Latin language roundup: Latin immersion, Winne ille Pu (Winnie the Pooh), the simple roots of Latin
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Here are three Latin-related links that I've been meaning to write about for a week or so now.
The first one is this video, an extremely long one for YouTube (30 minutes) showing in detail how the first Latin immersion program in the United States works. Whenever you embark on an immersion program that makes students sign a contract to use that language and that language only you know it's a good one.
The next one is from the Globe and Mail, kind of a follow-up to a former article that showed a continued increase in Canada of students learning Latin. This one goes over some of the recent modern works translated into Latin such as Winnie the Pooh.
The third one is here, and shows some of the simple and agricultural roots for Latin words in contrast to the language's usual academic feel. Marcus = somebody born in March, Manius = somebody born in the morning, Quintus, Sextus and Decimus are simply from numbers, etc. Even the Mediterranean was just called mare nostrum (our sea).
1 comments:
Tunberg's course at Kentucky is amazing - but you have to go to Kentucky to access it.
There are other ways to achieve a degree of Latin immersion ; the net now has a busy, fully functioning normal social network that operates entirely in Latin - f Schola on the NING network http://schola.ning.com is a totally Latin language network, with over 1200 members……There is also a Latin revitalisation movement, that aims to teach the language as a living idiom, as it was taught throughout Europe until the mid 1700’s - because – now we have web 2.0, there are a huge number of resources online for the self taught student – for example, instead of going to the odd lecture a couple of times a week, Latinum had serialised George Adler’s latin text in audio, for free, and offers over 1000 audio lessons in latin, including huge amounts of ‘comprehensible input’. The goal is to get students up to a high level of fluency, fast – and the system works, witness its thousands of users.
Adler wrote a revolutionary textbook in the mid 1800’s, for teaching Latin through the medium of conversation. The textbook is available online for free as well. Latinum teaches Latin using immersion.
http://latinum.mypodcast.com
You don’t need a University, or a professor to learn Latin, you just need an ipod and headphones.
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