Is picrel too heavy for a noob? I have a copy in my Logos library already, but I'm willing to get something else. Especially physical.
I want to learn Latin
Is picrel too heavy for a noob? I have a copy in my Logos library already, but I'm willing to get something else. Especially physical.
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata
It focuses on understanding rather than translating. It teaches through the natural method so it’s also fun. You need to read part 1 and part 2, and also do all the exercises in Exercitia Latina.
That's a good grammar.
I would suggest working through wheelock for basics first tho
Not this:
Psood phaggot shyt
>Psood phaggot shyt
>OP avoid this dogshit at all costs. Muh natural learning exists for lazy fucktards who unironically peruse Duolingo
kek I'm torn now. Had no idea pseud stuff would come up for this subject. It looks user friendly, not pseud tbh.
It is pseud. You need grammar, you can't nature method a dead language. Llpsi is only good for supplemental reading. NOT AS A FULL BLOWN LEARNING METHOD ON ITS OWN
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata teaches grammar.
Look, OP. It’s completely up to you. Any method you choose, any half decent book you get, is going to teach you Latin provided you put enough effort into it. LLPSI is one option. Its advocates argue that it is superior to the textbook method because it focuses on understanding rather than translation. The way it’s taught in universities and consequently in textbooks is through translation. That’s why many people use “reading a book in Latin” and “translating it” interchangeably. The natural method is meant to teach without translation whatsoever, so that the Latin words will acquire their own meaning in your head without having to map them to English words.
ScorpioMartianus (Aka Polymathy) on YouTube is a linguist who speaks many languages including Latin fluently and recommends people use LLPSI to learn. He made a whole audiobook version of it on his channel which is good for learning classical pronunciation. However, he does say that the student would benefit from memorising the declension and conjugation rules before reading LLPSI. Here is his video about it: https://youtu.be/5oJctKy_r6s?si=EUF6jDc7EITWUGbM
>guy who did not use LLPSI recommendeds Llpsi
Lmao
But he did.
Are you implying you have superior linguistic/pedagogical understanding to a guy who speaks 9+ languages including Latin and Ancient Greek
>because it focuses on understanding rather than translation
I'd say a main selling point is rather the fact that essential lexicon is absorbed in context, and anyone who has learned any foreign language decently, including classical ones, knows that the main obstacle is fundamentally lexicon, not grammar
learning what an "ablative of quality" is in your first two weeks isn't gonna do you much good when you can't even remember the word for dog because you just read it without context in some list of words to memorize for some declension/conjugation type exercises
You ought to know, OP, that the vast majority of autodidacts in scholarly languages fail using this method. The vast majority of people in school forget it shortly. Even historically, students had a rotten time learning Latin using this kind of method. It was considered the main struggle of a classical education, more so than mathematics. And part of it is because this isn't how we best learn languages. It's failing method.
Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata will give you a shot. A good baseline to pursue it yourself. If you have the discipline after, it's definitely possible, as many men of learning have pursued. But the main hurdle is this beginning, and this textbook bullshit, the same caliber you learn foreign languages in primary school, is dysfunctional.
Looks cool. You mean the book, correct? The publisher's web page starts off their list with what seems to be electronic courses (subscription).
Yes the book by Orberg.
Volume 1, Familia Romana, is written by him. It introduces you to Latin through the natural method. Begins with simple sentences and ends in reading real Latin poetry. Volume 2, Roma Aeterna, is a history of Rome told with extracts from real Latin authors.
Exercitia Latina is the exercise book that goes along with this.
>Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata
OP avoid this dogshit at all costs. Muh natural learning exists for lazy fucktards who unironically peruse Duolingo
LEARN THE GRAMMAR
ROTE THE WORDS
INSTALL ANKI
READ CEASAR
FINAL DESTINATION
Tu facis laborem Dei. Vade cum Deo, frater mi.
Listen to this guy OP
do this OP
ignore the monkeys seething about LLPSI, they don't know any classical language well, it's just a meme, you get all your grammar from it, it's not just a reader
Holy fuck please ignore the pseuds who haven't gone to uni OP use Wheelocks or Latin an intensive course the book you chose is based but it's not for teaching whereas those two I mentioned are. You can use llpsi in tandem even but don't fucking rely on it it's such a fucking learn Latin fast meme
So get both then? I'll start with Wheelock. Seems like the standard for English readers.
