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Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

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Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#21

Post by Tomte »

andrepd wrote: post #15
wcarey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That particular sentence is a really tough knot pedagogically too. As a teacher, you want a short simple sentence that includes a nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and verb to habituate students to thinking about cases. Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of tho…

> That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar. Surely this is a feature of all languages :)

Certainly not.

The first example of context-sensitive constructions in natural language was found in 1985.

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#22

Post by jthnews »

tomcooks wrote: post #4

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

Thanks for your interest! I agree about the pronunciation. The first of the videos is on that very topic. Also I second your suggestion of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. That is a great text. My goal is not to replace any of the existing tools, but rather to supplement them. There is no such thing as too much practice. Also, this presents a free alternative for those that might need one.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#23

Post by ferkad »

twic wrote: post #14
tomcooks wrote: post #4

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station…

ad 4. If you are referring to Nuntii Latini then it is no longer broadcasted. The final news service was emitted in 2019.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#24

Post by jthnews »

wcarey wrote: post #12
thaumasiotes wrote: post #2

> Select the English phrase that correctly translates the Latin. > Fīliae aquam agricolae dant. > 1. The daughters give the farmer water. > 2. The farmers give (their) daughters water. > 3. The farmer gives (his) daughters water. > 4. The farmer gives (his) daughter water. This is answerable, but only because three of the answers are impossible. You have to make the assumption that the correct translation is given as…

#2 you could read, "[He] tells the sailor's story to the mistresses, because mistresses love stories", which does have a possessive genitive.

Yes, I think that was the original intention. I changed the option to - Nautae in "Nautae fābulam dominīs nārrat quia dominae fābulās amant." - for the time being, so at least it isnt't flat out wrong while I think of something better.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#25

Post by yorwba »

chrononaut wrote: post #17
twic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station…

Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?

But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless.

Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're using the "correct" Latin pronunciation, so long as whatever pronunciation you do use maintains those correspondences.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#26

Post by thaumasiotes »

twic wrote: post #14
tomcooks wrote: post #4

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station…

> I think that none of these require historically correct Latin pronunciation.

That is true, but there are questions for which you want to know what the historical pronunciation was. For example, it's much easier to make sense of ancient misspellings if you can recognize that the misspelling and the target word would have sounded the same. Something similar holds for ancient jokes.

> I assume that at the Vatican they speak some derivative of mediaeval Latin

This is vague; the syntax and pronunciation of Latin change continuously into Italian. The rest of Italy has a better claim to be speaking "some derivative of medieval Latin" than the Vatican does; the Vatican's version presumably reflects mostly-arrested development after a certain point, as far as syntax goes.

As for pronunciation, I tend to assume (without any relevant knowledge) that the Vatican's Latin pronunciation is just how the same written words would be pronounced in standard Italian. You can find similar conventions for other dead languages -- it's the only option available for Chinese where we just plain don't know what the pronunciation was in 600 BC, and it's "Reuchlinian pronunciation" in Greek. This approach has quite a bit to recommend it, most prominently that it's easy to find fluent models of the pronunciation of a living language.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#27

Post by tomcooks »

twic wrote: post #14
tomcooks wrote: post #4

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

One of my Latin teachers (the one who was under 60) did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up. But i wonder, what is the point? I think the use cases for Latin are, from most to least important: 1. reading Latin texts 2. casually dropping Latin phrases to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies 3. writing Latin mottoes, naming species, etc 4. listening to that Finnish radio station…

> One of my Latin teachers did try to teach us a proper pronuncation once, but quickly gave up.

Basically what happens in Europe when students need to learn English pronunciation, but no way to give up.

> But i wonder, what is the point?

By learning Latin you multiply the speed at which you learn romance languages, which will allow you to understand and communicate with a much larger share of the world.

Moreover, but this is a personal sidenote: why do people outside of the Anglosphere need to learn how to speak perfect English (and get the usual banter about pronunciation not being spotless), while the Anglosphere generally doesn't bother returning the favour (while at the same time complaining about being treated as uneducated, rude gringos)

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#28

Post by jbarrs »

As an aside, I'd like to recommend to people the Cambridge Latin Course (https://www.cambridgescp.com/)

This was the course I followed learning Latin in school. Whilst it may be tailored more towards a school audience, much of the content of their books is available for free online, which includes lots of translation and vocabulary practice. The books and stories are all very light-hearted and fun and teach a lot about Roman history as you learn the language. This could make good supplementary learning material for anyone trying to teach themselves Latin for free.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#29

Post by tomcooks »

yorwba wrote: post #25
chrononaut wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not knowing Latin myself, I would imagine that learning Latin could also be a stepping stone to more thoroughly understand other related languages?

But pronunciation is very variable, even living languages have multiple different pronunciations in use at any given time (a.k.a. accents) and for a language like Latin that has been in use for thousands of years, the possibilities are endless. Being able to establish one-to-one correspondences between Latin words and their descendants in modern languages can be helpful, but it doesn't matter much whether you're usin…

Give it a try, it's what people do on a daily basis when trying to communicate with English speakers.

Re: Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style

#30

Post by tomcooks »

jthnews wrote: post #22
tomcooks wrote: post #4

It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation. For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.

Thanks for your interest! I agree about the pronunciation. The first of the videos is on that very topic. Also I second your suggestion of Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. That is a great text. My goal is not to replace any of the existing tools, but rather to supplement them. There is no such thing as too much practice. Also, this presents a free alternative for those that might need one.

Ah sorry I didn't mean to sound like that with the comment on the pronunciation, it was praise: fortunately someone like you is pushing for doing things the right way (and this removes the perceived cultural imperialism)

Great job!

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