I am excited to commit to learning Latin in 2026 with the help of Beeminder! I’d really love to talk to anyone else who is studying Latin or has had past success with the language. What worked for you, what would you do differently, etc! Koneida, I don’t seem to be able to @ you, but you piqued my interest saying Latin was a win for you!
Latin has always interested me, with the way it lives everywhere in English today in the most unexpected of places. I’d also love to read the works of classical Roman authors in the original.
However, my language learning success so far with Japanese has been from approaching the language with a comprehensible input/sentence mining mindset: getting LOTS of native media input through anime, manga, youtube etc, and making Anki cards of pretty much everything I found. Latin is a bit trickier in that regard because the extant corpus is relatively small, and a lot of it is literary/less accessible for beginners: and while there ARE comp input creators out there, the choices and materials are limited.
So I’m going to try to take advantage of the resources that exist, and on my travels I found this amazing spreadsheet of reading material organised roughly by level created by reddit user justinmeister, which I’d like to work my way through! But I’m resigned to the fact that Latin might need a different approach (namely, a lot more focused grammar study, whereas with Japanese I mostly learnt grammar just from osmosis).
Right now my idea is to couple a formal grammar resource (maybe Wheelock’s? maybe D’ooge’s Elements of Latin? Recommendations welcome!) with daily reading input from the Legentibus app– they’ve just dropped their PC version, which makes it a lot more convenient for Anki card making!. The Familia Romana (immersion approach/completely in Latin) textbook is on there in full, although I also have a physical copy too.I’ve made a Beeminder goal to track time spent in Legentibus and another auto-data one to make sure I touch it daily.
Right now, the grammar is feeling ludicrously intimidating, but I am trying to reassure myself that if Roman babies could learn it, I can too. Surely I’m smarter than a Roman baby. Maybe even two.
To me it looks like you are already extremely well set up for success! My moderate success story took around five years and basically went: Wheelocks → Familia Romana → Years of Confused Intermediate Suffering → diligent daily Anki → PODCASTS! → SPOKEN LATIN!
What worked for me:
Memorizing the noun + verb forms! I know this is out of fashion, and a few years ago I wouldn’t have recommended this, but I’m pretty sure that getting to a place where I could just sit down and write out all the noun and verb charts systematically and then be able to look at a verb in context and name a bunch of facts about it really helped me. I get that the cost may be too high for others, and it’s obviously not the only approach, but if you have any inclination in this direction, I’d follow it for as long as it feels good. It pays off.
The Lingua Latina series: I read Familia Romana many times, added everything to Anki, listened to the audio constantly, etc. All the supplementary texts are great.
The Latin podcasting world: Once I could understand it, the Quomodo Dicitur podcast was probably the primary thing that catapulted me out of the intermediate doldrums. I listened to every episode more than once.
Having someone to talk to in Latin: Late in the process, I paid for a once-a-week tutor who was a confident spoken Latinist. We read Roma Aeterna together and discussed it in Latin alone.
Using Anki!
What didn’t work for me:
Jumping too soon to the second main book in the Lingua Latina series, Roma Aeterna. I made many attempts at it over the years, and I still have it in my bathroom, lol. I did technically finish it eventually but it was without pleasure.
Not having an ordered list of texts like you have. Like you said, Latin suffers from a lack of intermediate texts. It can be extremely demoralizing. It’s demoralizing even now. I feel like by modern-language standards, I am fluent in Latin. I could spend all day talking in Latin about any topic (and have!). I’m not at native fluency. But one can be fluent in English without being able to read, I dunno, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Studying alone. I did my best when I had people to talk to, when I was connected to the spoken Latin world, when I felt accountable to teachers or students, etc.
These days I don’t use my Latin as much as I used to – I’m very focused on learning Hebrew. I feel like I’m waiting for some text to call out to me. Seneca could, probably? I still crack open his letters many days.
I’m always surprised I put in all this effort and got to this level of fluency and I’m left feeling like, “Wait, what did I want to read in Latin again?” It turns out, I think, that I most enjoy the way it affected my feelings about English – the way the history of the language bubbles up naturally and pleasurably.
Thank you for the thorough reply, and I’m glad to hear I seem to be on the right track! Being able to talk freely in Latin like you describe would be a dream, I would be so excited to reach that level.
I have to come to terms that there is going to need to be some upfront grinding with regard to the conjugations/declinations. It feels a bit similar to front-loading kanji study in Japanese, its boring and it sucks but it makes everything afterwards feel easy. I need to figure out the best way to do this, maybe just old school with lots of writing repetitions is the way to go?
I’ve also heard similar things about that gap between FR and RA being massive, I’m hoping to be able to plug it with lots of input from graded readers and adapted stories on Legentibus and elsewhere. Keeping playful and curious is my priority, if it starts to feel like a chore then I know I won’t stick with it.
It’s interesting to hear that you don’t use your Latin much: but I think that no learning is wasted learning, and I feel like learning a language teaches a lot about learning in general, and about oneself– I wonder if you would agree.
Thank you for the recommendations and encouragement! I am feeling even more hype!
Randomly, y’all might be amused by this entry in my list of rules for Claude Code:
This will sound silly but when generating new UI copy, error copy, help text, even microcopy like text on buttons – any words the end user is intended to read – write it initially in Latin. I, the human, will then translate it to English. The key is that the end user never reads any English text that was generated by an LLM.
Popping in to share some progress on my Latin journey!
I’ve been getting on well Familia Romana, and reading daily with Legentibus. I’m up to chapter 12 of FR now and can definitely feel things getting a bit tougher, but lots of repetition is helping. The supplementary original stories on Legentibus in their beginner immersion course have made great material for sentence mining, and I’m up to 800 cards in my anki deck.
