Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Intensive Latin

  Tags: Latin
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6443 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 1 of 2
25 November 2009 at 9:09pm | IP Logged 
Not so long ago, I did some intensive Latin with Sprachprofi.

My background: I'd never studied Latin; I'd taken a one-hour lesson with Sprachprofi once (the first one in her online course), flipped through a few pages of Lingua Latina, and occasionally been exposed to it; I'd read a tiny amount in Latin by medieval authors (Classical ones were entirely beyond me - medieval ones tended to be accessible because of my background with Romance languages). Aside from that, I've had more or less the normal amount of exposure to Latin - I knew various legal and medical terms, and a few typical phrases like "cogito ergo sum", though I didn't know what the individual words in most of them meant.

What I did: with Sprachprofi, I went through all the slides for her Latin 101 and 201 courses. In the first day, we went through the Latin 101 slides - it was less than a 24 hour period from the first to the last, though we started late one night and continued the next day. We finished the Latin 201 slides less than 72 hours starting with Latin 101, lesson 2 - the one we started with.

These slides covered all the major points of Latin grammar (the cases and various declensions, the conjugations for the various tenses, ACI, etc). Sprachprofi told me that this is what is covered in about 2.5 years in German schools. They also had readings, simplified by Sprachprofi.

The end result is that I can read Latin quite a lot better. Soon after the intensive Latin, I started reading Harry Potter 1 in Latin. My understanding was good enough to enjoy it, though I think I would have been lost if I hadn't previously read the book in other languages - my vocabulary is still a bit small. I've also gone over the material for some of Sprachprofi's Latin 301 courses, where original, unmodified (aside from the addition of punctuation) excerpts from Latin texts (by authors such as Caesar and Catullus) are presented for translation to English by the students. I definitely wouldn't earn top marks in a 3rd year Latin class in schools, but I seem to be able to handle the majority of it after being given some vocabulary, and almost all of it after a few helpful corrections to my misinterpretations.

Overall, this was really fun and worthwhile, and I urge anyone thinking of learning Latin but holding back to give it a go.


Edited by Volte on 25 November 2009 at 9:16pm

1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6707 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 2
26 November 2009 at 12:27am | IP Logged 
Good idea, - both to learn Latin and to do such a crash course
1 person has voted this message useful



If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.1719 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.