4 ms·

My 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'

My 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 ago
To 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 ago
  Quite. 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 ago
    I so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but it seems like you must mean something different?
  - schoen 9y ago
    I'm guessing that the issue is just that in poetry many authors are willing to use word orders and constructions that would otherwise be regarded as questionable or ungrammatical—"metri causa".
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer. However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.
      - InitialLastName 9y ago
        That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).
- tragomaskhalos 9y ago
  Word order in general being at the whim of the writer is the bane of the modern learner, although we can be sure that this is a stylistic device and that the spoken word order would have been much more standardised. There's a wonderful line in "The Loom of Language" (wonderful book, wish I could find my copy) berating "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" vs the language he'd use to bawl out his slave.
senorsmile 9y ago
If you are in the Seattle area, you can practice Latin, among others, at the ancient language Meetup. Latin is by far our biggest meetup (average 6 people ha). All skill levels welcome!
schoen 9y ago
> you can't practise talking to real people Not to native speakers, but to semifluent and (rarely) fluent 2L speakers, you can. While there's always an argument that the loss of native speakers radically impoverishes our sense of a language and its potential, and that what we can figure out from writing is just a portion of what the language used to consist of, you can definitely have fun practicing spoken Latin with experts and dramatically improve your understanding of the language. There are several spoken Latin programs, some of which use immersion methods, mentioned in the article. I spent a week at one of Nancy Llewellyn's programs about a decade ago, and mehercule can she speak fluently and extemporaneously about anything she chooses in Latin. :-)
JoeDaDude 9y ago
> you can't practise talking to real people I have not tried this myself, but there is a skype channel used to converse in Latin [1]. I'm sure the quality varies widely, but it is there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o

InitialLastName 9y ago

To 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 ago
Quite. 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 ago
  I so enjoyed the pattern-matching puzzle that I found preparing for the AP Latin (Virgil) exam to be.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> the grammar (and thus the meaning) is sometimes driven by the meter What do you mean by this? The closest I can come to making sense of it is that some Latin words obligatorily appear as the second word in the sentence, but it seems like you must mean something different?
- schoen 9y ago
  I'm guessing that the issue is just that in poetry many authors are willing to use word orders and constructions that would otherwise be regarded as questionable or ungrammatical—"metri causa".
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  I'm pulling from my studies of ~10 years ago, but IIRC there are points (noun and adjective endings?) where diacritical marks can change the meaning of the sentence. Unlike, say, Spanish, these marks are not written, and frequently have to be interpreted from language cues, including the meter.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    That's basically correct -- some case endings differ only by vowel length and are therefore not distinguished in standard Latin writing, which doesn't indicate vowel length in any way. (Old Latin writing sometimes did.) "Via", in nominative case, meaning "the road" as the subject of a sentence, is written identically to "via", in ablative case, meaning "by the road", but the 'a' of the ablative case ending is longer. However, you can't describe this as "the meter driving the grammar". The grammar requires the same cases and vowel lengths regardless of the meter you're trying to achieve. Rather, we modern-day people reading Latin poetry can use the meter to help us determine what was originally written. All of the causal influence is from grammar to meter, not the other way around.
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      That's pretty much what I meant... A naturally fluent reader of Latin poetry would have had to follow the same process of inferences (drawing from a far more intuitive and internalized model of the meter, of course).
tragomaskhalos 9y ago
Word order in general being at the whim of the writer is the bane of the modern learner, although we can be sure that this is a stylistic device and that the spoken word order would have been much more standardised. There's a wonderful line in "The Loom of Language" (wonderful book, wish I could find my copy) berating "the crossword puzzles of Cicero" vs the language he'd use to bawl out his slave.

senorsmile 9y ago

If you are in the Seattle area, you can practice Latin, among others, at the ancient language Meetup. Latin is by far our biggest meetup (average 6 people ha). All skill levels welcome!

schoen 9y ago

> you can't practise talking to real people Not to native speakers, but to semifluent and (rarely) fluent 2L speakers, you can. While there's always an argument that the loss of native speakers radically impoverishes our sense of a language and its potential, and that what we can figure out from writing is just a portion of what the language used to consist of, you can definitely have fun practicing spoken Latin with experts and dramatically improve your understanding of the language. There are several spoken Latin programs, some of which use immersion methods, mentioned in the article. I spent a week at one of Nancy Llewellyn's programs about a decade ago, and mehercule can she speak fluently and extemporaneously about anything she chooses in Latin. :-)

JoeDaDude 9y ago

> you can't practise talking to real people I have not tried this myself, but there is a skype channel used to converse in Latin [1]. I'm sure the quality varies widely, but it is there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9V04fDh6o