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| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5731 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes  Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 1 of 5 21 January 2013 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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Have you ever wanted to learn Classical Latin, but just can't buy any more language materials? Well, you're in luck, because literally everything you need to learn it to a high degree of fluency is in the public domain and available online for free. Yes, everything.
If you're a total beginner, start with Textkit. This amazing site has a large selection of free textbooks, grammar guides, and other resources available for download...not only for Latin, but Ancient Greek as well, if you're interested in it too. Best of all, these are QUALITY resources - many of these books were used for decades teaching Latin in schools, and it shows. They even have conposition guides to help you learn to write like Cicero, and literal, word-for-word translations of Latin classics you can refer to when you just can't figure something out. (And trust me, no matter if you've memorized all your declensions and conjugations perfectly, there will be LOTS of times you spend 10-20 minutes trying to work out a single, labyrinthine sentence in the Aeneid.) So, even if that sounds scary, you have the exact resources you need to work through it. But what about a dictionary? Everyone needs a dictionary! Sure enough, Perseus Project has the best dictionary ever. It's a copy of the famous Lewis & Short print dictionary, but unlike a print dictionary, you can enter ANY form of a word (like that weird declension in the text you're reading) and it will give you the gender, case, number, definition, and stem form. No more headaches trying to figure out what the stem of an irregular verb is! The same thing is available for Ancient Greek as well (noticing a pattern here?) In the link, look to the right - you want to use the "word study tool". That's the magic dictionary. Seriously, this thing is so awesome that if you're linguistic (and masochistic) enough, you could take a random text, punch in each word, and translate and study that way. But that's much less fun than just reading and automatically understanding for having gone through a textbook first, at least for most people. So where are you going to find those texts? Perseus Project, again, has a huge database of Latin (and Greek - you probably saw that coming) texts in both the original and English translation. Yep, just a ton of parallel texts laying around totally for free, all of which were interesting enough to last at least a millenium or two. Too awesome for words. Awesome as that is, however, nobody wants to be stuck reading only stuff from 2000 years ago! What to do? Read the news! Ephemeris has got more news than you can shake a stick at. "But Astrophel," you're saying, "even though Ephemeris is about current events, it's still totally passive. I want to USE my languages to communicate with people all over the world, and speak colloquially, and have it really be a part of my life." Oh, then you haven't seen Schola. It's like a Latin Facebook/blog site. With only smart people who speak Latin. It's VERY active, and because people from all over the world learn Latin but no one speaks it natively, it's like you've learned Esperanto with a 2000-year-old written heritage. Congratulations, you found the party. "Well that is pretty awesome," you're saying now, "but I still want to learn a language I can actually speak, and nobody speaks Latin anymore." Nobody except the Catholic Church, that is, and oh yeah - the people in these 1400 YouTube videos. Yeah...1400, which include a series of audio lessons for all the Pimsleur/MT fans out there (both in English and monolingual Latin) and recordings of real conversations. Man, I really don't think it gets any better...wait, actually it does! For two bucks each (okay this is the ONE thing that isn't free but is totally worth mentioning) you can get Latin audiobooks on that last website! HTLAL loves audiobooks, right? :D There's a really nice selection. And, just to round everything out, some other really great online resources: A Guide to Medieval Latin Recitations of Latin Poetry - Don't miss the links at the bottom for much, more of the same More Spoken Latin Ecclesiastical Latin Vocabulary - since Church Latin primarily differs from Classical in vocabulary and pronunciation, this is pretty much all you need to read it All the Ecclesiastical Latin texts you could ever want Early Modern - Contemporary Latin Texts The Vulgate - This is primarily of interest as an example of vulgar Latin, the way people ACTUALLY SPOKE during the Classical period. There was real diglossia between the famous Roman authors and this. And, of course, Latin Wikipedia Definitely don't miss these last two! Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar is my favorite Latin reference grammar, and I'm not alone in this - it's been the benchmark since it was first published in 1898. It even has a workbook to go along with it! Seriously, even many commonly learned languages don't have the quantity, and especially QUALITY, of the resources available for Latin...even at premium prices! This is all for FREE and NONE of it is pirated material. I think it speaks to the awesomeness of the Latin learning community that all this is out there. The only thing lacking is more people to be awesome with. For that I need your help, HTLAL. (I also need more coffee.) Edited by Astrophel on 24 January 2013 at 6:57am 37 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 5 21 January 2013 at 11:31am | IP Logged |
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There are a number of line shifts within the links, and in one place there are two links within one set of square brackets. But apart from: this is a splendid overview. Edited by Iversen on 21 January 2013 at 9:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 5 22 January 2013 at 2:59am | IP Logged |
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Thanks, an amazing post. I plan to go back to Latin one day. :-)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5731 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 4 of 5 24 January 2013 at 6:52am | IP Logged |
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Okay, the broken links are fixed. When I was looking at it before, I couldn't see any line breaks, and even when I went back where they appeared in the post and retyped everything, they were still there. Apparently it was my computer because I had to fix it from another computer just now. I wasn't just being lazy, really :) But it's ok now and I tested all of them to make sure they work. The only issue is that google books doesn't allow linking directly to the file, and redirects you to the main google books page. But if you perform a search there for "Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar (workbook)" you'll see it right away.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 5 of 5 27 January 2013 at 7:05am | IP Logged |
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I've heard that sometimes Chrome causes problems when posting, using a different browser should work.
But thank you so much for the incredible post and all the resources! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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