Yes do that. Remember: llpsi is a supplement, and should never be anything more. Wheelocks is for learning, llpsi is for practice.
I am
Wheelock is solid. So is Cambridge. When in doubt, pirate a different one and try the first few chapters. I strongly recommend just going with whatever book speaks to you, and not even bothering to understand why exactly it speaks to you. Different learners like different approaches. Look at it this way: every book recommended here is conveyance that is going to the location you want (knowing Latin). You have no way of knowing what kind of conveyance each is: maybe one's a boat, but you get seasick; one's a horse with no saddle, and your ass is going to hurt for a month after you get there, but you'll get there; one's a great sedan car, while another's an "okay" sedan car that smells funny; one is a bus that makes too many stops and is filled with retards (LLPSI).
But the key thing is that you can always get off one conveyance and get on another if you don't like it. With the caveat that you shouldn't do this for the first 5 chapters or so, since those will be interchangeable between books. Get the very basics down, at least.
Your slander against LLPSI is based on a guilt by association fallacy. You claim that LLPSI is advocated by “retards”. Which, despite being untrue (the most fluent and proficient speaker of Latin in the world, Luke Ranieri, is an advocate of LLPSI), does not establish the inferiority of LLPSI. LLPSI advocates do not claim that LLPSI is superior because one does not have to learn grammar. That is a strawman you have made up. Ranieri advocates for memorising the declension/conjugation rules before reading LLPSI. LLPSI is superior first and foremost because it is not translation-based.
I've never seen an exposition of the "translation vs. reading" thing that made sense to me. All reading is translation to some extent. It's like saying you want to own a car but don't want to know how the engine works. The better you get at knowing how your engine works, the less often you have to repair (troubleshooting shit that makes no sense) or it and the quicker it is to maintain it when it's time for routine maintenance (occasional review of weird things you have trouble with or forget), but the engine is always THERE, and you still had to build it from scratch for your car to run so well (sight-reading).
I strongly suspect the translation vs. reading people are hooked on this fuzzy notion of "immersion" as a magic method, and have never read Greek or Latin at a high level. There is ALWAYS translation, including use of a grammar and dictionary, involved in reading real Latin or Greek texts. Sometimes a lot, even for pros. You can sight read medium-level texts to some extent, once you get really, really good, but these languages were around for centuries and centuries and spanned huge regions. There are tons of variations, tons of weird grammar and vocabulary quirks that only existed for a time and in a certain location. You will always have to consult critical editions and stuff. It's normal.
Ask any ESL on LULZ who is fluent in English, do you still occasionally look up weird things in English? Especially when reading proper English lit? Of course they do. I was reading the Bible in Russian recently and came across a usage that made no sense to me, but when I asked my friend's Russian father if it was normal (without telling him where I found it) he said "oh yeah, just a bit archaic sounding." HE knew it intuitively because he was a native speaker. But that was an example of me, a non-native, having to work on my engine a bit.
The engine metaphor is once again implying that advocates of LLPSI neglect grammar. It’s simply not true. LLPSI teaches grammar and Luke Ranieri, who speaks Latin fluently, advocates memorising some grammar rules before reading LLPSI.
Do you not realise that every chapter in LLPSI includes a section on grammar with exercises? And if you do Exercitia Latina along with it you get even more grammar exercises.
Looking up words and grammar is not the same as translation.
The translation method is the method taught in university Latin classes. It involves taking a Latin text and translating it into English. They do this over and over and it’s how their professor grades them. That’s why you have people like pic related, for whom “reading in Latin” is equivalent to “translating”.
Lastly your claim that all reading involves translation is refuted by the existence of literate monolinguals.
>Lastly your claim that all reading involves translation is refuted by the existence of literate monolinguals.
but you are translating graphemes into language when you are reading
The point is that in learning a language the goal is to attain fluency which means the language takes on an existence of its own in your head without being tied to the mother tongue. Translation method does not encourage this.
But then you have the translation method being used for living languages. You can argue for or against it (I'm against it), but you see it being used in Asian countries for example, they have their students translate from English, and into English.
Yeah but nobody thinks that learning languages in university is the best way to learn. Everyone knows that it's highly synthetic and that the only real way is immersion.
You can't immerse yourself in a dead language though.
Modern day clergy that know it enough to speak it don't speak Caesar's Latin. And after Vatican II those who know it enough to write and hold conversations in it are less and less.
Modern day reconstructions of Caesar's Latin are that, reconstructions.
The differences between oral and written Latin is so big that by modeling your orality after the classics and the big authors you are speaking a nonexistant form of Latin that would pretty much only be understood in the Senate or a Court, not amongst the regular people running around, and not even in the houses of the bigshots, they'd speak either like normal people or Greek.
Cicero's speeches were highly artificial constructs were he pushed the language to it's limits, but he wouldn't speak like that to someone on the street.
Well yeah, it's an intellectual language today. Immersion is reading. There are some simpler Latin works.
>the most fluent and proficient speaker of Latin in the world, Luke Ranieri, is an advocate of LLPSI
Lol no.
That be Luigi Miraglia. But he advocates for LLPSI too.
But who cares who the most fluent speaker of Latin in the world is? Who studies classical languages to speak them fluently? Speaking Latin well is more of a gimmick than an actual intellectual accomplishment.
The worst thing about LLPSI is that it's not even a learn fast course. You will spend three-four months reading it and will come away knowing the basics of grammar with none of the formal understanding necessary to read complex texts, and about 1000 common words. That's a shit progress for 3 months, especially in a language you only read in so there's no time wasted on phonetics. That's because all LLPSI is beyond it's gimmicky sell is an inefficient rote system. You are give a rule and about 20 words, and then you rote them by reading badly composed sentences that will never occur in actual latin texts. It's just rote but you waste time repeating the same crap spread thin instead of employing spaced repetition that Anki has built in. The only positive of LLPSI is that it's organized like a fun story rather than a textbook
You don’t get taught “the basics of grammar” you are taught all of Latin grammar within LLPSI. The “badly formed sentences” are similar to the “badly formed sentences” a child would use when learning his native language. They increase in complexity. By the end of the first volume you are reading real Latin poetry, and the second volume is a history of Rome told by real Latin authors just edited to fit with the Orberg method. The whole second volume begins first with Orberg’s Latin prose, and then transitions to Livy, Eutropius, Aulus Gellus, Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, and other real Latin authors. No, it is not a “learn Latin quick” method. Nobody ever implied it was. It is an immersive, non translation-based method.
Do they bring the Vatican into it at all? Some of them are the only ones who actually use Latin conversationally with each other in the modern world. Surprisingly it flows more like Spanish than I would have guessed. Or maybe it's just how they specifically speak it.
Also, you lied about “1000 common words”
There are 1700+ unique words in Familia Romana, and over 3000 in Roma Aeterna.
>Holy fuck please ignore the pseuds who haven't gone to uni
Kill yourself credentialist homosexual
Wheelock is better
You won't learn how to speak Latin going to the classics because no one spoke like that.
If you want to learn orality, after going through the entire process of learning, you go for St. Augustine and medieval authors, whose Latin, whilst less "perfect" than classic authors, was more grounded in the orality of the language.
No one spoke in their day to day like Cicero, chaining subordinate after subordinate and ending with the verb.
Allen and Greenough's is a reference grammar. You CAN absolutely learn a language with just a grammar, but usually when people did this historically it was precisely because they already learned Latin and/or Greek growing up, and they knew how grammar works, so learning a new language from scratch just meant "filling" the patterns they already know (cases, declensions, subordination of tenses, etc.) with new forms. This was the beauty of the old gymnasium/lycee systems and mandatory classical language education.
You can definitely still learn Latin on your own simply by using a textbook. All a class really is, is a teacher leading you through a textbook in a fashion he deems appropriate, giving weekly exams, grading your work, being there to answer questions, etc. If you're reasonably intelligent, motivated, and willing to use the internet to replace some of these functions, you can do it yourself. It will still be useful to have a grammar like Allen & Greenough available, so I would get a cheap one too, personally.
