Welcome to Latinum 

"A Museum of Language, Civilisation and Culture"

Latinum offers a comprehensive, affordable audio course for learning Latin and selected other languages at home. Our extensive lessons and graded audiobook library make picking up Latin easy and enjoyable.

This one-of-a-kind course was started in 2006 to provide students worldwide with the tools to teach themselves through audio lessons. Almost two decades later, our course has helped everyone from university professors to family learners master the Latin language.

SUBSCRIPTION: The course works by monthly or annual (with a discount) subscription. 

The main two subscription tiers are USD 8 per month and USD 15 per month - you must subscribe (become a patron) at Patreon to access the audio course and audiobook catalogue.

The course is hosted on Patreon's servers, and by subscribing at Patreon, you get access to the course. Please look at the various pages on this site, to get an idea of how extensive and wide ranging the course is. Levels are Beginner, Beginner +, Intermediate, Intermediate + and Advanced.

When you use the course, please bookmark this site, as it contains the course catalogue. New uploads that may not yet be catalogues on these pages can be found by looking at the post feed at https://www.patreon.com/latinum ; there is also a useful search facility there.

The course and resources here are frequently  used as a supplement to school or university courses, or as a stand alone course for self study, or to re-learn old rusty Latin.  Subscribers have included university professors, parents and children learning as a family, retirees, and students at all levels wanting to supplement their formal classroom studies.

Immerse yourself in Latin through diverse, multi-level lessons including:

- Traditional grammar and vocabulary 

- Natural conversational material  

- Graded audiobooks to grow your reading skills

Supplement your classroom learning or refresh your skills with this flexible course. Latin teachers are scarce worldwide, making self-guided programs a necessity.

Beyond Latin, we now offer introductory Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic lessons too!

All textbooks used by Latinum are out of copyright, and can be found online for free in pdf format.

Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla

It is faster to learn by example than by rules

"Evan der Millner has done a wonderful job of providing students with electronic total immersion in Latin instruction and readings" - R. P Sonkowsky  Professor Emeritus, Classics, University of Minnesota

WHY AUDIO?

You need to 'fire on all cylinders' to master any language and get an instinctive 'feel' for it.

This must involve listening, speaking aloud, reading, and writing.

Few formal ancient language courses spend much time on the first two, which, to my mind, are the most important of the four, especially for a beginner. 

Our audio course provides the hours of support that you will need to succeed, and provides excellent value for money.

Learning a language to high level reading fluency requires a significant investment of time - and we can only sit in front of a book for so long each day. 

Using our carefully designed audio course means you can also study during time you would not normally have available - while commuting, doing household chores, out for a walk, or at the gym. This dramatically increases the time you have each day for language study, and as a result, your chance of success.

Latin has a system of long and short vowel sounds, which are hard to master unless the language is heard. The standard printed works do not show the vowel lengths. 

Additionally, listening is more likely to activate the 'speaking' area of your brain than reading alone. Our system is not merely passive listening, we also have interactive exercises in the Serial and Oral, Adler and Prendergast lessons (Prendergast is entirely interactive)

The other main advantage of listening is that it forces you to process the language in its natural order - no 'hunting for the verb', or attempting to re-arrange the Latin into another language's pattern - instead, you train your brain to deal with Latin, as Latin. 

STREAMING - SUBSCRIPTION TIER

• Full access to the STREAMING CATALOGUE

• Excludes ZIP files

• ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION available with a one month discount.

DOWNLOAD - SUBSCRIPTION TIER

• Full access to the DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE

• + full access to the STREAMING CATALOGUE

• Includes all ZIP files for convenient download of entire audiobooks and courses for offline use

• ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION available with a one month discount

Latin Teachers Embrace Extensive Reading, Shaune Larder,  ERJ, Volume 10, No. 1, pg 4. May 2017

"One text he [Millner] resurrected was George Adler’s A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language (1858). This text sought to teach Latin through what he termed “a Serial and Oral method”. The way the text is utilised by Millner is similar to the Audio-Lingual method of the 1960s (1) except explicit grammar instruction is also given. Millner argues that the method may not have been popular at the time because it required a teacher to conduct hours of question and response style drills which gradually introduced grammar and vocabulary."

"The book comes in at over 1000 pages long but is comprehensive. Millner spent two years recording the exercises into an audio format where a student can run the drills from an audio player."

"He suggests the book be worked through whilst being supplemented with a large amount of easy extensive reading passages as well. Millner has also created playlists divided by level so that beginners looking for extensive reading or listening practice might find something from the archived books and get audio as well." 

"Locke and Hamilton's interlinear readers are included in his collections. Like Conlon, he notes that traditional approaches do not contain  enough actual reading practice and he advocates massive amounts of reading and listening as well as oral practice drills." 

PRONUNCIATION

All the Latin audio here is carefully read in restored classical pronunciation.

 Molendinarius' pronunciation of Latin has been extensively peer reviewed, and conforms to the academic gold standard - primarily Sturtevant, followed by W. S. Allen's 'Vox Latina',  the ARLT Guidelines, and the  Cambridge Philological Society.

 Greek pronunciation used on the course follows a form of reconstructed Koine, approximating the way Greek may have sounded during era of the late Roman Republic. 

READ OUR TRUSTPILOT REVIEWS

 Aio, linguam non ex infinitis grammaticorum praeceptis, sed ex veterum librorum lectione et imitatione comparandam esse.

I say, a language is not acquired from an infinity of grammatical rules, but from reading the books of the ancients, and through imitation.

- Jacob Flacciolatus , anno 1715 

SELECTED CITATIONS

A selection of citations of Latinum in academic papers, 2007 to 2019: