If anyone is interested in learning it, there's nothing better than Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It's entirely in Latin, including grammar explanations, but it starts out incredibly simple and ramps up gradually with lots of repetition. And that's fun AND effective, since you're immersed rather than grinding tables.
As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone.
It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.
Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question
If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.
There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability.
I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.
On the flip side, Ørberg is a textbook for children, perhaps teenagers at the latest, and like most such textbooks it is in no hurry, so you’ll need to stick with it for quite some time to get results. That by no means makes it bad or unsuitable to whoever is reading this comment, but I can imagine how it wouldn’t work well in a typical introductory college course, where the instructor’s aim is to cram into the students’ heads as much Latin as possible in the semester or two they are given.
If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.
Intuitive comprehension works much better for Medieval Latin, like that used in the scientific publications of the 16th/17th/18th/19th centuries, i.e. the kind of Latin that would be used by people like Newton or Gauss.
Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.
On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.
The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.
Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.
For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).
but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.
Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way.
The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.
If you speak four languages, in most countries you are an outlier, and you should not assume that what works for you would work for others.
Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.
As someone who also learned multiple languages, the most typical result if grammar focused classes is that you cant use the language at all for years. And yes it is consistent outcome for majority of the students.
Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.
As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).
I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.
I like the approach in Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (sometimes called the "natural method"). I've noticed that it was adapted for other languages too, but most of the adaptations seemed old and outdated.
Recently I was wondering if I should work on a modernization of the concept (using audio and a more interactive medium). If anyone has thoughts on this topic, I'd be happy to discuss more.
We quoted that book for years (probably because the accompanying audio version had a somewhat amusing cadence, but I do also think it was a lot more beneficial to learning than trudging through classical texts with a dictionary).
I haven't read it in years, and my Latin's pretty rusty now, but it was the most useful and fun thing I used.[1] If you get the book, you might also like Mr. Ørberg's recordings (widely pirated) of himself reading the text with a Classical pronunciation. There are also some good Latin YouTubers; my favorite is Satura Lanx, <https://youtube.com/@SaturaLanx>, but Luke Ranieri, <https://youtube.com/@polyMATHY_Luke>, is also good and very knowledgeable.
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1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.
Duolingo Latin is not useful as your only course. I would say it’s not useful at all, except perhaps if your normal Latin class is on break and you want something, anything at all, to jog your memory a bit.
On one hand, it is really short. There are very few words assembled into very few phrases, and they are not even particularly popular words. (New Latin for “New York”? I mean, I guess, but was that really the best you could do?..)
On the other hand, for how short it is, it confronts you with quite a bit of grammar. As is customary for Duolingo, you’ll have to infer that grammar from the examples—except, per the previous point, you won’t get nearly enough examples. (It’s cute that some usages of the Latin verb “studeo” correspond to the English verb “study”, but the Latin one governs an unusual case, which depending on declension looks exactly like one of the other cases, so perhaps having it be one of the first verbs is unwise, especially when a lot of your target audience ostensibly has no concept of “govern”, “case”, or “declension”.)
On the gripping hand, because of how short it is, there is a lot of grammar that it does not even hint at. Including parts that any classical text will hit you in the face with within the first paragraph, and that will completely befuddle you unless you’re aware of them. (Like the quaint custom of plopping the preposition in the middle of its complement, as in “qua de causa” lit. “which for reason” i.e. “for which reason” i.e. “therefore”, or for that matter “magna cum laude” lit. “great with praise” i.e. “with great praise”.)
By comparison, Ørberg excels at this to a downright supernatural extent. It’s like La Disparition except instead of writing a (pretty natural-sounding) novel without using the most popular letter of the language he wrote a third of a (pretty natural-sounding) textbook without using the most popular category of nouns and adjectives in the language, and his version is actually useful. And it’s like this for any grammar concept he wants to defer. His way does take quite a bit of time, though, I’ll give you that.
After trying Duolingo a bit myself and seeing my family members try it, I've become convinced that Duolingo is worse than doing nothing, because it does a much better job of convincing you that you're learning than it does actually teaching you.
Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.
It sure does a little bit, but a) quality varies a lot - some courses can get you from zero to dos cervesas por favor, some are just poorly structured noise that has no chance of sticking in mind; b) doesn’t explain grammar (it’s an exception when it does), so results greatly vary on preconditions like languages you’re already familiar with and can relate - anything too foreign and you’ll have hard time trying to understand how those examples generalize.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
Lifehack: Latin is much easier if you already know a Slavic or a Baltic language (except Bulgarian). While declension patterns are different, the case structures are very similar. Not identical, but close enough that you actually just need to learn the differences.
Most other grammatical structures are also directly comparable.
So you can make your life easier by studying a Slavic (or a Baltic) language first.
Or you can find learning a Slavic (or a Baltic) language easier if you learn Latin first. The bonus being that there are more useful cognates in Latin than in Slavic languages (although while learning Czech, I was a bit amused to discover that many of my childhood friends’¹ surnames were just Czech words for colors). Latin has fewer cases than Czech (five³ versus seven) and fewer declension patterns (there are five declensions with most nouns falling into the first three. In contrast, Czech has twelve and the adjective declensions differ from noun declensions (as opposed to Latin where adjectives follow either a first-second declension pattern or a third declension pattern).
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
My spouse and I lived in London, but we both come from (other) European countries, so for our wedding, three countries and four languages were involved: the church's forms are all both in the local language as well as in Latin.
This is no different than hundreds of years ago, and it works well. Thanks to Latin, the church's _lingua franca_.
similar experience led me to start learning Latin: once travelled to an other country within Europe and the priest in the companion asked directions from a local in Latin.
Assuming they're Roman Catholic, to get married in the Church at least one of the couple needs to be Catholic and records of their baptism, confirmation, etc. would be shared between the individual's church and wherever they're getting married. You also run into this if you move around a lot, not just for marriage. If you want to be confirmed, you need to be baptised. Your baptismal records may be in another state or country and would need to be shared with your confirmation church.
In fact, the baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records, so when you’re married, the marriage is communicated to that parish and added to your sacramental record (likewise for confirmation if it doesn’t happen at your baptismal church, and, less commonly ordination will also be communicated there). When parishes are closed or consolidated, the bishop will indicate what parish becomes the new keeper of sacramental records for the closed parish.¹
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1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.
I used to think the Vatican would be old-fashioned, but the writing on its site is more readable than I expected. In particular, while reading the section “Development: Humanism and Posthumanism,” I found it interesting to compare the religious worldview of the West with my own more humanistic worldview.
This passage especially stood out to me:
> At the application level, AI in the strict sense raises questions about the reliability of data and the criteria by which programmers process it so as to make it available. It is unclear what biases or power systems influence the work. In particular, serious doubts arise regarding automated, AI-based decision-making processes in sensitive areas of human life: when deciding whether to provide medical care or grant loans or mortgages or insurance, or when prosecuting criminal cases in court or assessing the conduct of prisoners and the likelihood of reoffending with a view to reducing sentences, or when deciding on military attacks or law enforcement interventions.
It is funny because this almost feels like a complete summary of recent Hacker News debates in a single paragraph.
I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend.
The writing is genuinely excellent.
In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.
That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.
Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.
Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.
A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.
People love to wallow in the stereotype that the Catholic Church is old fashioned and anti-science. That's mostly propaganda leftover from 300 years ago.
Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.
I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
The term "Latin mass" confuses two distinct aspects. Colloquially it refers to celebrating the Tridentine Mass in Latin. But the Tridentine Mass was already celebrated in the vernacular years before Vatican II, though it was optional and I don't know how widespread it was. The Vatican II reformed mass was expected to use the vernacular in most parts, but it can also be given in Latin, and Latin is the canonical form against which translations are made.
I've been to a Latin mass a couple of times, specifically a sung (aka high) Latin mass. I see why so many people prefer it. But the Novus Ordo can also be sung. Latin masses also tend to use incense, etc, which also used to be more common in the Norvus Ordo. The real division is between parishes and priests with the energy to put into the mass, versus those that fall into the habit of doing the bare minimum. The "Latin mass" just happens to be a convenient mechanism that bifurcates the two groups.
Relatedly, I read a argument somewhere that the current state can be traced back to the proliferation of Irish priests. In Ireland the low (unsung) Latin mass had apparently been for centuries the predominate form even on Sundays. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but reading various sources it does seem that in various parts of the world the sung mass had already been in a long decline at least since the 1800s. And I think the Norvus Ordo was intended to simplify things in the hopes of reviving the energy in the mass, but instead it just created a lower floor.
Regarding the Novus Ordo, I believe that the key document from Vatican II (Sacrosanctum Concilium) still preferred Latin as the dominant language in liturgy, while readings etc. stayed in the vernacular, but clearly that is not what happened.
There's been an uptick in numbers for Tridentine Rite, so tides might shift back as Catholics realize the wealth of their liturgical tradition.
Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church. The meaning of words in dead dead language like Latin don't change much and so a document written in Latin is likely to be easily understood in 4-500 years (for people who can read Latin) and used for translations into the local vernacular. Whereas a language like English is constantly evolving and so the version of some words in, for a relevant example, the original King James Bible, do not mean the same thing in modern English that they did in the early 17th century.
The hulabaloo about the Latin or so-called Tridentine Mass is a cultural issue that is mostly about shifting societal norms and only incidentally about it's being in Latin. This is evidenced by the fact that the current form of the Mass, the Novus Ordo, is written in Latin then translated into the vernacular, and it can still be validly performed in Latin without special dispensation from the Vatican.
It very quickly turns mass into just repeating sounds without any way to internalize any of what you’re saying. There’s a bunch of stuff about humility, contrition, gratefulness etc that they want people to internalize.
(Probably not written by HHH himself, unless someone wants to compare it with the previous occupants - apparently Benedict XVI had the best Latin of the recent Pontificis)
Google Translate suggested "preme hic" which is plausible to me (I've spent a lot of time with Latin but haven't thought of this particular question before). It literally means "press here".
It'd be more a return to the past, we still had a lot of latin in science a couple hundred years ago.
One very fun thing I discovered recently is that Dante (and presumably other people in the middle ages) thought that Latin was a constructed language designed to go over linguistic differences, and that's why it had a proper grammar, unlike romance languages :)
That is very fascinating. Do you have some source on this that you could share? IIRC Dante wrote in vernacular Italian which was uncommon at the time, presumably to make his texts more approachable by common people?
If I had to take a guess, I would say he heard it in a lecture by Prof. Alessandro Barbero, same as I did :)
But I think the source is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgari_eloquentia
In the Italian Wiki page, the "constructed nature" of latin is hinted at; it doesn't seem to be present in the English wiki.
Update: It's indeed in the book, at the end of the 1st chapter of the 1st book:
3 There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica [grammar]. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study
4 Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.
Here, vernacular refers to "italian" or whatever dialect, while "gramatica" is latin - the artificial one :)
Dante was not completely wrong, since much of the written Latin we have was a formalised and standardised version, whereas Romance languages are descendants of the Latin people actually spoke.
If anyone is interested in learning it, there's nothing better than Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It's entirely in Latin, including grammar explanations, but it starts out incredibly simple and ramps up gradually with lots of repetition. And that's fun AND effective, since you're immersed rather than grinding tables.
As a former Latin instructor with literally decades of experience, I strongly recommend not relying solely on Ørberg. The outcomes of those who refused to supplement it with a proper grammar and dictionary were far, far behind those who used Wheelock alone.
It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.
Thanks for the perspective! I guess it depends on the outcomes in question
If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.
There's also the thing about "the best exercise plan is the one you actually follow". The direct method isn't "bunk", it's a very good method if you take into account that students don't have boundless enthusiasm and rote learning ability.
I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.
On the flip side, Ørberg is a textbook for children, perhaps teenagers at the latest, and like most such textbooks it is in no hurry, so you’ll need to stick with it for quite some time to get results. That by no means makes it bad or unsuitable to whoever is reading this comment, but I can imagine how it wouldn’t work well in a typical introductory college course, where the instructor’s aim is to cram into the students’ heads as much Latin as possible in the semester or two they are given.
If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.
Intuitive comprehension works much better for Medieval Latin, like that used in the scientific publications of the 16th/17th/18th/19th centuries, i.e. the kind of Latin that would be used by people like Newton or Gauss.
Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.
On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.
The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.
Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.
For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).
There is a good Latin dictionary that is online:
https://www.prima-elementa.fr/Gaffiot/Gaffiot-dico.html
but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.
A large number of Latin books are online at:
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/
Unrelated to Latin. I speak four languages, each learned in a totally different way.
The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.
If you speak four languages, in most countries you are an outlier, and you should not assume that what works for you would work for others.
Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.
Now I’m curious; what book of grammar was it? What did the exercises look like? What other languages and strategies did you use?
As someone who also learned multiple languages, the most typical result if grammar focused classes is that you cant use the language at all for years. And yes it is consistent outcome for majority of the students.
Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.
As a former pupil that took 7+years of Latin, I think the probability of actually reading latin texts fluently today would have been orders of magnitude higher had instruction been coupled with Ørberg. I still want to be able to read hobbitus ille, but no thanks to my Latin classes (and I think I had decent teachers).
