As an English speaker, how difficult is it to learn Latin...

As an English speaker, how difficult is it to learn Latin? Mfw they taught Latin in British schools until the mid 20th century.

>it's a "Britain person pretends they have an emotional connection with Ancient Rome" thread
The "muh heritage" of the United Kingdom

>The "muh heritage" of the United Kingdom
More like the "We Wuz Kngz" of the anglo-saxon barbarian

It's a lot of work. That's the thing about languages: they're all a shitload of work, and you have to spend years doing small (and not terribly difficult) things every day to get hold of them.

I did three years of Latin in high school/college. The nice thing is that you really just focus on learning to read it, as opposed to dialogue in it. The difficult thing is that it's highly inflected (nouns are declined for grammatical position, the verb conjugation is complicated, and there's a vast vocabulary to absorb, although many of these have English cognates).

If you're the sort of person who struggles to plow through a doorstopper, then you're probably not ready to take on a language yet. Most of us aren't.

Also, Latin is probably roughly as difficult for all European language speakers. Speakers of romance or pseudo-romance languages like English have a small leg up on vocabulary, but everyone ends up learning the same grammar, and the grammar is what makes Latin challenging.

I actually wanted to learn Cumbric but literally no one knows it well enough to teach

The City of London is the only remnant of the Romans left in the world and it controls the UK and thus the world your ignorant twat.

>latin

The Russians are the Third Rome, though.

>forgetting Chester

wew lad

hunt down the latin with virgil video series, do all of them, get a textbook, get Caesar's De Bello Gallico and start plowing through (give it about 30 minutes to an hour every day) with online verb conjugators and noun decliners. If you do this for about a year you'll be through virtually all of the main grammar and you can then begin focusing on dealing with latin in your own head and moving on to harder works. It's very possible, you just have to actually do it.

Dude, come on... the more Latin you know the better your sense of English. Even if you don't get far enough to read Virgil or even Caesar, you still gain an intuition of etymology.

funny

If you have never learned a 2nd language and you're a native English speaker then Latin is pretty hardcore as far as getting used to grammatical concepts and all.
3 grammatical genders, 6 cases, 5(+) declension patterns, 4 conjugation patterns, and all this is just the basic stuff you have to memorize before you get to actually learning the language/reading.
It's pretty much the opposite of English in that English relies on word order to convey meaning while Latin is highly inflected and can put words anywhere. You can study Latin for years and still not be able to read a single sentence like you can in English.

>not starting with cuneiform

>not starting with proto-hieroglyphic inscriptions

why don't you learn a useful second language first

I actually learned it in school (Germany). It was needed to get into certain university courses. That said, I can't speak it at all.

They still teach Latin in most British private schools and some state schools. I was taught latin at a state (publicly funded) school in England.

>Not starting with Linear Script A

Define useful.

I studied Latin for a year or two at school, was pretty sweet. Wish I'd kept going but IIRC I needed to do a modem language too and two languages felt a bit excessive.

They still do in decent schools mate

That's funny, they still teach it in a big part of polish schools. Too bad those lessons are mostly shit (no one cares, even teachers).

Answering your question - Latin has more complex grammar than English, so it can be quite difficult, if you're not a fast learner.

Wasn't Latin the official Language of the Polish nobility?

Also this. If you aren't familiar with learning other languages, you're probably not going to have a good time learning Latin.
Wheelock's is a good start though (get an early edition)

Why an early edition?

I've heard that they're better from a number of sources and less wishy-washy (Latin isn't exactly on the cutting-edge for innovations so "improvements" to the same text don't really help). Plus they're cheap and the appendices are a huge benefit. Haven't tried the newer editions myself but I do have a first and a third edition that get the job done (dirt-cheap+good enough=recommendation).

It's basically a book on grammar but you can find a supplemental texts for free online if this isn't your learning style (still recommend buying the text just for the grammar tables)

>and the grammar is what makes Latin challenging

The only reason this belief is common is because most learners do not progress very far beyond the early stages of the language where they are first being taught the grammar. With all languages, grammar represents only a tiny, almost insignificant proportion of the amount of time spent learning it; the vast majority of it will be spent on vocabulary, idioms, and the type of things a culture talks about. This is true even with languages with very 'complex' grammar, like Latin and Hungarian; and, honestly, their complexity is often overstated; inflections, for example, are just slightly more regularised prepositions/postpositions.

Latin is difficult mostly because 1) we only read their classical lit and political/philosophical texts (imagine being an ESL student and having only Shakespeare and Thomas Hobbes as learning material), and 2), somewhat related to the first, the language is dead, there's no way to listen to native speakers chatting about mundane everyday shit, talk to them yourself, have them correct you.

When you say grammar is the "easy" part of learning a language you have to remember that you are likely talking to people who have no idea what a "postposition" even means.
Telling people grammar is insignificant is a great way to discourage people who are on their first language and struggle to get over that plateau. Gr8 job narrowing the field, can't have too many people learning this shit, it lessens my prestige.

religious ppl just hate learning in general, it'their way of not living

>Not starting with PIE.

>Latin is highly inflected and can put words anywhere

Yeah that's true but Greek is highly inflected too and is noticeably easier than Latin IMO. That's because in Greek most of the noun cases are unique. Latin has way more ambiguity. "Manus" could be any one of four forms. "Puella" could be two forms, "Puellae" could be three different forms, etc. If you're reading a chunk of poetry with 15 nouns/adjectives/participial constructions and 1 verb all enjambed with each other it can be maddening when you're not used to it.* Also the actual Latin words are wider in their meanings, it's always seemed to me, than Greek, but I might be imagining that. And let's not forget the cultural factor. Roman culture was very alien to ours in some way and that makes the language that much harder.

>the vast majority of it will be spent on vocabulary, idioms, and the type of things a culture talks about.

Yes. The actual rules of Latin grammar are not extremely complex and could be acquired in a matter of days. It's getting a feel for how the language works (i.e. being able to juggle these grammatical concepts fluently and subconsciously so you don't need to parse and pause as you read) and acquiring vocabulary that takes a long time.

Still it's totally possible.

* For example a random sentence from Livy: Utcumque erit, iuvabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro virili parte et ipsum consuluisse.

"However it will be, "

>British

Arabic

>Utcumque erit, iuvabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro virili parte et ipsum consuluisse
>verb adverb noun adjective noun noun noun noun preposition adjective noun conjunction pronoun verb"
I think principis is an adjective here (modifying populi), not a noun. I guess this only reinforces your point about Latin ambiguity...

why are bulgarians always cast as romans in movies? the main guy in OPs photo looks bulgarian as fuck, as well as Pilate in Passion of the Christ (pic related)

Arabic is not useful unless you live in the middle east, care about muslims, or are a muslim.

Yeah it's definitely an adjective and "et" is an adverb, I was being quick and careless.

sadface

O Britannia

vaguely European yet not with a strong Anglo look

No one's even sure how to pronounce Latin