Teaching Latin in Latin

In the Renaissance, Latin was usually taught through the medium of Latin. Various textbooks were published, giving teachers examples of the types of dialogues they could use to examine in grammar, from the very first stages.

Vocabulary was built by showing objects, by acting out, or by displaying pictures.

This method of teaching died out when Latin stopped being used as a spoken language of the educated, around the mid 1700's. The main reason this happened, was the rise of the Nation State, and the resulting focus on patriotism, and the national languages.

By the mid 1800's, Latin was almost universally taught as a translation course, or as a philological course, and not as a language course per se.

However, as Comenius noted in the mid 1700's, no matter the goal - for example, when teaching Biblical Hebrew, where no communicative facility is required, the most expeditious method of gaining knowledge, is still through listening, and reading, with listening coming first - the point is where do you stop developing your skill - if you are just learning the language to read in it, your skill level in speaking need not develop.

In Comenius' day, skill at speaking the vernacular, and Latin, were both desirable.

In the late 1900's various teachers tried to resurrect the previous method  - Adler, in 1856, wrote a huge textbook based around spoken Latin. Others composed similar courses. 

However, the lack of teachers who could speak the language, or teach it in the language itself, meant these efforts were largely ignored. Scientific knowledge about how languages are learned progressed. Latin remained a philological subject. The hours available for teaching it were much reduced,and the expectations that students would actually be able to read fluently, vanished. A generation of teachers arose who had limited language skills in the language they were teaching - versed in grammar, they were more akin to linguistics students, who analyse a language, than their colleagues in the French and Spanish departments.

There is a growing number of teachers who want to teach Latin in Latin, who acknowledge that this makes their classes more attractive to their students, that enrollments are higher, when the classes are more enjoyable, and are not just about grammar, and translation.

As an experiment, a model language class was developed, and the lessons posted on YouTube, using Adler's Latin Ollendorff text as the fundamental text, with the grammatical exegesis in Latin drawn from a selection of renaissance textbooks. 

This course - which will consist of several hundred short lessons, makes extensive use of gesture, physical objects, and slide shows with voice over for objects that cannot be easily obtained. Latin is taught through dialogue. Grammatical concepts are introduced incrementally, and slowly the student builds up the ability to discuss Latin grammar in Latin, while gradually expanding their ability to talk about a wider range of subjects.

Internationational Audio Visual Latin Course - Latin taught through Latin

The Cursum Latinum  is currently in development. At the time or writing, over 200 lessons are available , with new material being uploaded to the dedicated YouTube channel on almost a daily  basis - the complete course, which will cover all the fundamentals of Latin, and a great amount of more advanced material, will comprise well over 1000 lessons. 

This is a course designed for the serious student of Latin, who wishes to be able to read texts which do not have translations (i.e. the vast bulk of material ever written in Latin in the past 2000, most of which remains untranslated). Due to its unique structure, the Cursum Latinum can be used by both adults and children. Even advanced students of Latin can benefit enormously from this course.

The Cursum Latinum is designed to train students to read and think in Latin. It is not a translation course. The goal is to reach a high level of reading fluency.

The methodology is very traditional, and uses a methodology that has documented origins in Roman times.

At present, the Cursum Latinum is only available (for free) on YouTube. It is the only course of its type in existence. There are a small number of teachers around the world, who teach Latin in Latin, but at present, the Cursum Latinum is the only example of such a course openly accessible, outside the confines of the University of Kentucky's Latin department, the Vivarium Novum, and a handful of classrooms around the world. 

Unlike a book-based course, the Cursum Latinum offers you a teacher. As the course follows Adler's text, "A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language for Speaking and Writing Latin", it is possible to use Adler (available on Google Books) to move along with the course, although the exact match to pages in Adler is not explicit, as the course uses other material, notably the educational materials for teaching Latin in Latin developed byJohn Amos Comenius in the mid seventeenth century, and materials developed by der Millner himself.

As the course is entirely in Latin, it can be used by students internationally. It also has the distinct advantage in that it will not date, as Latin is immutable, but the vernacular languages shift over time.

The foundational methodology of the Cursum Latinum is that developed by Jean Manesca in the late 1700's for teaching language orally, using conversation. This method was subsequently adopted by Henri Ollendorff, who wrote a textbook for teaching Latin using this method in the early 1840's. George Adler, a noted German-American linguist, re-wrote this text, and published it in 1856, the year before his death.

The text then sank into oblivion, to be rediscovered by der Millner in 2007.

Initially, the text was serialised as an audio course along with the English explanations, on the Latinumpodcast.