I've only been on the student side of this (with Hebrew), but that has been my experience as well. These sorts of books can work, but it needs extraordinarily good teachers to do so.
I like the approach in Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (sometimes called the "natural method"). I've noticed that it was adapted for other languages too, but most of the adaptations seemed old and outdated.
Recently I was wondering if I should work on a modernization of the concept (using audio and a more interactive medium). If anyone has thoughts on this topic, I'd be happy to discuss more.
"Grinding tables" might be the most accurate description of my language-learning experience that I've come across.
We quoted that book for years (probably because the accompanying audio version had a somewhat amusing cadence, but I do also think it was a lot more beneficial to learning than trudging through classical texts with a dictionary).
Thanks for sharing this! My wife and I have been interested in refreshing our Latin from high school, and we've been looking for good resources.
We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.
I haven't read it in years, and my Latin's pretty rusty now, but it was the most useful and fun thing I used.[1] If you get the book, you might also like Mr. Ørberg's recordings (widely pirated) of himself reading the text with a Classical pronunciation. There are also some good Latin YouTubers; my favorite is Satura Lanx, <https://youtube.com/@SaturaLanx>, but Luke Ranieri, <https://youtube.com/@polyMATHY_Luke>, is also good and very knowledgeable.
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1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.
Duolingo has a Latin course.
Duolingo Latin is not useful as your only course. I would say it’s not useful at all, except perhaps if your normal Latin class is on break and you want something, anything at all, to jog your memory a bit.
On one hand, it is really short. There are very few words assembled into very few phrases, and they are not even particularly popular words. (New Latin for “New York”? I mean, I guess, but was that really the best you could do?..)
On the other hand, for how short it is, it confronts you with quite a bit of grammar. As is customary for Duolingo, you’ll have to infer that grammar from the examples—except, per the previous point, you won’t get nearly enough examples. (It’s cute that some usages of the Latin verb “studeo” correspond to the English verb “study”, but the Latin one governs an unusual case, which depending on declension looks exactly like one of the other cases, so perhaps having it be one of the first verbs is unwise, especially when a lot of your target audience ostensibly has no concept of “govern”, “case”, or “declension”.)
On the gripping hand, because of how short it is, there is a lot of grammar that it does not even hint at. Including parts that any classical text will hit you in the face with within the first paragraph, and that will completely befuddle you unless you’re aware of them. (Like the quaint custom of plopping the preposition in the middle of its complement, as in “qua de causa” lit. “which for reason” i.e. “for which reason” i.e. “therefore”, or for that matter “magna cum laude” lit. “great with praise” i.e. “with great praise”.)
By comparison, Ørberg excels at this to a downright supernatural extent. It’s like La Disparition except instead of writing a (pretty natural-sounding) novel without using the most popular letter of the language he wrote a third of a (pretty natural-sounding) textbook without using the most popular category of nouns and adjectives in the language, and his version is actually useful. And it’s like this for any grammar concept he wants to defer. His way does take quite a bit of time, though, I’ll give you that.
After trying Duolingo a bit myself and seeing my family members try it, I've become convinced that Duolingo is worse than doing nothing, because it does a much better job of convincing you that you're learning than it does actually teaching you.
The courses vary a bit. The Welsh course, for example, is not that great. I have heard that off both serious learners and native speakers.
I've found it fairly useful for picking up other alphabets, as opposed to languages.
Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.
It sure does a little bit, but a) quality varies a lot - some courses can get you from zero to dos cervesas por favor, some are just poorly structured noise that has no chance of sticking in mind; b) doesn’t explain grammar (it’s an exception when it does), so results greatly vary on preconditions like languages you’re already familiar with and can relate - anything too foreign and you’ll have hard time trying to understand how those examples generalize.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
Duolingo does work for those A1-B1 levels it has courses for. At minimum, it got me where I was able to switch to netflix.
Do avoid.[1]
1: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/11413/is-duolingo-...
Duolingo has a tenth of a Latin course.
Source: I did the whole thing before I learned Latin from a different course. Duolingo's is unfinished.
I've seen Scanlon's Latin which was written I think to help people pray the Divine Office in latin
Lifehack: Latin is much easier if you already know a Slavic or a Baltic language (except Bulgarian). While declension patterns are different, the case structures are very similar. Not identical, but close enough that you actually just need to learn the differences.
Most other grammatical structures are also directly comparable.
So you can make your life easier by studying a Slavic (or a Baltic) language first.
(mwahaha!)
Or you can find learning a Slavic (or a Baltic) language easier if you learn Latin first. The bonus being that there are more useful cognates in Latin than in Slavic languages (although while learning Czech, I was a bit amused to discover that many of my childhood friends’¹ surnames were just Czech words for colors). Latin has fewer cases than Czech (five³ versus seven) and fewer declension patterns (there are five declensions with most nouns falling into the first three. In contrast, Czech has twelve and the adjective declensions differ from noun declensions (as opposed to Latin where adjectives follow either a first-second declension pattern or a third declension pattern).
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
Do you find it better than Wheelock’s? As a casual language observing hobbyist, it’s really scratched my itch of learning why Latin is the way it is.
My partner and I are from two different European countries that speak different languages.
When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.
That was a fun surprise.
My spouse and I lived in London, but we both come from (other) European countries, so for our wedding, three countries and four languages were involved: the church's forms are all both in the local language as well as in Latin.
This is no different than hundreds of years ago, and it works well. Thanks to Latin, the church's _lingua franca_.
similar experience led me to start learning Latin: once travelled to an other country within Europe and the priest in the companion asked directions from a local in Latin.
That’s pretty cool. What kind of things were your respective churches communicating about?
Assuming they're Roman Catholic, to get married in the Church at least one of the couple needs to be Catholic and records of their baptism, confirmation, etc. would be shared between the individual's church and wherever they're getting married. You also run into this if you move around a lot, not just for marriage. If you want to be confirmed, you need to be baptised. Your baptismal records may be in another state or country and would need to be shared with your confirmation church.
In fact, the baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records, so when you’re married, the marriage is communicated to that parish and added to your sacramental record (likewise for confirmation if it doesn’t happen at your baptismal church, and, less commonly ordination will also be communicated there). When parishes are closed or consolidated, the bishop will indicate what parish becomes the new keeper of sacramental records for the closed parish.¹
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1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.
Solution: Latin block chain
Latin is the Web's primary language: In the beginning, there was index.html ("index", Lat. "one who points out").
I used to think the Vatican would be old-fashioned, but the writing on its site is more readable than I expected. In particular, while reading the section “Development: Humanism and Posthumanism,” I found it interesting to compare the religious worldview of the West with my own more humanistic worldview.
This passage especially stood out to me:
> At the application level, AI in the strict sense raises questions about the reliability of data and the criteria by which programmers process it so as to make it available. It is unclear what biases or power systems influence the work. In particular, serious doubts arise regarding automated, AI-based decision-making processes in sensitive areas of human life: when deciding whether to provide medical care or grant loans or mortgages or insurance, or when prosecuting criminal cases in court or assessing the conduct of prisoners and the likelihood of reoffending with a view to reducing sentences, or when deciding on military attacks or law enforcement interventions.
It is funny because this almost feels like a complete summary of recent Hacker News debates in a single paragraph.
There is an AI working group in one of the dicasteries that has produced two excellent publications:
Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)
Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)
I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend.
The writing is genuinely excellent.
In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.
That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.
Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.
> Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.
See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) from 1891:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching
Various others over the decades.
Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.
Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.
A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.
'Communitarianism'.
It can be fruitful to consider the potential negative ramifications of one’s work for once. Especially so when the program is busy anyway.
People love to wallow in the stereotype that the Catholic Church is old fashioned and anti-science. That's mostly propaganda leftover from 300 years ago.
Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.
†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
They have 10 languages linked from their home page (https://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html).
Latin and Chinese are the only two that don't have the home page same design. Maybe they've laid-off some of their translators.
I'm surprised Russian isn't on there.
Why? Most Russians are Orthodox, not Catholic
I'm somewhat surprised it's still up, given the rather firm refusal by Francis to allow the Latin mass at churches that wanted it in the States.
The term "Latin mass" confuses two distinct aspects. Colloquially it refers to celebrating the Tridentine Mass in Latin. But the Tridentine Mass was already celebrated in the vernacular years before Vatican II, though it was optional and I don't know how widespread it was. The Vatican II reformed mass was expected to use the vernacular in most parts, but it can also be given in Latin, and Latin is the canonical form against which translations are made.
I've been to a Latin mass a couple of times, specifically a sung (aka high) Latin mass. I see why so many people prefer it. But the Novus Ordo can also be sung. Latin masses also tend to use incense, etc, which also used to be more common in the Norvus Ordo. The real division is between parishes and priests with the energy to put into the mass, versus those that fall into the habit of doing the bare minimum. The "Latin mass" just happens to be a convenient mechanism that bifurcates the two groups.
