The Vatican's Latinist (2017)

Foster was basically the rallying point for people opposed to the grammarian methods of teaching languages that started in Classics but ended up taking over how foreign language is taught in most schools and contexts. Virtually everyone actually fluent in Latin today (reading, listening, or speaking) either learned directly from his a tutor using Ossa Latinitatis Sola or was downstream of that.

Striking contrast with the most well known classicist in the UK being unable, by their own admission, to comfortably read Latin text basically at all.

Abandoning the old ways has cost us a lot in almost every area of human endeavour. Especially in pedagogy.

If you find this article fascinating, and are intrigued by the possibility of learning to speak a dead language like Latin, I'm here to tell you that it's probably a lot easier than you think.

To start off, there is a textbook that I think really resonates with hackers. It's called "Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata" (The Latin Language Illustrated through itself) and it teaches Latin in a fun and mind-altering way. The entire book is in Latin, but it starts of with very simple sentences that anyone who speaks English or a Romance language can intuit with a bit of effort. There are very clever marginal illustrations that help drive the meaning home. It builds an understanding in Latin brick by brick, and eventually you find yourself understanding complex sentences and ideas. Furthermore the book is just fun and often funny, it tells a story of a Roman family and strikes an excellent balance between teaching and entertaining. Contrast this approach with dense Latin texts that have a heavy focus on grammar and translation.

So that's one way to learn the language, but what about speaking it? Well, that's where the Legentibus app comes in. It's a Latin language podcast application which has wealth of well recorded stories in classical Latin at a bunch of different difficulty levels. It also has has the Latin language text of the stories that are highlighted as the audio is read, with optional interlinear English translations. I find these really help at first to help me understand the content. I turn them off later once I get the gist of what is being said, or just listen without reading. You can also do dictionary lookups of individual words without turning on the translation.

Here are the reasons why I think this is one of the most enjoyable and useful things I do as a newbie Latin language learner:

1) The stories themselves are engaging. Some of my favorites are from "Gesta Romanorum" (Deeds of the Romans) which is a 13th or 14th century collection of stories often with a moral allegorical themes. These were rewritten in a beginner friendly style, but use classical Latin idioms, some of which are explicitly pointed out in the text as clickable footnotes.

2) Daniel (the co-founder of the app and Latin scholar) does an excellent job as a reader. I listen to a lot of audio books, and I especially like it when the reader consistently does memorable character voices. Be it an extortionist dog slyly claiming "Omnēs canēs amant" (everyone loves dogs) or Pluto, King of the Underworld, commanding "Eurydicē accēde hūc!" in a booming voice, Daniel nails it.

3) You can listen to these while folding laundry, cooking dinner, or doing whatever. I manage to squeeze in 40 minutes a day or so of these stories, and I'm always happy to do it.

4) Often times when I learn a new bit of grammar or learn the precise meaning of a word, my mind often will replay in my head a phrase (in Daniel's voice) from one of the stories that uses that word or grammatical concept. This happens more than you might expect.

Finally, there is a pretty vibrant online community of Latin language learners out there, from the /r/Latin subreddit, to the LLPSI (Lingua Latina per se Illustrata) Discord (https://discord.gg/uXSwq9r4) to the Latin & Ancient Greek) Discord (https://discord.gg/latin) and others.

It's never been easier to pick up Latin.

https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignor... — per this blog post (which takes https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/mary-beard-a-dons... as the starting point), most classicists “can't sight-read a complex Latin text all that well” [unlike medievalists and Renaissance scholars].

> I've heard that few can speak Latin 'correctly', because the skill is almost useless - you can't talk to Romans or almost anyone else; it's all written.

Because Latin has died out as a spoken language, it doesn't really change over time like modern languages do. If you find a sentence written 2000 years ago and another elsewhere written 1500 years ago, it's likely they mean the exact same thing.

"Latin is a dead language" is actually a positive statement about the continued use of Latin, especially in the church; so much of the writing of the early church and the church fathers was in Latin, and we can know that we're interpreting it faithfully (or at least as faithfully as we have done for centuries) because the language is static.