REVIEWS OF LATINUM
A wonderful resource, I come from a background with no education of grammar or linguistics, and have been trying for years, without success, to learn languages. That is, until now. The material is engaging, well written, and structured in a way that demonstrates the creator's understanding of how to produce a speaker of a language. The vast audio resources allow you to pick and choose extra material so that you can improve your listening comprehension, and thus your ability to think in the language itself, which is after all, the end goal.
Stellar Continuum Gaming • 2 days ago on YouTube
I've finally signed up for the Patreon version. It's amazing! The first lessons alone are so well constructed, combining repetition, immersion and explanation in the perfect balance, allowing the "rules" to be automatically and unconsciously inferred without pain. I'm sorry I waited!
Evan Millner has been making excellent recordings for many years, and I am glad to be able to support him. I found his recordings very encouraging from the beginning of my Latin study, and I use them every day in my current study routine. Recently I contacted him with a request for a certain type of recording, and I was pleasantly surprised that he appreciated the suggestion and has made several recordings in the style that I like to use. I also appreciate the research he has done uncovering so many great educational texts and sharing them with us. I hope to be able to support him for many more years, and I hope that you will too!
The breadth and quality of the Latin audio courses available on Latinum is really quite astonishing and the product of years (if not well over a decade) of work. Audio material in Latin is rare to find in general, but of this quality (and, crucially, variety) is practically unheard of. I'm especially grateful that there is material here to suit a variety of teaching approaches - from comprehensive grammar courses, to easy readers, to more difficult material, to texts of more antiquarian' (in the best sense of that word) interest. I heartily recommend supporting Latinum's work - is doing the scholarly and pedagogical world of classical languages an enormous service.
This is a massively useful resource for Latin students. I'm trying to learn Latin on my own. And I can't even begin to say how valuable it is to have access to the Latin textbooks of earlier generations and Evan der Millner's excellent recordings.
There's a huge range of really useful material. Evan's pronunciation is clear and lovely. There's also a great deal of weird and wonderful Latin to encounter. A wealth of things I had no idea about. (I'm not the world's greatest Latinist, but I do have a degree in Classics, so have been very pleasantly surprised by the kinds of things that Evan manages to dig out...)
Hello Evan,
As I have noted elsewhere on this site I am a beginner to a degree
which is somewhere in the spectrum of minus 10. I have started your
beginner lessons and find that you're pedantic style is perfect for me.
It is clear even with my tenuous grasp of Latin that your knowledge
and teaching style is outstanding.
Best regards Alan Peach.
Latinum has been very useful to me. i spent 3.5 years with a grammar first approach before discovering Latinum and its focus on audio. I’m working through the Adler course. I’m pleased with the results
I want to first off thank you for showing me Adler. I had not really understood the importance of this material. But I also want to say that I have taken a vast number of courses, and find almost everyone of them terrible. I have seen people who supposedly follow « Reginald Foster » spend ten years studying and still cannot read a page in less than an hour, nor say a single sentence in Latin. I have watched others painstakenly go over pages and pages of Latin and never finding that anyone has really begun to master the material. And I had never seen an approach that made any sense to me. Latin, they would say, is not like any other language. I have had instructors who teach advanced Latin fail to respond to any Latin spoken, and i have taken beginning Latin conversations where the subject matter covered is Vergil! Seriously, this is insane. I have also walked out of classes and programs.
Then you turned me on to Adler. And finally I began to really learn. So many things that I had not really understood but pretended to, began to be clarified. The massive number of exercises is critical to learn.
I have attempted to teach myself Latin many times, only to fall short, until having encountered this course, where finally I was exposed to the sounds of the language, learned by experience, through Evan's courses. Latinum is truly the rebirth of the Latin language through the spirit of music. One develops the ear and the mouth, through this course, relieving the higher spheres of the brain of an unwelcome and unnecessary cognitive burden, that we might, like children, learn and speak language again.
This is the best Latin course out there. Compare this to Orberg's Lingua Latin with the audio. Evan der Millner has produced 120+ hours of audio in the Adler course alone, probably thousands overall, whereas the Orberg text is accompanied by 5 hours of audio. Likewise, compare the Assimil course: 100 lessons, memorable dialogs, but in the end, only 2 hours of audio for the ear. Language is taught through bulk experience or comprehensible input. Finally, through the invention of the mp3, "immersion" can be simulated; this unknown nebula broken down into methods.
Whatever your goals, I highly recommend that you take this brain upgrade, in pursuit of everything, not just Latin. Bear in mind that the hegemony of the English language throughout the world means that never before has thinking been so divorced form sensing and moving, for without Latin we aimlessly speak intellectual words, ignorant their roots.
Learn through Latinum, whether you wish pass through to Superman (for at least being Ancient is a test), or wish to revivify the Ghost of ProtoIndoEuropean, Latin your gateway.
Fare thee well. The presence of this course is a pivotal shift in world history.
P.S. The Latin-English-Latin repetition of the same sentence, as though to show an image, offer a hint, then explain it again, affords a powerful pedagogical technique. It is this that makes all the world of difference. It takes incredible patience on the part of the educator, but it is this technique that gets you past the sticking point (in a solo linguistic endeavor).
Absolutely excellent! As someone self studying Latin. It's often most difficult to find a guided consistent approach (as just how to go about learning) nevertheless, in actually learning the material itself. I've probably put more time in "learning how to learn" than actually studying the language itself. That is, until I discovered Mr. Millners work.
Evan has not only cited and uncovered troves of Latin information and learning resources that would otherwise likely be lost to time, but also, dedicated hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours of his own personal time transforming these already great resources into audio courses clad with the utmost attention to the classical restored pronunciation!
I'd recommend anyone interested in Latin (or language in general) to check out Latinum. You will not be disappointed.
Thank you Evan for your monumental effort!
The vast amount of work Evan has carried out is quite staggering. However, what has kept me so engaged is Evan's enthusiasm, commitment and true love of Latin. He is a joy to listen to and watch! Latinum has become a part of my daily routine and I would miss it terribly if it was not there! Thank you so much Evan for all your work.
DUOLINGO REVIEWS
The Duolingo Latin course is a very basic introductory course. It will not take you very far at all.
"It's better than doing nothing." - A Latin teacher on reddit, damning with faint praise.
"Its creators seem not to have quite mastered Latin themselves" - comment from an experienced Latin teacher on reddit.
"The quality varies a lot among the speakers and there is a general lack of attention to vowel length. The fact that the course ignores this completely is one of its biggest problems, since vowel length is arguably more important than which consonants are used" - comment from a user on reddit
"Since you aren't taught any grammar its nearly impossible to consistently figure out what you're doing right or wrong. " - comment from a user on reddit