The free course, Discovering Ancient Greek and Latin, gives a taste of what it is like to learn two ancient languages. It is for those who have encountered the classical world through translations of Greek and Latin texts and wish to know more about the languages in which these works were composed.
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.