Latin class has been pretty fun so far.  The class isn’t very big, but that’s probably not a bad thing.  We’ve only covered punctuation and the first lesson on the first declension, so it’s not too late for more people to get in on it if they want to.

I’m surprised by how much I enjoy teaching.  It’s even got me thinking I might want to expand into teaching other skills, like programming or webmaster work.  I always thought I’d hate teaching because I hate getting up and talking in front of people.  I’m sure I would hate the lecture-hall kind of teaching, but this isn’t like that.  It’s more like a lab setting or a conversation, with a lot of feedback, so it doesn’t feel like giving a speech at all.  I’m still a little nervous about it, but that’s because these people are trusting me to know what the heck I’m doing, and I don’t want to let them down.  And I don’t have the subject down cold 100% myself, so that’s a bit nervous-making too. Read more »

Well, my first Latin class went well, what there was of it.  We had to cut the first class short at about a half hour, so we just got through some basic pronunciation stuff.  That seems to be what people are the most concerned about, which surprised me a little, because I don’t remember spending much time on that when I learned it.  I guess that makes sense: unlike the classroom, when you recite or sing in Church, you want to speak the words correctly right from the start even if you don’t know what they all mean yet.

So we’ll be continuing on pronunciation next week, and practicing by going through the prayers at the foot of the altar (the beginning of Mass) line by line, covering any tricky words.  I think the worst one is cithara, which is pronounced CHEE-tah-rah.  The word means harp, but to me it sounds like the name of the half-girl, half-cat heroine of an 80s Saturday morning cartoon.

Class is also moving to Tuesdays at 6:30pm.  As soon as I picked Monday, I found out some people couldn’t make it on Monday, which is about what I figured would happen.  So it’ll be Tuesday until further notice.  We’ll be reviewing last week’s material again, so if anyone was interested but thought they’d missed out, you’ve got one more chance to get in at the beginning!

Along with my blogging, I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from my Latin lessons lately, but that’ll change after Christmas.  There’s just been too much going on between work and holidays, but I should be able to spend more time on these side projects soon. Read more »

I’ve got a new Latin lesson up, starting on the subjunctive mood.  The subjunctive comes very early (lesson 15) in the Missal Latin book that we’re going through at church, compared to the Classical Latin books I’ve got (lesson 28 and 50), so I thought I’d better get to it myself.  We almost never use the subjunctive in English, but Latin uses it so much that it’s hard to find a long passage of text for exercises that doesn’t.

I remember the subjunctive being a tough one for our class in school, because the subjunctive is one area where there’s no simple translation in English.  Latin is very particular about separating things that have happened or will happen from things that might happen.  So you often can’t just translate the words literally anymore, but have to figure out what they meant and then find the best way to say that in English.  When you can translate the meaning of a sentence instead of the individual words, you’ve reached a different level.

This lesson has been up for a while, but I wanted to get things moved before I posted any new ones.  It’s on infinitives, so now we can translate, “to be or not to be.”

I’ve finally finished another Latin Lesson, this one #29, covering the passive voice of the perfect system and the ablative of personal agent.  I’ll explain the hiatus in another post.  The next one will be on infinitives, which are actually kind of fun—or easier than the passive, anyway.

I’ve finally gotten the next Latin lesson up.  This one’s #28, on the passive voice.  It was a pain coming up with 20 good sentences in the passive for exercises, so it took a while.  The next lesson will finish off the passive and add a couple things that go with it.

Every time I write that I think of the ’70s band, The Fifth Dimension.  Anyway, the latest Latin lesson is up, on the fifth declension and the formation of adverbs from third declension adjectives.  That means we’re pretty much done with nouns and adjectives, except for expanding our vocabulary.  So I think the next lesson will go back to verbs and dive into the passive voice.  Every time I try to find liturgical passages to use in the lessons, they either use the passive voice or subjunctive mood, which I haven’t covered yet.  Those are all over the place in prayers, and much more common than they are in English.

New Latin Lesson is up, on the fourth conjugation.  No extras in this one; that’s enough to absorb.  Next will be the fifth declension, and then we’ll have covered all those, so we can use any nouns and verbs in the language except a few irregular ones.

I’ve only covered the active and imperative voices and the indicative moods, though.  That leaves the passive voice and the subjunctive mood, both of which have their own sets of endings, so I’ve really only covered about a third of the possible combinations.  The passive and subjunctive won’t take as many lessons, though, now that we’ve got the active indicative down.

Incidentally, when I was waiting at a bus stop in Chicago, I noticed a plaque on the bus stop that said Urbs In Horto.  That means “city in a garden,” but the H in Horto was kind of worn, so at first I thought it was “Morto.”  “Morto” doesn’t make sense, because mors is third declension so it would be in Morte, so I figured it out.  But just for a second, I wondered why they had a plaque up that said, “City in Death.”

My latest Latin lesson is up, #25.  If I do 100 of them like I originally planned, I’m 1/4 of the way through!  This one covers the fourth declension, the irregular noun domus, and the accusatives of extent of space and duration of time.  The next one will cover the fourth conjugation, and the one after that will be the fifth declension.  At that point, we’ll have covered all the declensions and conjugations, so I’ll be able to use any words except a few irregular ones.  That’ll make it a lot easier to find stuff to translate for exercises.

I’m pretty pleased with the traffic the lessons are getting so far: about 24 page views a day on average.  That’s almost all from people looking for answers to specific questions on search engines.  I need to start posting to some Latin forums to promote it a little to people actually looking for lessons.