Relatedly, I read a argument somewhere that the current state can be traced back to the proliferation of Irish priests. In Ireland the low (unsung) Latin mass had apparently been for centuries the predominate form even on Sundays. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but reading various sources it does seem that in various parts of the world the sung mass had already been in a long decline at least since the 1800s. And I think the Norvus Ordo was intended to simplify things in the hopes of reviving the energy in the mass, but instead it just created a lower floor.
I've heard the same re. the Irish.
Regarding the Novus Ordo, I believe that the key document from Vatican II (Sacrosanctum Concilium) still preferred Latin as the dominant language in liturgy, while readings etc. stayed in the vernacular, but clearly that is not what happened.
There's been an uptick in numbers for Tridentine Rite, so tides might shift back as Catholics realize the wealth of their liturgical tradition.
Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church. The meaning of words in dead dead language like Latin don't change much and so a document written in Latin is likely to be easily understood in 4-500 years (for people who can read Latin) and used for translations into the local vernacular. Whereas a language like English is constantly evolving and so the version of some words in, for a relevant example, the original King James Bible, do not mean the same thing in modern English that they did in the early 17th century.
The hulabaloo about the Latin or so-called Tridentine Mass is a cultural issue that is mostly about shifting societal norms and only incidentally about it's being in Latin. This is evidenced by the fact that the current form of the Mass, the Novus Ordo, is written in Latin then translated into the vernacular, and it can still be validly performed in Latin without special dispensation from the Vatican.
That isn't because of a general opposition to all uses of Latin.
The official version of that document is in ... Latin.
Roman Rite liturgy wars? On Hacker News? More likely than you think.
He had specific reasons for not wanting it in mass:
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/07/19/latin-mass-...
It very quickly turns mass into just repeating sounds without any way to internalize any of what you’re saying. There’s a bunch of stuff about humility, contrition, gratefulness etc that they want people to internalize.
I'm somewhat surprised it's still up, given the rather firm refusal by Francis to allow the Latin mass at churches that wanted it in the States.
Maybe because a web site isn't holy Mass?
Little changed in 18 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20080511133831/https://www.vatic...
Little changed in 500 years: https://web.archive.org/web/15080511133831/https://www.vatic...
I don't see in lang="la" in their HTML. (Not surprising, with this old-looking design).
Professor Dave Explains has a great series for those interested in learning Latin: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLybg94GvOJ9EcIVsQMJOj...
I don't speak latin, but people that do say, that Vatican's X posts in Latin are in a really bad Latin.
https://x.com/Pontifex_ln
(Probably not written by HHH himself, unless someone wants to compare it with the previous occupants - apparently Benedict XVI had the best Latin of the recent Pontificis)
The 404 page is in English. ;(
How do you say "Click here" in Latin ?
Google Translate suggested "preme hic" which is plausible to me (I've spent a lot of time with Latin but haven't thought of this particular question before). It literally means "press here".
According to google, "preme hic". ("press here")
probably same as "press here"
Clickus Hereus
Bigus Clickus
Latin might be useful if AI is gonna be finally destroyed and the Emperor will rise. (wh40k)
It has to be there for the aliens.
Well at least the spelled 'appendix' correctly
I imagine a parallel universe where Latin is used as lingua franca instead of English.
If you squint enough you can see English as a barbarised form of Latin.
It'd be more a return to the past, we still had a lot of latin in science a couple hundred years ago.
One very fun thing I discovered recently is that Dante (and presumably other people in the middle ages) thought that Latin was a constructed language designed to go over linguistic differences, and that's why it had a proper grammar, unlike romance languages :)
That is very fascinating. Do you have some source on this that you could share? IIRC Dante wrote in vernacular Italian which was uncommon at the time, presumably to make his texts more approachable by common people?
If I had to take a guess, I would say he heard it in a lecture by Prof. Alessandro Barbero, same as I did :)
But I think the source is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgari_eloquentia In the Italian Wiki page, the "constructed nature" of latin is hinted at; it doesn't seem to be present in the English wiki.
Update: It's indeed in the book, at the end of the 1st chapter of the 1st book:
3 There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica [grammar]. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study
4 Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.
Here, vernacular refers to "italian" or whatever dialect, while "gramatica" is latin - the artificial one :)
Dante was not completely wrong, since much of the written Latin we have was a formalised and standardised version, whereas Romance languages are descendants of the Latin people actually spoke.
lorem ipsum
How do you say "click here" in Latin ?
Its not even using reiiiiact! what a noob site
/s