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 Latin (ch. 22 today) and I can translate quite well given enough time. I can't translate the subjunctive, but I can identify when there's a verb in a tense I don't know, and that usually helps. I can understand all five declensions of nouns, the three (or two, rather) declensions of adjectives, and the four conjugations of verbs in all active and passive tenses (present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect). I'm really new to participles, but I've learned the basics by reading ahead, and they come up a lot so I get practice. I know a pretty good number of adverbs and conjunctions, the most common ones for sure, as well as all the different pronouns and demonstratives. 

My schedule is consistent: every day starting at 9-10am I do at least one hour of work from Wheelock's, which I break up into (a) the grammar and writing down new vocab, and (b) translating example sentences. I do these on consecutive days- day 1 is grammar and vocab, day 2 is translating, day 3 I do the next chapter's grammar and vocab, and so on. There are days where I only make it through half the sentences to translate, and days where I just work on translating sentences from Euler; some days I read Lingua Latina, and sometimes I take the day off (especially on weekends). Throughout the rest of my day I do my usual work (I'm an electrical engineer so I do a lot of circuit things), then in the evenings and nights sometimes I revisit my Latin, flipping through vocab or reviewing or reading Lingua Latina. 

Have I enjoyed my time learning Latin? I think what has surprised me most about the process is how much I've enjoyed it. I've had hard days and easy days, days where I'm forgetful and feel like I haven't learned anything and days when I feel like I can read fluently; but I've never once said "ugh, I don't want to do the translations today!" Rather, I get to clear a spot at the kitchen table, open up my notebook and Wheelock's and I struggle through the day's Latin until I've done enough. 

Something funny that's happened, is I've become increasingly interested in the Latin language beyond just getting to translation ability. I can imagine myself with a different career path becoming something of a Latinist! Reading Wheelock's without a teacher or other students, and without an emphasis on speaking, makes it much easier to pick up on Latin rhythm and sentence structure. Even people in Latin communities tend to use awkward structure (Anglicized usually) and they use words like personal pronouns in ways that immediately seems strange to me, though if I was trying to express myself in Latin from the beginning I probably would have also clung to those sorts of language crutches. 

Not that there's any right or wrong way to speak Latin, but I only find it funny how my perspective has changed, and how the self-teaching method tends to emphasize different details of the language compared to in-person learning. It's not like I'm the first person to use a Latin textbook to teach themselves (it's surprisingly popular among retirees!) and I haven't done anything particularly miraculous; I could have done more. But I'm really satisfied with the progress so far, and I'm falling more and more into the Latin world, and it's been great. 

I estimate that by the end of February I should be done Ch. 32 in Wheelock's, or maybe I'll start working a bit faster as the content shifts from grammar to vocab (the vocab in Wheelock's is obviously more specialized to classical Latin compared to the vocab used by mathematicians and scientists so I can go a bit easy on it, though I haven't yet). That means with a consistent schedule a reasonably determined person can learn enough Latin to translate math papers in about 4-5 months. So there's the answer.