"Latin is easy if it's taught right"- A priest determined to keep Latin alive;

[iguanamon]

This came to me today via twitter, CBS News and @EllenJovin
Meet the priest determined to keep the Latin language alive

I did a little further research: Learn Latin with Father Coulter sharing the Father Reginald Foster Latin teaching experience

Learn more about Father Reginald Foster

Father Coulter's Latin Learning Resources Links

Excerpt:

In the basement of a nursing home in Milwaukee, the world's best Latin lessons are given for free. That's where Father Reginald Foster, a priest who lacks patience, gives his lessons. He's managed to convince hundreds of people to dedicate their lives to a language no longer living, reports Brook Silva-Braga. ... Do you see what I'm sitting on? My butt. If you sit on your butt and study Latin as long as I have you'll be a master, too," Foster said of why he's so good at the language.
And if you think it seems too hard to learn, he's not buying it.
"No. Every poor person, derelict, prostitute, anyone else in Rome spoke Latin," he said. ...

[Decidida]

I have very much enjoyed my Latin and Ancient Greek studies in the past. There are some really interesting resources if you know where to look.

[Systematiker]

I actually used some of Fr. Coulter's files attempting to replicate Fr. Foster's classes when I was learning Latin. I'd probably be better at it if I had made it all the way through them

[languist]

I actually agree with him. I think my love for languages was really fuelled by my Latin studies. We had a very eccentric and inspirational teacher who taught us Latin from age 11 onwards, and he was able to ignite a passion for case endings and poetic structures in children in a way which flies in the face of this stereotype of Latin as a "dead", "pointless", "boring" language. We were made to learn hundreds of words by rote, in the Victorian style, and came face to face with our first true experience of complex grammatical deconstruction of language, and yet we all rushed to class and more or less got the grades. A teacher can really make the subject!

[OliverQ]

I would love Latin to make a comeback, it's my favorite language sound wise. But obviously with the Romance languages taking over, there is just no need for it to be revived so aside from classical and religious studies, I don't see it ever gaining a big increase in followers.

[Xenops]

Don't tempt me with learning Latin.

Don't tempt me.

Don't!

Darn it.

I would love Latin to make a comeback, it's my favorite language sound wise. But obviously with the Romance languages taking over, there is just no need for it to be revived so aside from classical and religious studies, I don't see it ever gaining a big increase in followers.

As sad as this sounds, this might be true. Of course, I do recall seeing Winnie the Pooh translated into Latin...This language has a coolness factor to it that the Romance languages (while neat themselves), don't have. In Star Wars terms, Latin is like Darth Vadar, and the Romance languages are...The Rebellion?

[Decidida]

If you want to be tempted by the ultimate cool thing to learn and do, how about completing Euclid's geometry text in the actual ancient greek it was written in. Yes, years ago, someone else and I did play around with some of Euclid's Elements in the Greek, and it was fun.

This website has been up for a long time.
https://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/classics ... .htm#conts

The Greek and Latin number systems are interesting to study and use and compare to the Hindu-Arabic decimal system.

[nooj]

And if you think it seems too hard to learn, he's not buying it.
"No. Every poor person, derelict, prostitute, anyone else in Rome spoke Latin," he said.

I like Reginald Foster, he's a mini legend in the Latin community, but here he's being disingenuous.

Every poor person, derelict and prostitute spoke Latin in Rome because it was their native language. Language acquisition is fundamentally different for native speakers and later learners.

Sure, Rome got a lot of immigrants as well, but there's nothing to say that they, like modern day immigrants, didn't have trouble learning Latin. In fact, we have actual literary and epigraphic evidence that they often didn't perfectly acquire Latin.

But the fundamental point is true, that Latin is not an inherently difficult language.

What might be difficult is finding or creating those contexts in which Latin can (re)become a language of conversation. To learn German, people can watch German shows, listen to German music, go to Germany or Austria or Switzerland. To learn Latin...?

[zenmonkey]

If you want to be tempted by the ultimate cool thing to learn and do, how about completing Euclid's geometry text in the actual ancient greek it was written in. Yes, years ago, someone else and I did play around with some of Euclid's Elements in the Greek, and it was fun.

This website has been up for a long time.
https://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/classics ... .htm#conts

The Greek and Latin number systems are interesting to study and use and compare to the Hindu-Arabic decimal system.

What have you done?! Nooooo.

(I can only fend off doing things like this because I have a) no time b) a 1689 book in Portuguese and Hebrew on "Grammatica Chaldaica" to get through first.... )

[Iversen]

My Latin is an off and on affair. Sometimes I decide that it is time to revive it and then I also mostly succeed. The problem is that I find very little contemporary stuff to read (except a few Harry Potter translations and the internet 'journal' Ephemerides, whose update frequency seems to be going steadily downwards). I can find enough Roman texts and also medieval stuff, but much of that is marred by inteeeeeeerminably long sentences and boring content, and there is one problem more: one of the most difficult things in Latin is to adopt the mindsets that have been built into the language. Often you take a formulation in a modern Romance or Germanic language ... and when you look it up it is not there in your L1->Latin dictionary because it was constructed as an inversion of a Latin-L1 dictionary and only contains the patterns which existed at the time of Ovidius Naso or Thomas Aquinas. We need dictionaries built on the modern languages directly, and then the scholars should spend their time on determining what the old folks would have said instead - which may have been something totally different. How often haven't you seen the remark that the Romans wouldn't have expresssed some thing or that they would have used a construction with a substantive instead of a verb (or the opposite)?

If we just could get those two problems solved then Latin wouldn't be harder to learn than any modern language. Eh, and one more thing: your inital model shouldn't be the language of Cicero. Who would learn German with Urtextausgaben von Kant und Hegel als ihre Studiematerialien?