Nobody will ever answer you in Latin at a bus stop, and that should shape how you study it. With a living language, conversation papers over the gaps in your grammar. With Latin, nearly everything you do is reading, so the aim is easy to state: reach the point where a sentence gives up its meaning in one pass, left to right, instead of being dismantled with a grammar table in one hand and a dictionary in the other.
To learn Latin well, build a solid core of vocabulary, learn the noun and verb endings through many easy sentences rather than from tables alone, and read far more simple Latin than seems necessary. Pronunciation causes more arguments online than it deserves, and you can settle it in ten minutes.
Who still uses Latin, and why people learn it
Latin has had no native speakers for well over a thousand years. The everyday Latin of the Roman Empire didn't so much die as change, and its descendants are Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan and their relatives. It belongs to the Italic branch of the Indo-European family and is written in the alphabet that carries its name. Classical Latin managed with 23 letters: no J, no U, no W, with I and V doing double duty as vowels and consonants.
The written language outlived the spoken one by centuries. It was the language of the Church, of law, of medicine and of European scholarship well into the 18th century, and it's still the official language of the Holy See. English is full of it too: e.g. is exempli gratia, i.e. is id est and a.m. is ante meridiem.
People who learn Latin today mostly fall into a few groups: students facing GCSE or A level Latin in the UK, or the Latinum that some German universities still require for degrees such as theology; Catholics who want to follow the Mass in the Church's own language; readers who want the Roman poets and historians without a translator in between; and learners of Spanish, Italian or French who have noticed how much the old language explains.
Classical or church Latin: choose once
There are two main ways to pronounce Latin, with identical spelling and grammar.
| Classical | Ecclesiastical (church) | |
|---|---|---|
| c before e and i | always k: centum sounds like "kentum" | ch: centum sounds like "chentum" |
| v | like English w: vinum sounds like "winum" | like English v |
| ae | like "eye": puellae | like the e in "bed" |
| Where you'll meet it | most school and university courses in the UK and US | the Catholic Church, choirs, schools in Italy |
If you're learning for the liturgy or for singing, use the church pronunciation. If you're preparing for exams or reading the classics, most teachers will expect the classical one.
What English speakers get for free
Tens of thousands of English words come from Latin, directly or through French, so much of the vocabulary arrives with hooks already attached: aqua (water) gives aquarium, manus (hand) gives manual, pes, pedis (foot) gives pedestrian and mater (mother) gives maternal. The alphabet holds no surprises, the spelling is consistent, and there are no articles at all. Puella can mean "a girl" or "the girl", and context decides.
What makes Latin hard: the endings
The difficulty sits almost entirely in one place. English shows who does what to whom with word order; Latin does it with endings.
- Puella amicum videt: the girl sees the friend.
- Amicum puella videt: the same meaning, with more weight on the friend.
- Puellam amicus videt: the friend sees the girl.
The -m on amicum and puellam marks the object, wherever it stands. Nouns have six cases spread over five declensions, so puella runs puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puellā in the singular, with a separate set of plural forms. Verbs pack person, number, tense, mood and voice into one ending: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant takes you from "I love" to "they love", across four conjugations plus a few irregular verbs such as sum, "I am". The subjunctive, participles and the rest can wait well past your first month.
Latin also has no single word for yes: you answer by repeating the verb. Venisne? Venio. "Are you coming?" "I'm coming."
First Latin words and phrases
- Salve: hello, to one person. Salvete to several.
- Vale: goodbye. Valete to several.
- Quid agis?: how are you doing? Bene: well.
- Gratias tibi ago: thank you, literally "I give you thanks". Gratias alone works too.
- Non: no, not.
- Aqua, panis, vinum: water, bread, wine.
- Pater noster, qui es in caelis: Our Father, who art in heaven.
- Dominus vobiscum, answered with et cum spiritu tuo: the Lord be with you; and with your spirit.
Plenty of tables, too little reading
Latin isn't short of courses. Textbooks, lecture series and grammar references exist by the hundred, many of them excellent on the forms. What's rarer is material that teaches you to read. The traditional school method front-loads the tables: weeks of chanting declensions, then sentences built mainly to test those tables, translated word by word into English. It produces learners who can name the case of every noun and still need four minutes for a sentence a Roman child would have understood at once.
What works better is less glamorous: meet each form in dozens of short, easy sentences, take vocabulary seriously, because no grammar rescues a sentence in which half the words are unknown, and read a great deal of easy Latin before going anywhere near the hard stuff.
How to learn Latin in your first month
Plan on twenty to thirty minutes a day.
- Week 1. Pick a pronunciation, learn the greetings above, then the first declension (puella and its family) and the present tense of sum and of verbs like amo, laboro (I work) and ambulo (I walk).
- Week 2. The second declension (amicus, servus, verbum), adjectives that agree with their nouns, and the accusative object. Read a dozen short sentences aloud every day.
- Week 3. The dative and ablative, prepositions such as in, cum and ad, and the imperfect tense: amabam, "I was loving" or "I used to love".
- Week 4. Connected text: short graded stories, a prayer you already know in English. Write five Latin sentences of your own each day.
Latin is a language you'll study mostly alone, so the routines in our guide to learning a language on your own apply more strictly than usual. By the end of the month you'll be well into A1 on the CEFR scale, a scale designed for living languages that still works as a yardstick here.
Learning Latin with Qlango
Qlango teaches Latin at A1 and A2 with the method it uses for all its courses, which happens to be exactly what the table-first approach lacks: short lessons built around sentences, and spaced repetition that brings each word back right before you'd forget it. You build Latin sentences yourself, so the endings have to be right, and you write answers from memory instead of only recognising them. With Premium you get offline lessons and an AI teacher you can ask about grammar, vocabulary and example sentences as often as you like, starting with why it's amicum and not amicus after videt.
The course is free to start. When you add it, you pick the language you learn through, which can be your native language or one you'd like to strengthen at the same time. See all languages and levels and the Premium plans.
No one at the bus stop will notice the change, but you will, the first time Puella amicum videt reads in a single pass from left to right. Qlango's A1 course is a quiet place to work towards that moment, and the first lesson takes a few minutes.