For textbooks, there are different options available. Here are some I know or know of:
>some random old textbook from archive.org or the library
Not a bad option for a certain kind of person. A fun way to learn any language. Most old textbooks assumed a higher base IQ and didn't condescend to their audience.
>LLPSI (Lingua latina per se illustrata)
Very popular method among online Latin self-taughts lately. Some extremely insufferable fans, many of whom are interested in the IDEA of learning Latin but want a secret special shortcut so they don't have to "learn grammar," by which they mean memorizing forms and names of declensions and so on. Even though LLPSI is meant to be used with a grammar instructional supplement, there are many LLPSI fans who think they are learning by "pure immersion," "like a baby learns his mother tongue." I find this weird because not only is "knowing grammar" absolutely essential to reading real Latin at higher levels, as I said in the beginning of this post, being "forced" to learn grammar is also one of the best things about learning Latin. I have learned other languages in 1/5 the time it took people to learn them via classes because I already knew Latin grammar. But YMMV.
>Shelmerdine
Sort of the opposite of LLPSI in that it leans toward grammar to the exclusion of practice texts. Good if you already know basics of grammar or prefer to "under the hood" of a language ASAP. I sometimes recommend to this kind of learner that they use Shelmerdine for grammar but supplement it with Cambridge's texts for practice.
>Wheelock
Classic combination of grammar instruction and texts, somewhere between LLPSI and Shelmerdine. Worked for generations of learners, was semi-standard for a while.
>Cambridge Latin
Similar to Wheelock, but some people like it much more. Fond memories of Grumio.
>Reading Latin (Sidwell and Jones)
From what I can tell, it's somewhere between Cambridge/Wheelock and Shelmerdine?
>Shelmerdine
>Sort of the opposite of LLPSI in that it leans toward grammar to the exclusion of practice texts. Good if you already know basics of grammar or prefer to "under the hood" of a language ASAP. I sometimes recommend to this kind of learner that they use Shelmerdine for grammar but supplement it with Cambridge's texts for practice.
I actually have this too (in the same Logos library as the Allen and Greenborough.. I got some both as part of a Catholic package or something). For some reason, they don't have Wheelock, so I'll get a hard copy.
Good luck, also remember in addition that I say here
that layering is good. Don't think in terms of using the one best method, think in terms of absorbing the info regardless of its source. At the end of the day, doing three mediocre textbooks in three months with significant overlaps (which only reinforce your knowledge and give you more practice) is superior to spending three years arguing about Latin online.
>in addition to what I say here*
Making at least one typo / grammar mistake per post is not ideal, considering I'm recommending the grammar-first approach
No one has mentioned Henle. How good is Henle? It seems to focus on ecclesiastical Latin.
Qua de causa tanto ardore vestri culi LLPSI nomine audito incendantur numquam intellegere potero.
quos linguam discere non potuere delectat tempus terere plus de methodis garriendo quam ipsis linguis
Si linguam discere vis, nescio quid faciendum tibi sit. Scio autem quid non sit faciendum: in /clg/ inire.
Cinaede
tace pathice
Vides mentulas
ego video, tu autem sugis.
Tu ponis in anum tuum cum cupiditate
Mater tua te non peperit sed cacavit.
Pater tuus non verum est, mater tua verum canis
Porcus quidam matrem tuam futuit, quae novem post menses te cacavit, dein merdis te aluit.
I read Lingua Latina Familia Romana for about 11 chapters until I realised that I should do something more useful with my time and I decided to learn French instead
I feel like there isn't enough input surprisingly
Now I'm not a retard who thinks that LLPSI is just the first book in the series but even with the supplements I felt like there wasn't enough extensive reading for it to really work well
Also when I started studying I thought you weren't supposed to search anything up or else it'd ruin the effectiveness of the method but I think that's wrong
Familia Romana is pretty good at explaining grammar in my opinion but you really need to study the notes in the margins
Ummmmm... wheelocksissies? D-did he... did he just refute us?
Quite literally any textbook from LLPSI, Wheelocks, your own pic is completely fine. Basically every Latin textbook since the 1850's teaches the same thing anyway so you'll just be splitting hairs with pedantic people discussing them, you just need to stick to it 100%.