Learn Latin With Video and Audio: 70 Hours of Spoken Latin

Through the years, in my dif­fer­ent lan­guage learn­ing endeav­ors, I’ve always mar­veled at how much I have been able to improve my over­all abil­i­ty in a lan­guage (espe­cial­ly French) through sim­ply lis­ten­ing to as much (lev­el appro­pri­ate) con­tent as pos­si­ble in the tar­get lan­guage, every day.

The last few years I’ve been on the look out for any and all videos of skilled Latin speak­ers to lis­ten to. Not too long ago the num­ber of videos avail­able was not that extensive.

Luck­i­ly things are chang­ing: the amount of record­ings of speech­es and lec­tures held in Latin is increas­ing rapid­ly, mak­ing expos­ing our­selves to immense amounts Latin eas­i­er than ever.

Adding More Latin Audio 

I’ve col­lect­ed videos from all over YouTube into a playlist to watch/listen to and I thought I would share it. It con­tains videos of Lui­gi Miraglia, Nan­cy Llewellyn, Ter­ence Tun­berg, Vil­fried Stroh and many more. It is by no means com­plete, but I have tried to include what I have found thus far.

Thanks to the increas­ing num­ber of talks, con­fer­ences, and sum­mer cours­es, I have been able to grow the num­ber of hours in the playlist to over 70 hours of spo­ken Latin.

For addi­tion­al lis­ten­ing see our Latin audio archive

Make Listening to Latin a Habit

Lis­ten­ing to a lan­guage you’re learn­ing is one of the best ways to improve: it’s like phys­i­cal exer­cise, the ben­e­fits are numer­ous, e.g. it forces you to under­stand the mor­phol­o­gy, syn­tax, and vocab­u­lary in real time; it trains you to antic­i­pate the lan­guage. In all my lan­guage learn­ing endeav­ors, I’ve always found that I make the great­est (and eas­i­est) progress by lis­ten­ing to as much (lev­el appro­pri­ate) con­tent as pos­si­ble in the tar­get lan­guage, every day. 

Sug­gest­ed read­ing: How to Learn Latin: Moti­va­tion, Goals, and habits

I sug­gest mak­ing it into a habit to watch or lis­ten to one or two of these videos of peo­ple speak­ing Latin, every day. As I’ve writ­ten about here, a lit­tle time spent lis­ten­ing or read­ing Latin every day leads to mas­sive results in a year. 

Playlist Content 

The playlist con­sists of videos of talks and lec­tures giv­en by some of the best Latin speak­ers in the world, among oth­er peo­ple, it con­tains videos of Lui­gi Miraglia, Nan­cy Llewellyn, Ter­ence Tun­berg, Vil­fried Stroh and many more.

Many talks have been record­ed with cell phones result­ing in, at times, quite bad audio. But the Latin is still audible. 

Playback Speed

Some of the speak­ers’ Latin may be a bit too fast if you aren’t used to hear­ing a lot of Latin. In that case, I rec­om­mend using the dif­fer­ent play­back speeds that YouTube offers. To change play­back speed select (in the YouTube player):

• set­tings (the cog wheel) > speed

You can click the thumb­nail below to access the spo­ken Latin playlist!

Frui­mi­ni!