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All Blog Posts (639)

Happy Anniversary Schola

Schola is two years old this…

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Added by Latinum Institute on February 21, 2010 at 9:39am — No Comments

Regarding the issue of fluency - my general experience has been that those who are self taught seem to a have more sensible goals, and a more sensible methodology for studying Latin, than students taught in most school programmes. Through not knowing any better, they are aiming for in Latin what they would expect to aim for in French, German etc - an ability to command the language, its vocabulary,and its idioms.

It is a very educational experience to click through the profiles of… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on January 31, 2010 at 9:06am — 3 Comments

Greek Podcast

Some months ago, we had a discussion about a Greek podcast - someone from Eclassics started producing the course from Kendrick, and I was hopeful, when suddenly, after a few lessons were posted online, the whole thing vanished into thin air, and the person producing it disappeared off the edge of the earth. Anyway, Latinum is now pretty well established, and I want to improve my Greek - so I am starting work on a new Greek podcast - it will use Kendrick's Greek Ollendorff, and some other stuff… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on January 28, 2010 at 7:00pm — 3 Comments

A little rant I wrote earlier

Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of European history, would know that Latin was taught orally, and used actively as a spoken second language, uninterruptedly from Roman times, until well into the late 1700’s. Universities across Europe conducted all their business in Latin as well. In some European countries, this tradition continued into the mid 1800’s. Waquet’s “Empire of the Sign” is instructive reading. Certain schools forbad speaking anything but Latin on the school premises. It… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on January 28, 2010 at 6:28am — No Comments

ΔIAΛOΓOI ATTIKOI

Latinum also has a new social network site ( It has been in the planning for a long time) where only ATTIC GREEK (Classical Greek), Classical Hebrew, and Latin many be used. This social network (which shares its chatroom with Schola) is called ΔIAΛOΓOI ATTIKOI

Added by Latinum Institute on January 26, 2010 at 5:00am — No Comments

Latinum Interface Page

New home page for Latinum, setting out the project more simply and clearly.

Added by Latinum Institute on January 23, 2010 at 10:34am — No Comments

Sign "pro Auriga"!

I write this post to ask you to sign a request in favor of the magazine Auriga. The Generalitat government had subsidized the subscriptions of this magazine so that it arrived to all the Catalan Lycees. But now they say that they don't want to pay the magazine to any school... And this magazine is going to die in a brief course of time. We found very little solidarity. I speak about this in my personal blog… Continue

Added by Ramon Torné Teixidó on January 19, 2010 at 3:30pm — No Comments

More thoughts on the locutorium

The locutorium is an open space - anyone can enter, if they are a member of Schola, and can use it as they wish. You are warmly invited to come along in, and make of it what you will. It is an open space, and has no 'owners'

The only rule is 'Latine tantum' - Latin only. It is the only universally intelligible language the users of the chatroom have.

Technology

There is a synergy of new technologies that has made this possible - three or four years ago, what we… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on January 3, 2010 at 7:18am — 3 Comments

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

Deadlines for the National Mythology Exam and the Exploratory Latin Exam

Please consider administering the National Mythology Exam or the Exploratory Latin Exam this year! Or talk to an English or History teacher about the how they can use the exam to supplement their curriculum and bring national recognition to their students!

The National Mythology Exam sponsored by the ETC (Excellence Through Classics, a standing committee of the American Classical League) is designed for students in grades 3 through 9. The format of the exam is multiple choice… Continue

Added by Zee Ann Poerio on December 27, 2009 at 10:07am — No 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

Natale 2009

Occorre sempre recuperare il senso di ciò che facciamo e che diciamo, ricercandolo nel passato remoto da cui proveniamo. Questo è vero particolarmente per Natale.

“Natale” vuol dire “nascita”, ed è la festa in ricordo della venuta al mondo di Gesù, il Figlio di Dio, 2009 anni fa. Ma da quando esiste questa datazione? Da meno di quanto ci si potrebbe aspettare. Occorre risalire a circa 1500 anni fa, quando viveva Dionigi, un monaco originario della Romania meridionale, tanto pio e tanto… Continue

Added by Andrea Del Ponte on December 25, 2009 at 2:30pm — 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

$125,000 Salary for Master Middle School Teachers

Earn a $125,000 salary and join a team of master teachers at The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School, recently featured on the front page of the New York Times: (http://www.tepcharter.org/nytimes.php).

TEP is a new 480-student 5th through 8th grade middle school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Applications are currently being accepted for teaching positions in Math, Science, English, Social Studies, Music,… Continue

Added by tepcharter on December 22, 2009 at 3:43pm — 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

Perseus and the Kindle?

I'm trying to figure out how to import/convert the available Perseus Project .xml text files so as to be readable on an Amazon Kindle... There doesn't seem to be much posted about this topic (unless I've overlooked something obvious)--any thoughts out there?

Added by R. Allen Snider on December 20, 2009 at 4:15pm — 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