Anybody studying Latin at Lingq? Do you think it is possible to learn this language here? How do you cope with little content available in the library? I wonder is it possible to learn Latin faster than any modern language due to the fact that you don’t need to focus on speaking.
I learned the basics of Latin at school long time ago and I’ve gone back to it time and again over the years and I improved my knowledge to some (difficult to measure) level. I can read rather freely not too complicated original texts but I do need to look up many words if the texts are more demanding. Now, I’m focussing on Russian so I’m not really learning Latin on Lingq with any systematicity. However, I have done some experimentation, specifically,I imported a novel and read through the first chapters.
My opinion: to some extent, I can say that I dreamed of a system such as Lingq when I wasn learning Latin. I remember paying for a program that only included the text of Caesar’s “De bello gallico” with clickable words that took you to their definitioin. In Lingq you can import any text!
Can you learn Latin from scratch on Lingq! I do think so. I would advise to read about grammar as you read texts on Lingq. Just understand how the language works, so you can “notice” the patterns and word forms, you don’t have to memorize tables. There are several tutorials online.
There’s not a lot of material in the Latin library. Probably, the best way to begin is through simple fables. There are a few on the library but you’d probably be better off impofting a text such as this (use Calibre or similar software to convert the pdf to text format and copy-paste the whole text into Lingq’s import page, the system will break it down into chunks):
http://bestlatin.net/1001latin/download/MilleFabulae101.pdf
This is a collection of simplified fables. The e-book is offered for free by this site, which also contains information on the language:
I wish you success
P.S. I don’t like the default Latin dictionary offered by lingq. It may do the trick for beginners but you’ll soon find it lacking. I would suggest the admins to offer Whitaker’s “words”. It’s free software both to download for online user, it could even be run by lingq internally and it displays grammatical info:
http://archives.nd.edu/words.html
Maybe we should write a thread about this in the support forum
Oh, and about whether it would take less time to learn Latin than a modern language… I’m not sure, you can save some effort by not having to activate the vocabulary but the main thing is to understand and you’ll have to get used to the sometimes “convoluted” (for modern readers) sentence structure, which also takes time
I spent a (tiny) little bit of time on Latin last year but then got out of the habit. I have the Getting Started With Latin book and I was importing lessons by just typing in the basic sentences from the book. I was enjoying spending just a few minutes a day on it as a side project, so I hope to get back into it one day. I didn’t look at any of the material already on LingQ.
Thank you for these resources, they seem very useful! I think you are right that it is advisable to take a look at some grammar. Without any grammar knowledge I will be lost very quickly:)
Latin is a language that I really want to learn, but my focus currently is French and I am trying to not get distracted. But, I have to admit I get Latin temptations every once in awhile that make me want to dive right in despite my better judgment. I have a real love for history which is probably a major reason I plan to work on Latin after I am more comfortable with my French.
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I think I will use LingQ to learn Latin someday, assuming the other existing languges that I’ve since considered learning have entered into the picture. (eg Chinese, Russian, etc.) Like Irish, I would probably would take less time in Latin since my goals would only be to be reasonably comfortable in speaking and coming up with little phrases, etc. I wouldn’t have to worry abouit listening comprehension or speaking.
Latin differs from most modern Romance languages in that the word order is free and floating, so a minimal foundational knowledge of declensions and conjugations will be necessary to decode any sentence. That being said, LingQ is an excellent resource for reading Latin and I wish it had been available so many years ago when I first started Latin. If you are a Latin student, import what you’re reading for school into LingQ and drill down into the vocabulary.
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It is good to hear some feedback from somebody who has used LingQ for Latin.
A good free on line Latin English dictionary is “Lewis and Short”.
For medieval Latin words that are not classical one can search Du Cange
I studied Latin in high school (25-20 years ago) and I’m studiyng now: the advantages is the meaning of most part of the world (Italian is derived from Latin) but the difficulties is to understand the relation between words and sentences because of declination and subordination of phrases. Speaking is an important part because speaking enforce the memorization of language patterns, but you can have some difficulties abotu order of words
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When someone studies a foreign language generally wants to be able to understand and speak to native users. But studying Latin is a different task. Latin was used along many centuries and changed over the time. Students are proposed as a model the classical authors specially Caesar and Cicero. Of course is not easy to speak like them!
There are several works intended to teach the Renaissance time students to learn a language useful for communication, like the “colloquiorum liber” by Erasmus from Rotterdam-