Latin is the language of Christendom for over 1,500 years–it is valuable for someone who wants to understand the history of Christianity, to understand the Latin Vulgate and Old Latin Bible translations, the language known by Biblical writers from Mark, early writers in Christendom, influential medieval theologians from Anslem to Aquinas, reformers from Luther to Calvin, Puritans like John Owen, and Baptist writers like John Gill.  Latin also helps one to understand untranslated Latin excerpts in commentaries like Keil & Delitzch, Latin excerpts in systematic theologies, and so on.

Interestingly, only approximately 0.01% of all extant Latin, though admittedly with substantial influence, is composed of classical Roman authors  Approximately 80% of extant Latin writings composed by those who professed to be Christians, while the other 20% is scientific and various other treatises by non-Christian writers (Derek Cooper, Basics of Latin: A Grammar with Readings and Exercises from the Christian Tradition [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020], xvii).

So in light of the value of Latin, I have prayerfully decided to to learn the language at my own pace.  So how is it going?  I’m glad you asked.  How am I going about it?

I first started with Latin 101: Learning a Classical Language by Hans-Friedrich Mueller, a course offered by “The Great Courses” organization.  Having profited by numbers of classes offered by The Great Courses, I would use their class to learn classical Latin and then transition to the Latin of Christendom.  The “Great Courses” class offers a textbook with exercises and also video lectures, and I wanted to have lectures with a real, knowledgable teacher.  I also did not want to pay very much money, and I knew that The Great Courses regularly offers sales where their classes are listed at 70-85% off (you should never pay the full price, or even half price, for a Great Courses course; they list prices are fake to make you feel like you are getting an incredible deal at 70% off.  The marketing technique is effective–but the real, 70% off price for their classes is actually reasonable for courses that are often of high quality.)

I got through the majority of the Great Courses class, completing all the exercises, with their textbook and a Latin dictionary (Simpson, D. P., Cassell’s Latin Dictionary: Latin-English & English-Latin, 5th ed. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing, 1968)  However, as I kept plugging away, I started to get really bogged down in the exercises.  I was looking up practically every word in the dictionary and taking an inordinately long amount of time to complete the exercises.  I believe that the Great Courses class will probably work for some, but for me there just were not enough exercises to attain sufficient mastery of the material before going on to the next chapter.  So after slogging through a majority of the book, with progress getting slower and slower, I started looking for alternatives.

I discovered the Familia Romana / Lingua Latina: Per Se Illustrata series, and have to this point been very impressed.  I purchased a number of books so that I could have everything I needed to teach myself using that series, as well as a few other works that help as described below:

5.) Ørberg, Hans H., Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Teacher’s Materials. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2005. Amazon Smile link

I also got a few others; click here for my page on learning Christian and classical Latin for more information.