@davideroccato
BTW, Metatron has an interesting YT video on “How Latin sounded like”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTLQS9-GZNU
Thank you, these tips are very helpful!
davideroccato: I took Latin for four years in Catholic high school. I got mostly A’s but I wasn’t into it. I now wish I had taken more interest. Latin is helpful for my French.
According to LingQ your native language is Italian, so that is going to be a huge advantage. Latin is also a direct part of your history, so that may supply additional motivation.
As I recall, Latin is a very orderly precise language that is fun to puzzle out. So much information is encoded in the endings, that one encounters fewer “word soup” situations. Also the classical texts used for learning are quite well-written so slang and sloppiness are much less of an issue too.
If I may say, you strike me as a person who would enjoy Latin. I’m skeptical how much progress one can make in fifteen minutes per day, but once you get into the habit, you may find yourself going over time!
I’ve been a professional language teacher. To get real, obvious progress in a language you will want to use (or study) it at least 1 hour a day. I have never had a student who only studied for 15 minutes a day make any real progress, unless it was a language extremely close to one they already knew.
Latin is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a “dead” language but you can still find modern stuff in it, like Harry Potter and youtube videos, and tons of people still learn it. So it’s still going to be easier to learn than quite a few small, minority languages, it just won’t be anywhere as easy to learn as say French because there is just less content to choose from.
Also, as I discovered when trying to learn Ukrainian on LingQ, LingQ is bad at languages with declinations and conjugations. It is constantly wrong with Ukrainian word meanings (even getting plurals and cases wrong), to the point where I can’t even guess at the sentence and I have to put the sentence into Google Translate instead, which has a much better translation. You can learn Latin for sure, I just don’t know if LingQ is really the best service to do it with, at least not until you’re already more advanced at it.
Well, that was a question I had time ago. I will rethink at this once I finished a few projects I have going on right now. I don’t want to supercharge my mind with too much daily stuff. And you are right, maybe I would enjoy Latin, and probably I would learn it quite fast. Life is unpredictable, who knows! ![]()
It would be fun to freak out a doctor during an office visit to speak in Latin. They have a more than passing exposure to it, but I doubt any of them become proficient in Latin conversation.
I think a reading knowledge would be interesting for reading some classics. I think I’ll give it a try for a couple of weeks. If nothing else, it will help with my Spanish as additional insight into word etymology. My limited high school Latin from the mid-50s has helped with quite a few new Spanish words.
YIKES: I just opened the first mini story in Latin and every single word is BLUE! We’re going to need a bigger boat…or something.
It depends on your background I would say. I remember you from the discord server and so I feel like once you get used to the sound changes it’s gonna be very easy for you.
Latin has different challenges, but as a romance language and as a pivotal language for inter-European communication and so on you have more than enough resources to learn Latin. (personally I got all of Thomas Aquinas books from Summae theologicae from wikibooks and I now have more words to read in total than what I have in Italian or Portuguese (respectively 2.13 million, 1.75 million and 1.9 million))
What I want said with that is, I haven’t experienced as much of a limitation in procuring volume in Latin as you might imagine I would. Lots of dedicated book shops exist as well. The only difficult thing about Latin for me is that I have to deal with many different forms of Latin.
I don’t think 15 minutes a day is a meaningless investment, but I feel like half an hour makes more sense so that your brain can just get to treat it as a cognitive task, max 45 minutes if I wanna keep it short.
I imagine if you learn 5-20 words per day that way (my current rate of Finnish where I give minimal effort) you can reach around 8000-12000 known words after a year.
You’re brave!
And yes, I don’t think there is a lack of material! Probably who wants to learn Latin is already attracted by certain topics. I agree with the time investment many of you suggested already, that’s why I’ll have to think about it more carefully in the future.
@PeterBormann
I finally watched it, and it’s very interesting indeed. It’s tough if we learn the right pronunciation of certain words, hear them and pronunce them in the wrong way! ![]()
Wonderful resources in this thread. Commenting so I can find it again via my posts.
Cheers!
~ mk ![]()
Click the three dots, and you can bookmark the post.
The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) used to broadcast news in Latin once a week. The program was unfortunately discontinued in 2019, but all of the episodes (383 episodes in total, duration 4-5 minutes each) are still available online and they should be accessible worldwide at the YLE website. You can find them here, in case anyone’s interested: