Getting started on classical Latin

Introduction

The aim of this free course is to enable you to get started on learning Latin in a fairly leisurely but well-focused way. It has been developed in response to requests from students who had had no contact with Latin before and who felt they would like to spend a little time preparing for the kind of learning that studying a classical language involves. This course will give you a taster of what is involved in the very early stages of learning Latin. Along the way, you will learn some Latin words, master the pronunciation of Latin and explore the links between Latin and English. Importantly, too, you will gain a basic understanding of how Latin ‘works’ – its grammar and sentence structure – and gain a useful impression of what learning Latin actually involves. The material which follows is designed to be studied in small sections. In all, it will probably take about 8–10 hours to work through. But even if you have only a small amount of time available, you will find it useful to work through the early sections and familiarise yourself with some basic grammatical terms.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A276 Classical Latin: the language of ancient Rome [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .