Greek). I studied Latin to degree level a decade-and-mumble years ago, and to my great shame have not kept it up at all. On the rare occasions that I am required to translate some Latin - an inscription in a church, for instance - I try my best, but I am usually a far cry from Indiana Jones. (I do have a moderately extensive selection of pretentious phrases in Latin that I can deploy when necessary.) We used Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer and The Cambridge Latin Course at school; I think the latter starts pretty much from the basics, and the former covers probably all of the grammar you'd ever need to know. I think you can get some of the Harry Potter books in Latin, if that sort of thing takes your fancy. Once you've acquired a moderate mastery, you will find something like Caesar's Gallic Wars to be quite an easy read (though stylistically he ain't much cop).
- InitialLastName 9y agoTo add to that, the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter, which is a concept pretty much entirely foreign to many familiar with English prose.
- bshimmin 9y agoQuite. Though, if by any chance you have reached a sufficient mastery of English prosody to understand the iambic pentameter, the dactylic hexameter really isn't such a stretch, notwithstanding one being based on stress and the other weight.
- InitialLastName 9y agoI so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.
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- jkingsbery 9y agoI took Latin in college (having not taken it in high school), and found the Wheelock text book pretty helpful (https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 https://www.amazon.com/Wheelocks-Latin-7th/dp/0061997226 ). If you're looking for Latin texts, check out the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) and the Latin Library (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/). If you get stuck on something, swing by the Latin StackExchange (https://latin.stackexchange.com/ https://latin.stackexchange.com/).
- jamesash 9y agoCurrent Latin learner here. I found the Great Courses Introduction to Latin by Hans-Friedrich Mueller to be helpful. 35 audio lectures, plus 35 chapters of exercises. It's a good introduction that covers all the basics, and has set me up quite well for working through selections from The Gallic Wars.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoThis is a stretch but there is a cottage industry that churns out translations of children's books into Latin. Search for "Winnie Ille Puh" or "Cattus Patasatus" and that will lead to several others. This was likely started by Charles Schulz and company who had a Latin version of the Peanuts Philosophy published, a version which is now a rare collector's item. [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-book/dp/B003850S7E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500143768&sr=1-1&keywords=peanuts+philosophy+latin https://www.amazon.com/Peanuts-Philosophers-Latin-version-2-...
- favorited 9y agoDitto. I totally wasted the years I had to sit in a Latin classroom... I've bought a book of Latin stories that we used in school, and I'm looking forward to diving back in. If my 13-year-old self knew that, he'd be horrified.
- Ascetik 9y agoOne of my best friends studied under him in Rome, he had some amazing stories to tell.