How to Learn Latin in Two Months

One Living Latin student's lightning-speed journey from total beginner to National Junior Classical League Certamen champion.

Cecily Reed, a lover of languages and an exceptionally motivated student at Philips Exeter Academy, decided to start learning Latin in the middle of her junior year, outside of her regular school schedule. Using the Paideia Institute's self-paced Living Latin curriculum, she was able to learn the foundations of Latin in just two months. Having mastered the equivalent of two years of high school Latin instruction in record time, Cecily attended our 2024 Living Latin in Rome High School summer travel program and then went on to place third nationally in the Latin reading comprehension Certamen at the National Junior Classical League's Convention. We interviewed Cecily about her highly accelerated immersion into Latin and how learning with our Living Latin curriculum made it possible.

What inspired you to start learning Latin?

I’ve loved Roman history and myth since middle school. I used to read everything I could get my hands on: speeches, military histories, biographies, epics, and more recently philosophy and poetry. I’ve even written my own myth and history compilations, used by my school to train young students for Certamen, a Classics trivia competition we take part in. My three Classics shelves are placed right at eye level and stacked double with books. My favorite part of all this is the throughline of Roman virtue. If you look up virtus on Whitaker's Words, you get definitions ranging from “power/courage/manliness” to “character/excellence” to “mighty works”. Every story is permeated with a different sense of virtus–whether it is three successive generations of P. Decius Mus showing virtue in the self-sacrificing ritual of devotio, or P. Claudius Pulcher losing virtus in a quest for empty glory, or Caesar finding it after his loose-belted youth (effeminatus erat). The concept of virtus is a very inspiring one–it moved an entire nation of men to extraordinary feats of bravery and cruelty–and I think after learning about all that, the least I can do is puzzle out the million uses of the subjunctive.

How did you structure your learning schedule with Living Latin?

I tried to do five lessons a week, which gave me leeway to prioritize schoolwork and sports on busy days. While at school, I was not as diligent a student as I might have been and typically spent just two hours a week on Living Latin. Once I was on summer break, I spent about four hours a day working on Latin and met with my tutor for three hours a week. I do not recommend this method as it is great to have some extra time at the end to review and consolidate material, and four to six hours a day on Latin meant that I started using the passive periphrastic in English and trying to add “-que” to Chinese potential complements and hallucinating conjugation charts when I went to sleep! The curriculum is split up into very helpful chunks that keep a reasonable pace if you stick to a schedule. I had a wonderful tutor, Alexina Derkaz, whom I met with once or twice a week to translate a paragraph of the course reader and go over grammar with. I also helped test a new feature of Living Latin that is currently under development: an AI chatbot that uses Chat-GPT models to answer questions about Latin grammar and syntax. By taking Living Latin I learned the equivalent of what takes two years at my prep school in a little under two months with Paideia!

What did you enjoy most about the curriculum?

I loved the History and Culture sections. Of course, the graded reader was fantastic and each lesson was essential and instructive, but as an armchair historian I loved seeing Paideia incorporate familiar stories and new facts into each lesson. This very unique feature helped each lesson land for me and gave me a context in which I could place random facts, and also helped prepare me for seeing grammar structures, case uses, and vocabulary in primary sources.

What did you find most challenging?

I found the reading extremely challenging. The first ten or so were easy, but I struggled to identify words and translate them literally into English instead of just creating my own plotline based on what the words seemed connected to in French, Spanish, or English. The graded reader forced me to slow down and translate each word accurately, helping me identify cases, numbers, tenses, and parts of speech, so that I could construct a literal translation. This was very challenging at first but became much easier as my experience grew. 

How did attending Living Latin in Rome High School help you expand on the material you covered through Living Latin?

Living Latin taught me a lot of grammar and vocabulary by providing a very controlled and well-paced environment: their own graded reader, custom quizzes, and video and written lessons tailored to each chapter. Upon completing Living Latin online, I had a lot of knowledge but not much practical experience and was not very comfortable with unstructured readings. Living Latin in Rome really helped me build confidence with translating out of context by exposing me to many styles and levels of writing, from Ennius to St. Augustine, and solidifying my grasp of how grammar structures could appear in different ways.

Tell us a bit about your experience at the National Junior Classical League's Convention, and how Living Latin prepared you to participate.

The NJCL Convention gathers Classicists from around the country to compete academically and artistically and play Certamen and Agon, Classics trivia competitions focusing on language, history, and myth. Powered by motivated students and a wonderful Classics faculty, my school always puts up a strong showing at Convention, but this year exceeded all expectations. For the first time in nine years, our team made it to Certamen finals, and we took national wins in many tests. The Intermediate Certamen team I captained ended with a hard-fought third place nationally, and my Agon team also earned third overall. Most surprisingly, after studying Latin for just two months, I placed third nationally in Reading Comprehension and was able to win almost all our points in finals using the spoken Latin comprehension I learned at Paideia. By exposing us to many authors from many time periods, Paideia taught us how to adapt to any style of Latin. The spoken Latin practice, an approach that seems to be unique to Paideia and the NJCL Convention, helped me to listen to and understand Latin the same way that I would hear French, Spanish, or Chinese.

Are you interested in continuing your studies in Latin, or trying Ancient Greek?

I most certainly am! I am planning to graduate from Exeter with a Classical Diploma, meaning that I will have read extensively in both Latin and Greek, something less than 10% of each graduating class achieves. I am taking the placement test in less than a week and hoping to place into accelerated AP-level Latin, all thanks to Paideia’s online Latin curriculum and the Living Latin in Rome High School summer program.

Who would you recommend Living Latin to?

Anyone from more advanced Latin students to someone who, like I did, has oodles of Roman culture but does not have experience with the language and grammar parts.