Languages Were Made to Be Spoken

The student of French or Spanish comes home on the first day having learned to say a few simple phrases. From the first moments in the classroom, they are beginning to speak in another language, taking the step towards thinking with a foreign mind. The Latin student could be excused for coming home on the first day with the firm conviction that not only will they never speak this language, but that it is in fact fundamentally unspeakable (pun intended).

And yet, this language was spoken fluently across Europe for centuries, and was capable of handling not just complex philosophical, theological, and scientific ideas, but also was able to be used to train a dog, to get the children to do the chores, and to buy the groceries. Ancient languages may be more complicated than modern languages, but they are still first of languages.

This 12 week course will train your child to speak in Latin. They will develop a basic ability to speak about everyday matters in Latin, and will develop greatly in their aural comprehension of Latin as I speak it to them each class session. Through games, scripted dialogues, English to Latin translation, and active listening, they will encounter the language as a living form of communication. The result is both empowering and transformative: it makes reading Latin easier, and it makes Latin about so much more than 2000 year old texts.

To learn more about the value of spoken Latin to your child's study, see my video on natural language learning:

  • The Speak Like a Roman course was incredibly fun and informative. It was super exciting to apply the concepts that I had learned in other Latin courses to speaking in Latin. Dr. Junius made speaking in Latin not terrifying by helping us have discussions amongst ourselves. My favorite part was listening to him speak in Latin and trying to figure out what he was saying. He would describe and give hints about a Latin word in order to get us to understand it without having to hear an English definition. It was like sneaking a game of charades into a school day, except it was even better because it was in Latin.