A Little Latin Every Day: How to Learn Latin With Short Texts and Audio

How to Learn Latin?

When my stu­dents ask me how to learn Latin, I always say, spend as much time with it as pos­si­ble, read as much as pos­si­ble, prefer­ably for hours each day.

This is, of course, eas­i­er said than done. In this day and age, it’s not at all evi­dent how to find all the time need­ed to learn Latin to a high lev­el, espe­cial­ly if you are not doing it in an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting but rather in your leisure time.

How­ev­er, it is often­times under­es­ti­mat­ed how much progress you can make in Latin or any oth­er lan­guage by just spend­ing 5–10 min­utes a day on a focused task. Quite quick­ly, the min­utes amount to hours and the small steps to great progress.

Sug­gest­ed: Videos and arti­cles in Latin

Master Shorter Latin Texts

In my expe­ri­ence when we have lit­tle time, focus­ing on short­er texts and real­ly mas­ter­ing them, under­stand­ing the vocab­u­lary and the gram­mar and con­quer­ing the texts, so to speak, builds an enour­mous amount of confidence:

Even if we feel like we don’t know Latin, or that we aren’t pro­gress­ing, we can look at the short­er texts we’ve thor­ough­ly mas­tered and say:

“yeah, maybe I have a long way to go, but that text I under­stand ful­ly, it’s mine.”

This bite-sized approach was a big part of how I learned French and Latin. Grant­ed, if you have the time, com­bin­ing this approach with exten­sive read­ing is ide­al. A byprod­uct of focus­ing on mas­ter­ing short­er texts is that you can more eas­i­ly remem­ber exact quotes, con­struc­tions, or con­texts appro­pri­ate for a par­tic­u­lar word.

Learn Latin Every Day

In a pre­vi­ous post, I out­lined a method I’ve used to mas­ter short­er texts as a way of build­ing lan­guage abil­i­ty and con­fi­dence as well as study habits. I dis­cuss this fur­ther in a talk here (in Latin).

The basic idea is that you pick a short text and study it for a few min­utes every day in var­i­ous ways, rang­ing from cur­sive read­ing to look­ing up any­thing dif­fi­cult, to read­ing and under­stand­ing it ful­ly simultaneously.

Where to Get Short Texts?

So if you do have a few min­utes, and want to work with some short and inter­est­ing texts, where do you get them?

One way is to go look through Latin lit­er­a­ture, antholo­gies, and Latin read­ers. But track­ing down and find­ing inter­est­ing texts takes a lot of time

Let’s see what you can do instead.

A Series of Short Recordings

To help peo­ple strug­gling to find short, inter­est­ing Latin texts, we record and pub­lish short 1–5 minute episodes (you can find them here).

We aim to pro­vide record­ings of texts from a vari­ety of peri­ods, gen­res, and lev­els. This is of course a work in progress, but if it appeals to peo­ple, we’ll con­tin­ue broad­en­ing the material.

The texts are read at a fair­ly slow pace and are sup­port­ed by a tran­scrip­tion. Click the link below to access this series of record­ings of Latin texts.

List of all the Latin audio episodes.

Why Audio?

To me learn­ing lan­guages has always been a very audi­to­ry task, where lis­ten­ing and devel­op­ing lis­ten­ing com­pre­hen­sion has been cen­tral to get a firm foothold in the language.

It also helps us avoid trans­lat­ing, which is at times a good tool, but in order to read Latin flu­ent­ly we have to be able to read with­out hes­i­tat­ing, or look­ing up words all the time.

At first, you may need to trans­late, but lis­ten­ing over and over again while refer­ring to a trans­la­tion will slow­ly wean you off it. You will grad­u­al­ly devel­op a firm com­mand of the syn­tax and most of the vocab­u­lary so as to be able to fol­low the flow of the language.

These days, lis­ten­ing can be done on the go quite eas­i­ly and so you can con­tin­ue work­ing on your Latin even while doing the dish­es or going to work or stand­ing in line. I know I learned most of my French going places and stand­ing in line.

Who Are They For?

In the series we’ll try to find texts of every lev­el and every time peri­od, so hope­ful­ly there’ll be some­thing for any­one want­i­ng to spend some time on their Latin. Nev­er­the­less, the amount of tru­ly easy Latin out there is quite sparse. So depend­ing on you lev­el, you may have to rely on some dic­tio­nary work and trans­la­tion at first, but after lis­ten­ing repeat­ed­ly you will start to inter­nalise the lan­guage in the texts and make them yours.

If you want to read and lis­ten to an eas­i­er text in Latin, check out Pugio Bru­ti — A Crime Sto­ry in Easy Latin. Amelie and I want­ed to cre­ate a longer sto­ry that would be quite easy (350 unique words) to read. The response has been awesome!

What to Do Now?

If you’re learn­ing Latin, I would sug­gest the following:

• Go through the cur­rent episodes and find some­thing that appeals to you and work with it,
• Set a goal to go through every episode or the ones you like.

I’m cur­rent­ly learn­ing Ger­man with pod­casts and I find that hav­ing a lim­it­ed but grow­ing amount of mate­r­i­al that I can work my way though, makes cre­at­ing a read­ing habit a lot easier.

We hope you enjoy this new attempt to pro­mote the study of Latin. Let us know what you think.