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Latinum Institute's Blog – December 2008 Archive (5)

Latinum Update - New Years Day 2009

2009 marks an important milestone in Latinum's short 2 years online - today the 3 millionth audio file download was passed. I remember when I started the podcast, and twenty downloads a day was a big deal. Now, from 6,000 to 15, 000 audio file downloads a day is the norm. I am still uploading episodes from the Adler textbook. This takes time, and my uploading lags behind the content already recorded, but the task is nearing completion, and soon, after 2 years of almost daily effort, the entire… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 31, 2008 at 10:29pm — 5 Comments

Childrens' Books in Latin

Following on a post by Laura Gibbs posted on Latinteach, about reading material in Latin, and comprehensible input, I have this to add:

One thing we need, to promote and advance Latin, are a large number of very basic childrens books, in Latin. Not enough of these exist. Books as basic as those produced for 2 and 3 year olds, mostly pictures, with only a few words. We need tens, hundreds, of books like these. I believe there would be a market for them, with parents who want to give… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 24, 2008 at 8:46am — 7 Comments

Counter-intuitive memory study

The results of this study are worth knowing about, especially to help kids learn vocab etc.

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Even though forgetting is such a common occurrence, scientists have not reached a consensus as to how it happens. One theory is that information simply decays from our memory—we forget things because too much time has passed. Another idea states is that forgetfulness occurs when we confuse an item with other items that we have previously… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 15, 2008 at 3:37pm — No Comments

Building a Virtual Latin Community Online

Building a Virtual Latin Community Online

An overview.

In early 2007, I started to investigate online Latin provision. It rapidly became apparent that the Classics community had been somewhat slow in taking full advantage of the newer aspects of the web. Some sites were excellent, such as the Cambridge Latin project, but this material could only be accessed by paying for it. There was a dearth of quality material available for free.

It was immediately evident that… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 13, 2008 at 7:29am — 5 Comments

Research with implications for Language Teaching

The piece of research below has implications for language teaching. I would suggest that language learning falls into the category of an area where abstract thought about the concepts is very important - and it would be interesting to do a controlled trial of students new to Latin, one given simple texts, the other thrown in at the deep end with a hard text, and subsequently given the simple texts and rules - but only after being exposed to higher level Latin texts or conversation… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on December 2, 2008 at 5:15am — 2 Comments