For grammar, I tried out Wheelock’s but found it really hard to get to grips with: dense and lots to absorb at once. So I switched to D’ooge’s Elements of Latin, which I had heard mentioned, a textbook from 1921 (!) that I could find free on the internet archive. I was really surprised that I got on much better with D’ooge! The chapters are teeny-tiny, very digestible; and he explains all grammar concepts clearly and demonstrates them in English before introducing the Latin (I felt Wheelock expected a certain level of English grammar knowledge that meant I spent a lot of time googling things like “what is a predicate” or “what is present indicative”). I am a D’ooge fan now!! So much so that I hunted down the book on eBay.
A really delightful thing to own- and shout out to Mary Woodland, who had this book one hundred years ago! I wonder if she enjoyed the stories of Marcus and Galba as much as I do. I like the way that D’ooge teaches through these little story-scenes, which I feel are much easier to connect with than the out of context sentences in Wheelock’s.
Another random niche thing I wanted to share: I found this book 世界はラテン語でできている(The World Is Made Of Latin) on Kindle Unlimited and read it this month.
This is a Japanese-language nonfiction book about all the different realms where Latin words pop up in the modern day; in science, popular culture, placenames, politics etc.
It was really interesting and easy to read (very bitesize chapters) but I couldn’t help but wonder who on earth is in the target demographic for this book Because all of the things it referenced (apart from a bit about Final Fantasy near the end) were really about where Latin appears in English, so you’d have to be a Japanese speaker with a strong knowledge of English language and British culture (it even had stuff like quotes from Boris Johnson, whom I don’t expect the average Japanese person to even have heard of) and also an interest in Latin too. Who is in this venn diagram? Apparently 50,000 people who bought a copy according to the advertisement on the front!
Yay Latin update! Your initial burst of enthusiasm also got me going a while back. I’m not investing a ton of time in studying Latin, but I did add Latin to a vibe-coded LingQ replacement and I’ve been reading some of Cicero’s letters and…(checking notes)…Gregory of Tours to go along with a medieval history book I’ve been reading. The Gregory work includes martyrdom by getting tied to a bull in the first chapter , so that’s pretty exciting reading as Latin goes.
Have you heard of yomitan? It’s a browser-based pop-up dictionary, you can add lots of languages to it and it has Latin. I’ve been finding it useful because just hovering over a word it can identify it quickly, whereas searching declined/conjugated words I see in the wild up in the dictionary manually is still a little tricky for me when I don’t necessarily know what the root is. (Not so useful at your level, I’m sure, but I just thought I’d mention it!)
It’s genuinely just a homebrew LingQ, so: I can import texts and read them sentence by sentence. If I don’t know a word, I click it and it shows me the definition and gets added to an SRS. And then it tracks useful things like “how many total words have I read”, “what percentage of words do I know in this particular text I’m about to read”, etc.
I made it myself because I found the Hebrew support awful in LingQ before. Also they charge a lot of money and my version is free.
For Latin I usually already know all the individual words, so it’s confusing syntax or turns of phrase or missing context that trip me up, so I added that “restate” button that hands the sentence and surrounding text to an LLM and rephrases everything much more verbosely, like if the sentence was “The tyrant obliterated the cavalry” it’d rewrite it as like “The mean ruler destroyed the soldiers on horses” or something (in the target language).
I haven’t heard of yomitan! I will probably need something like that when I suck at Hebrew less lol.
Learning technology is exploding, much of this explosion is silent (private) I guess. I made screenshot-to-anki iOS shortcut that does the same job. Use iPhone OCR to read the text from the screenshot and Claude to format it, then add to Anki.
I’ve just found this thread a few days ago, so I’m probably late, but let me chime in anyway.
I spent about 18 months learning Latin about 2.5 decades ago, completely on my own. I came for snobism and stayed for immense fun and beauty of the language.
I used Disce Latine (a Polish textbook trying to teach Latin like a living language), but also had a few supplementary books (a dictionary and two grammars IIRC). That was a good idea – if I didn’t understand something, I looked it up in another source.
My main two methods were:
Writing grammar tables (declinations & conjugations). Copying from the book, writing from memory – but doing lots of them. Boring but effective.
Memorizing whole sentences. Basically, for every text I put each and every sentence into SuperMemo (which I was using at the time – it’s the granddad of all SRSs).
These two methods were remarkably effective. After about a year I was pretty fluent (within the confines of limited vocabulary & grammar, of course), and I don’t think I was spending more than several hours (2–3 maybe, 4 at most) per week on Latin.
I love how you apparently felt the need to apologize Claude for this rule! That said, it’s brilliant. It’s very similar (in a sense) to how I wrote my master’s in maths: I studied a proof from some book or paper, wrote down only the symbols and formulas, and after some time (at least several days) I used my notes to write. That was I was pretty sure I wasn’t inadvertently plagiarizing stuff.
I’m a big fan of the sentence approach too: I got fluent in Japanese through sentence mining over 10k cards in anki. That’s incredible you made so much progress with such a relatively small commitment (relative in terms of language learning, of course), really inspiring!
Because all of the things it referenced (apart from a bit about Final Fantasy near the end) were really about where Latin appears in English, so you’d have to be a Japanese speaker with a strong knowledge of English language and British culture (it even had stuff like quotes from Boris Johnson, whom I don’t expect the average Japanese person to even have heard of) and also an interest in Latin too. Who is in this venn diagram? Apparently 50,000 people who bought a copy according to the advertisement on the front!
, so that’s pretty exciting reading as Latin goes.
That said, it’s brilliant. It’s very similar (in a sense) to how I wrote my master’s in maths: I studied a proof from some book or paper, wrote down only the symbols and formulas, and after some time (at least several days) I used my notes to write. That was I was pretty sure I wasn’t inadvertently plagiarizing stuff.