Learning to read Latin - where to start

Reading Latin is not as hard is sometimes believed, but then it is believed to be very hard indeed.

On the plus side, Latin is written in the Roman alphabet, you not not need to either speak it or understand speech, instead you can focus your effort on learning to read. French, Spanish, Italian etc. originate from Latin and English contains many words which originate from the Latin language. So if you are an English speaker and already know a romance language then you have a head start.

Reading Latin

In order to read Latin, you have to learn vocabulary but also you have to understand the grammar - more so than if you are learning a language like French or Spanish.

The word order of a Latin sentence is different (and more flexible) than English word order, and so to understand a sentence you need to parse it.

Parse it?

This requires an understanding of the grammatical constructions allowing you to put the Latin sentence it into a word order that makes sense to an English speaker, before translating it.

English word order in a simple sentence is Subject, Verb, Object but as can be seen in this example this is not so in Latin. "Brutus Portiam amat" has the meaning "Brutus loves Portia" but the word order is Subject, Object, Verb. "Brutus Portia loves".

Another example, "many hands make light work" in Latin is "multae manus onus levius faciunt " but the Latin word order is :- "many hands work light make".

Naturally, the difficulty of any given Latin text depends on the vocabulary and the grammar, but this can vary widely, as it does in modern languages. Latin grammar is reasonably consistent throughout the years but some styles are simpler than others and are written with less complex constructions.

An example of Latin written in a simple style is the Vulgate, Saint Jerome’s translation of the bible, but if you wish to read classical Latin, you will need to understand the full range of Latin grammatical constructions.

Reading latin - where to start

Surf the net for short courses and try some.

To much like hard work and too tedious?

What do I suggest? (This is the great thing about the net - everyone has an opinion).

Learn a few key concepts (bonus, bona, bonum, amo, amas, amat) and start with short but complete Latin sentences and phrases. There are many examples of mottoes, phrases and maxims in Latin and these (if you choose carefully) tend to use simple grammar but as they are short there are few words to look up - before you start to parse and translate. It is also much easier to remember vocabulary in a sentence then in lists.

This isn't for everyone and a more formal approach may suit you better, but I'm talking about playing with language and learning Latin as a hobby and fun past-time. You don't have to learn everything all at once.

We are not using it as a Lingua Franca anymore are we? (Apart from Nuntii Latini, and a few others ...).