More wired than a Roman Internet café

Latinum Institute's Blog – December 2009 Archive (11)

Locutorium Scholae

The video chatroom on schola has seen a lot of action recently - and seems to be developing quite nicely.

There is currently a regular Comenius reading group - it does not have a schedule - lead by Molendinarius, this group is reading through Schola Ludus. When it meets, an email is sent out to all members of Schola, who, if they are at a computer and have some free time, can log in and participate.

Laura Gibbs will be setting up a regular Vulgate reading group. This will… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 29, 2009 at 7:36am — 6 Comments

The Locutorium Rocks

Three days ago, the usual suspects were chatting away in the viva voce locutorium when someone had the idea to message everyone in Schola (over 1200 members now).

Suddenly, the locutorium came alive, faces we had never seen before appeared, and the conversation went on for some hours.

Yesterday we did the same thing again - this time, the regulars had been given… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 25, 2009 at 7:51pm — No Comments

Spanish Podcast

http://ssl4you.blogspot.com/

This lady has done amazing things, producing perhaps the best intermediate Spanish learning resource on the internet. Amazing.

Added by Latinum Institute on December 23, 2009 at 4:53am — No Comments

Latinum Update

I've not posted an update about Latinum recently: Here is the latest clustermap showing visits to the site since May 2009:

The stats are as follows: 5 May 2009 to 13 Dec 2009: 38,119 visits shown above Statistics updated 22 Dec 2009@04:59GMT: 39,712 visits [?] Total since 4 May 2008: 102,419. United States (US) 18,779 United Kingdom (GB) 3,550 Canada (CA) 1,520 Brazil (BR) 1,307 Australia (AU) 1,240 Germany (DE) 1,202 China (CN) 685 Spain… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 22, 2009 at 10:29am — No Comments

CI

Comprehensible Input is important - but even more important, I think, is input per se - whether comprehensible or not. It is the sheer volume of material that helps your brain get to grips with new structures and word /sound patterns that are not present in the native language morpheme set. One needs to re-hear, or be re-exposed to sets of language data many hundreds of times for the information to become hard wired in the brain.

I suspect it is the INPUT aspect of comprehensible… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 22, 2009 at 8:17am — 5 Comments

Orbis Pictus Audio completed

Today I finished recording all 154 chapters of Comenius' 'Orbis Sensualim Pictus', in Restored Classical pronunciation.

The book is recorded phrase by phrase in Latin-English-Latin, and can be used without reference to the actual text, although Comenius' illustrations are useful, and the text was designed to be used accompanied by the engravings.

You can find parts of the recording on Latinum

The CD, with several… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 21, 2009 at 7:24pm — No Comments

Why listening to Latin is important

Revolutionary approach to learning languages

Published 27 January 2009

The teaching of languages could be revolutionised following ground-breaking research by Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger.

Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns—even if you haven't a clue what it all means.

"However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don't… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 20, 2009 at 10:03am — 1 Comment

Saxum Rosettae - The Rosetta Stone text in Latin

The Rosetta Stone is one of those seminal texts - something we have all read about, and recognise the importance of - but how many have ever read it, or know anything about the contents of it?

This short reading of the Rosetta Stone in Latin, is something of a curiosity, presents Heyne's translation into Latin of the Greek text of the inscription, read in restored Classical Latin on Latinum by Evan Millner.

Heyne, Commentatio… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 14, 2009 at 12:50pm — No Comments

Oral Latin and Comprehensible Input

One reason I have poured so much energy into my Latinum projects, is that I believe that large amounts of exposure to the language are needed - more hours than can be supplied in a classroom setting - to acquire fluency. Also, our students nowadays are more inclined to listen to an audiobook or a soundtrack, than to read.

I would not necessarily recommend that Latinum materials be used in the classroom - they are not specifically designed for this,(although some materials might be… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 9, 2009 at 7:05am — No Comments

Underwood now on the podcast

I have decided to release Underwood's Medical Latin course as a free offering, via podcast: I am just in the final stages of uploading it, it should be completed in an hour or so.

http://latinformedicalstudents.mypodcast.com/index.html

The DVD of the course with all the mp3's and the pdf files can also be obtained from… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 8, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Why Latin teaching has to change.

"Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down in 39AD; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists." Johann Hari,… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 8, 2009 at 5:13am — 1 Comment