Learn to Speak Latin

The Latinum Latin Language Course is a successful free online audio course, devoted to teaching the Latin Language. The course functions as a “Latin Language Outreach Program”, and has an international user base. Several thousand audio files are downloaded from the course website every day. The Latinum Course is supported by resource materials for vocabulary learning, located on Schola,  with images and Latin words, but no other language. Users are encouraged to use their newly acquired language skills on the growing Latin-only Social website, Schola.

The Latinum Course uses modern language methods to teach Latin, based around an intensive oral system that would be too time intensive to implement in a classroom situation, but which is very well suited to distribution via the internet and iTunes, for use through the medium of a computer or personal stereo.

Apart from offering lessons in Classical Latin, Latinum also hosts a growing range of readings from Classical Texts and the Roman Poets, recorded by a number of contributors worldwide, some of whom are famous for their delivery of Latin prose. Thus, Latinum attracts both new students of the language, and also those who may have been studying for many years.

The Latinum Course is unique, in that it focuses on Latin as a living, spoken language. The course is aimed at giving its users a high level of fluency in spoken Classical Latin. This has not generally been a goal of courses in Latin since the Renaissance. The premise of the course is that the fastest road to an all round complete knowledge of the language, is to treat it as a modern language, and to learn it using the techniques that have successfully been applied to teaching English as a second language. A user who can speak Latin with some fluency, can then read the language as a fluent speaker. They should be able to think in the language, and not perpetually translate every sentence into their mother tongue in their heads. A fluent speaker will have a fast reading speed, and will be able to read and enjoy more aspects the vast and varied literature that has been written in Latin over the past 2300 years. It is the goal of the Latinum Course to assist in producing such students, a new generation of fluent Latinists, who will be able to use their Latin practically as a means of active communication, indeed a generation of Latinists such as the world has not seen for over 400 years.

to learn a language successfully, you need to expose yourself to it - the studying you do in class is really only ever going to be a very small part of the effort needed. Latinum is designed to help fill a gaping hole in Latin study - the lack of enough immersion material. 

The U.S. State Department groups languages for the diplomatic service according to learning difficulty.:

Category 1. The “easiest” languages for speakers of English, requiring 600 hours of classwork for minimal proficiency: the Latin and Germanic languages. However, German itself requires a bit more time, 750 hours, because of its complex grammar.

Category 2. Medium, requiring 1100 hours of classwork: Slavic languages, Turkic languages, other Indo-Europeans such as Persian and Hindi, and some non-Indo-Europeans such as Georgian, Hebrew and many African languages. Swahili is ranked easier than the rest, at 900 hours.. 

Category 3. Difficult, requiring 2200 hours of study: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and the Chinese languages. Classical Latin falls into this group

Will you get a chance to practice Latin? This is the thorny problem with Latin - partially solved by the internet, and access to Schola  and the growing number of Latin Speaking clubs around the world. If you had been learning latin 300 years ago, you wouldn't have this problem - there would be enough Latin speakers around.

To be a successful learner of any language you need the chance to hear, read and speak the language in a natural environment. Language learning takes an enormous amount of concentration and repetition, which cannot be done entirely in the classroom. Will you have access to the language where you live, work and travel? 

The Latinum Course uses as its base text the comprehensive textbook for Spoken Latin, written by the famed 19th century linguist, G.J.Adler, called " A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language".

The map above shows red dots, representing clusters of ten users, showing the location of the user base of the Latinum Course for learning how to speak Classical Latin, over the months of May - July 2008. Larger dots are clusters of 10-99.  During this period, over 12 700 individual users accessed the Course website. Over 2 million audio files will have been downloaded from the Latinum Course since the program came online in the first quarter of 2007 through to the end of July 2008.