Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

selfstudyclassics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 112 posts

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

#31

Post by hakuseki »

wcarey wrote: post #8
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…

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…

Actually this is an example of ambiguity, not context sensitivity (in the formal languages sense). Context sensitivity means context is needed to construct a grammatical sentence, not merely to parse one. It's actually pretty hard to find examples of this in natural language.

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

#32

Post by jthnews »

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…

You might be surprised at the size of the community of Latin speakers (outside the Vatican). It gets some attention from time to time on HN. For this community a shared pronunciation is crucial to being mutually intelligible. And I suppose it makes sense to use the one with the most support from the experts, even if it will always remain somewhat speculative. I take your point - it is possible to study and ready Latin without much regard for pronunciation. But I also feel that if you approach it this way you miss out on the fun of trying to recreate the speech of an ancient culture.

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

#33

Post by jthnews »

jbarrs wrote: post #28

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 a…

Thanks for the link to a great resource. I don't mean to detract in any way from any of the other terrific resources available online - free or otherwise. I created selfstudyclassics.com to scratch a very particular itch. When I started to re-learn Latin after many years, I was looking for something which was focused on examples and featured a lot of practice with instant feedback - something like Khan Academy, which I love. My hope is that it is helpful to others with a similar itch.

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

#34

Post by yorwba »

tomcooks wrote: post #29
yorwba wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want to use Latin to talk to people, you should probably use whatever pronunciation they expect, even if it's not "correct".

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

#35

Post by gadders »

jbarrs wrote: post #28

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 a…

Caecilius est in horto.

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

#36

Post by School-Cotton »

tomcooks wrote: post #27
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…

> 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…

I don’t think there’s any evidence that learning Latin helps you learn Romance languages any faster than learning a Romance language does. Why should learning Latin and then French be any faster than Spanish->French ?

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

#37

Post by wenc »

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?

The written form, maybe, but the spoken form not likely.

The Youtuber Ecolinguist ran an experiment where he had Romance language speakers (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) try to guess at riddles in Latin. Turns out Classical Latin is actually very different from most Romance languages, which descended more from "Vulgar Latin".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C77anb2DJGk

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

#38

Post by bshimmin »

School-Cotton wrote: post #36
tomcooks wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don’t think there’s any evidence that learning Latin helps you learn Romance languages any faster than learning a Romance language does. Why should learning Latin and then French be any faster than Spanish->French ?

I studied Latin and French from the age of 11. When I spent a year in Bologna as a student on the Erasmus scheme (studying Latin, in fact), I can assure you that my schoolboy French was the more useful of the two as a starting point for learning Italian.

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

#39

Post by bmj »

yorwba wrote: post #34
tomcooks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want to use Latin to talk to people, you should probably use whatever pronunciation they expect, even if it's not "correct".

I attend an Anglican church (in the U.S.). Our rector and deacon are both from England. They endlessly argue about the pronunciation of venite.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN