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

I've participated in many spoken Latin events (and loved them), but they were akin to conlang events in that every single person was a non-native speaker, and the majority were not fully fluent. Following the view which I think I took from Ghil'ad Zuckermann (I don't know whether he would phrase it this way) that revived languages like Modern Hebrew are akin to conlangs, it seems that at least the way I speak Latin is akin to the way I speak conlangs -- great reliance on explicit knowledge, little influence from my own or others' native speaker intuition.

Another difficulty is the "period speech" issue

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/771:_Period_Speec...

where most Latin speakers are happy to use vocabulary from any period almost interchangeably, even though native speakers wouldn't have.

On the other hand, even if you don't get access to spoken communication with (almost) any new people (I have only once in my life spoken Latin with another person who didn't also speak English), you do get access to millennia of "Latinity" and a perspective on the origins of modern European languages (even the non-Romance ones because of pervasive borrowings).

I want to say that every language is a world and opens new horizons of thought and culture. For conlangs, those horizons may be kind of shockingly minuscule, but they're still there. Even with the intentional extreme limitations of my favorite conlang, toki pona, I've had the experience on rare occasion of feeling like something was easier or clearer for me to express in toki pona than in my native English. But yes, learning modern languages has paid much huger dividends in being able to communicate with hundreds of millions of new people and participate to some limited extent in very vibrant cultures...

Edit: in the specific case of Esperanto there's a widely-held but controversial theory that it helps prepare people for the experience of learning other languages, maybe by helping them develop some grammatical concepts or practice certain language-learning skills.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

I actually find this less plausible than I used to (it seems like many of the grammatical concepts you get from Esperanto won't map that well onto other languages), but some experiments with this did show positive results.

The author strongly recommends having the kids learn Latin. In case anyone is interested, some resources/curricula for homeschooling Latin she mentions in the book include Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, Song School Latin, Latin for Children, The Big Book of Lively Latin, The Latin Road to English Grammar, and Latin Alive!.

Anyone have experience/thoughts/opinions on teaching their kids Latin? Or even learning Latin as a kid?

Pro I guess is that it lets you read some classical literature although in 2 years I never got remotely proficient. In some ways it's easier than a modern language because you're mostly learning to read.

Con is mostly the obvious. You could be spending the time learning a modern language. (I also took 4 years of high school French. Never got very proficient in that either. It helps a bit when I visit France but I never spent enough time living it to get good.)

I ended up spending a few years studying Spanish in college, I'm reasonably conversational now and met my wife, who's from Puerto Rico, in the process.

Even if my wife wasn't Puerto Rican, I would teach my kids Spanish. Grammatically it's far easier than Latin and will connect them with culture and millions of speakers that are alive today.