An Interview with Evan Millner

Why did you set up the Latinum Podcast?

Well, like many things, it happened by accident. I have been studying Latin for some years now, in a desultory fashion, and decided I wanted to rev things up a notch. My natural way of learning a language is to listen to a lot of it. With Latin, this always presented me with a problem, as there was almost no stuff around that I could put on my MP3 player. I don’t like sitting in front of my computer all day,unless I am doing something, like building a website, or making something, or writing.... and I also didn’t want to have my nose in a book for longer than necessary. Grammar books, unfortunately, send me to sleep.

I’d had enough of learning Latin that way, and nodding off over declension tables. So I started to write to people with audio in Latin that was already online, for permission to transfer the files to mp3 format, so I could stick them on my iPod. In the beginning,I was doing this for myself.

Most of the files online in 2006 that were in Restored Classical pronunciation were in realaudio, and these can’t be played away from the computer, or saved in iTunes. I originally set up the podcast just for myself. I wasn’t really thinking that anyone would be massively interested; it was going to be my personal archive of Latin stuff online. Then I noticed it was getting hits, and these were increasing exponentially. There are now a few thousand file downloads per day, and the user base is international. The podcast gives access to a full education in Latin, to students in countries with no tradition of teaching the language, and who otherwise would not have access to anything other than a textbook. This applies to most adult students, everywhere, as there are almost no informal programmes to speak of for teaching Latin to adults outside of the big universities.


I decided to put some serious work into it, and now it is full of wonderful Latin to listen to. I have more students online now, using the podcast, than I would ever see in a lifetime at school. There have been over seven million file downloads since the podcast started in May 2007.

What sort of stuff do you have on the podcast?

The backbone of the podcast is this amazing book by a guy called George Adler that I stumbled across online using Google Books. Adler was one of those super geniuses who was so bright he went nuts. Really, I’m serious; they locked him up in a mental asylum. Once he had left the University, and didn’t have to worry about his career, and he did something totally off the wall – he wrote the first proper book in English for studying conversational Latin as though it were French or German or any other living language. He knew what he was up to, because he had written the first English edition of the definitive 19th Century German Conversational textbook, and a German-English dictionary (both are still in print, over 150 years later). I’m using Adler’s book as the basis for the lessons on the Podcast, and it is proving quite popular.

Do you have other things on there as well?

Yes, quite a lot. Beginning students don’t get to read much advanced Latin, but listening to it is well worthwhile, as your brain can pick out patterns, especially grammatical patterns, even when you don’t understand everything. It’s a great way to learn. The podcast has loads of Horace, Catullus, Virgil and other goodies to listen to, read by a wide range of different people. Some of the readers are quite famous, like Sonkowsky. There is also an entertainment section, with some pretty off the wall things. There is also a lot of 'easy listening', or, in teacher-speak "comprehensible input", which is useful for rapidly building fluency and confidence.

Why listen to a Latin Podcast?

I think the podcast format is great for learning Latin – you just listen to the lesson, and then repeat out loud after the reader, and you can take it with you wherever, on your skateboard, on your bike. The Latin sort of just sinks in by osmosis. It is a great stress free way to study. Latin isn’t difficult at all if it is learned this way. The great thing is that you’ll be able to speak it quite well, if you give it a shot, because the emphasis is on speaking Latin, on conversational Latin, and not on the grammar. This is wonderful if you intend to read Plautus or Terence, or any other Dramatic works in Latin. The only surefire way to get to grips with any language is to surround yourself with it as much as possible. We don’t have time machines to take us back to ancient Rome, but listening to the Latin downloaded from the podcast lets you surround yourself with the sounds of spoken Latin, creating a virtual reality Rome in your head. That’s a real help.

Why should anyone bother with Latin?

Well, as I say, being a European without knowing Latin, is like being a Chinaman without knowing Chinese. You are cut off from your culture. Almost anything worth putting into print in Europe from the time of the Roman Empire, until the late 1700's, was published in Latin. Poets wrote in Latin for an international European audience. Plays were written and performed, orations, political tractates, novels were written, even sci-fi. Most of this material is now simply unknown, there are simply too few readers to read all of it. However, thanks to Google Books, you personally have access at the click of a mouse, to more literature in Latin than you could consume in several lifetimes.
It’s a dead language, but as I always say, it’s dead and kicking.