Latin · Curriculum
The Latin curriculum, start to finish.
12 chapters, 237 lessons. A new band of the 1,000 most common words every hundred ranks, the grammar that turns those words into sentences woven in, and a graded reader closing each chapter that you can read using only what you have learned so far.
- 12
- Chapters
- 237
- Lessons
- 31
- Grammar primers
- 10
- Story milestones
A frequency-first Latin course: the 100 words that carry most of a classical page, the case system that holds them together, and drills that make declension automatic rather than a table you look up.
Is Latin hard, and how long does it take? Read first.
Is Latin hard to learn?
Latin is harder than Spanish and easier than its reputation. There are no articles, no progressive tenses and a small sound system, so pronunciation and spelling are not the problem. The difficulty sits in one place: nouns change their endings to show their job in the sentence, so word order carries far less meaning than it does in English. Get the cases and the rest follows.
How long does it take to learn Latin?
Reading simple adapted Latin is a matter of months. Reading Caesar with a dictionary is a realistic first-year goal for a committed learner, which is roughly what a school syllabus assumes. Reading Tacitus for pleasure takes years, and that is true of any highly literary author in any language.
Which Latin pronunciation should I learn?
There are two, and the choice is yours rather than a matter of right and wrong. Classical or restored pronunciation is what Cicero would have recognised: v as w, c always hard, ae as the vowel in eye. Ecclesiastical is the Latin of the church and of most choral music, pronounced essentially as Italian. This course teaches classical, because that is what most academic courses assume, and says so wherever it matters.
Why 100 words gets you further than it sounds
Latin frequency is steep. A hundred headwords - et, in, ad, de, sum, qui, non, ut, cum - account for a very large share of the running text on a classical page, because the commonest items are the connectives and pronouns holding every sentence together. That will not let you read the Aeneid, but it means most of what your eye lands on is already familiar, and the unfamiliar words are the ones worth looking up.
The chapters
What you can do when you finish
- Read the rank-1,000 graded reader at the end with no lookups - every content word is from the chapters you just worked through.
- Hold a present-and-past tense conversation: ask questions, talk about routines, narrate what happened yesterday.
- Hedge a request politely, follow everyday speech, and recognise the core grammar that turns vocabulary into sentences.
- Cover the 1,000 most frequent words - roughly 80% of everyday speech by the frequency curve.
Latin learning: common questions
Frequently asked
Is Latin a dead language?
It has no native speakers, which is the technical definition, but it never stopped being written or read. Latin carried European scholarship until the eighteenth century, it remains an official language of the Vatican, and a small community speaks it actively. Dead is accurate and slightly misleading at the same time.
What are the Latin cases?
Six: nominative for the subject, accusative for the object, genitive for possession, dative for the indirect object, ablative for a broad range of by, with and from meanings, and vocative for addressing someone. Each has singular and plural forms and the endings differ by declension, which is why drilling them beats memorising the tables.
Should I learn Latin or Greek first?
Latin, for most people. The alphabet is already familiar, the grammar is a shade simpler, English vocabulary gives you a large free head start, and there is far more beginner material. Greek rewards the effort but is a steeper first climb.
Does learning Latin help with English?
With vocabulary, substantially: a large share of formal English comes through Latin, and the roots become visible rather than arbitrary. With the Romance languages, more so again. The claim that Latin uniquely trains logical thinking is much weaker and worth treating with suspicion.
What is the best way to learn Latin vocabulary?
In frequency order, and in context rather than as isolated pairs. The commonest hundred words appear on every page you will ever read, so they repay drilling to automaticity. Rarer vocabulary is better met inside sentences, where the case ending tells you what the word is doing.