How Fast Can You Learn Latin? (About Five Months)
An unemployed 24-year-old sets out to learn Latin, so he can read papers by Euler. How long does it take? Back in late October I realized I wanted to read a paper by Leonard Euler, but unfortunately no translations existed. So I tried to force my way through it, ignoring things like grammar, hoping to pick up the general meanings of things based on context and vocab. There have been people that were proponents of this sort of method, but I must say, if I'd spent only a week or two learning about cases and discovering things like Wiktionary or Whitaker's WORDS (and my new PyWORDS program!) I would have realized that it's both easier and harder than I would have thought. Instead of putting in more effort to translate word-by-word, which could have taken a couple weeks, I decided to take the easy way out and just learn Latin from my brother's old Latin textbooks. That was three months ago, so how has it gone? It's gone well. I'm half way through Wheelock's