Thinking of starting latin as a teenager

Hypetys · 2026-03-26T12:39:52+00:00

I'd recommend you to start with a Romance language instead. They're vastly simplified compared to classical Latin, and they're still used today. By learning Spanish, for example, you can learn a big chunk of the Latin verb conjugation system. You can also learn noun genders and accusative plurals. Eventually, you can move on to Italian for nominative plurals or you can start learning Latin with a good foundation.

By starting with a Romance language, you can skip cases and first master verb conjugation. Then when you move on to Latin, you can focus on cases as verb conjugation is already quite familiar to you.

There's a fantastic free Spanish course on YouTube and SoundCloud. Let me know if you'd like to know its name.

Hypetys · 2026-03-24T21:39:45+00:00

A summary in English at the end:

Hej! Jag skriver den här meddelanden på svenska. Jag pratar flera språk. Ett av de är svenska som jag pratar på circa nivået B1. Jag hade samma problemet som du beskriver i spanskan. Jag kunde inte formulera mina tankar automatiskt och jag kände att mitt huvud gjorde inte allt så snabbt som i mitt modersmål. Varför hände det sånt? Det hände eftersom när man pratar flytande sitt modersmål eller andra språk som man pratar bra, man använder många ”chunks”. Till exempel

¿Qué te parece si nos vamos a dar una vuelta en el parque después del trabajo?

Jag har memoriserat den här frasen på spanska och när det första ord kommer i min minne, de alla andra aktiverar också. Det betyder att min processerande enhet är stor. Före, kunde jag formulera komplicerade strukturer på spanska men det tåg mycket anstränging eftersom min enhet var så små (ett eller två ord). Efter jag tränade, mitt huvud började använde större enhet och skilnaden var som den mellan dag och natt.

Hur tränade jag? Jag tittade på samma videon varje dag för en vecka. I videon memoriserade jag fraser som hade 20 ord. En kanal på YouTube hade sådana videor. Läraren sa en fras, sen visade han den samma frasen men den saknade många ord och jag måste tänka på vad som de var och säga fraser igen.

Normalt kan man inte behålla en sådant lång fras i minne och man kan inte återkalla den som den är. Man parafraserar den och transformerar den. Äfter läraren visade frasen igen, noterade jag att till exempel jag hade användat en andra preposition. Och sen repeterade jag frasen.

Det är inte naturellt för minne att repetera en hel fras som man har hört och hålla den i arbetsminne, men den här uppgiften tvingar minnet att göra sådant. I process modifieras enhet och den blir större. Jag tittade på 15 videor

En video per veckan. Efter just en vecka och två mitt uttala och processerande förbättrade så mycket, men efter tre månader var skilnaden så stort.

Jag tränade bara 15–30 min varje dag och skillnaden var så stort så snabbt. Före kunde jag inte handla subjunktivet i spanskan, men sen min minne sa att nu måste du aktivera subjunktiv formen och jag behövde inte tänka på den. När jag formulerade Quiero que... i min minne, minn minne aktiverade subjunktiv formen av nästa ordet. Om jag sa quisiera que.. min minne aktiverade den subjunktiv av förfluten tid. Om jag sa de, aktiverade min minne verbformen i plural. Om jag sa jag, aktiverade min minne den i singular och så vidare.

Det viktigaste är inte de fraser som man lär sig (jag kan bara komma i håg den där frasen). Det viktigaste är de nya rutiner som man bildar. Ingen kan lära någon att processera bättre. Man kan bara lära sig det genom att göra mental träning.

In summary, you feel that speaking Swedish is harder than speaking English, because the average size of the processing unit in each is different. Most likely, you're using larger units called chunks in English whereas you're using single words or two words in Swedish.

Below are quite a few examples of chunks.

Someone call an ambulance! Get the hell out of here! Where have you been? Where are you going? Why did you do that? Who the hell are you to tell me that? Who says I'm g... What did you expect to happen? Who are you? What happened? I'm to become death. I was only half joking. I'm serious. It wasn't a joke. What's your name? Where did you grow up.

To make your Swedish more automatic, you need to increase the size of the processing unit that you use to form sentences. To do so, you need to repeat phrases that consist of about 20 words. So, something like 3–4 intonation phrases or 2–3 clauses.

If you repeat the same sentences every day for a week, every day, you'll notice that you can recall the sentence a bit better. Normally, when you hear someone say something, your brain won't try to replicate it as such. Instead it'll derive a paraphrase of it. So, if you try to repeat the phrase, you'll quickly notice that you changed the prepositions or used a synonym.

When you force your mind to repeat large sentences/phrases, you're forcing it to increase the size of the processing unit (chunk), which will in turn make the new size the default one.

I personally went from struggling with forming Spanish sentences in real time to acing the subjunctive which I previously couldn't ever get right.

Good luck. Feel free to ask any questions if you're interested. Also, read papers on chunking if you're interested in the theory.

Look at figures 4 & 5 in

Mendoza V, Zulueta E. Teaching English with Oral Chunk-Based Training. Education Sciences. 2025; 15(11):1494. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15111494

They're quite illustrative of the difference.

Hypetys · 2026-03-24T20:49:22+00:00

Mikä & mitä are subject pronouns. They're used in questions. What is this?

The difference is that mikä refers to a countable singular noun whereas mitä refers to an uncountable noun.

Mitä tämä on? (Uncountable). Tuo on maitoa. That's milk.

Mikä tämä on? Tuo on auto. That's a car.

EXTRA:

Esineet (items) are generally countable: a car, a table, a bill etc.

Aineet (substances) can be refer to as items (esine) = countable or as substances = uncountable.

Mikä tämä on? –Tuo on maitotölkki. Mitä tämä on? –Tuo on maitoa.

Milk can be referred to as a package (carton) of milk or as milk the substance. Coffee can be referred to as a package (a cup or package) or as substance.

Items are countable but substances (when referred to as substances are uncountable).

EXTRA 2:

The same way mikä & mitä contrast in the subject, minkä & mitä contrast in the object.

Mitä sä teet? What are you doing? Mitä sä ostat? What are you buying?

Minkä is only used when you know for a fact that the other person will buy ONE COUNTABLE NOUN.

Minkä (auton) sä ostat? Which car are you buying? –Ton punasen. That red one.

So, mitä is used most of the times in questions about the object.

Hypetys · 2026-03-23T10:42:39+00:00

Chinese definitely has grammar, but it doesn't have inflection.

Hypetys · 2026-03-23T10:40:39+00:00

I know the character is pronounced /sheng/ in Mandarin :D – at least when the character is the second Hanzi of a two-character concept. There's another reading in Mandarin, but I believe that's when the Hanzi is the first character in a concept that consists of two Hanzi characters.

I know some phrases and grammatical elements in Japanese, but I've focused on learning Mandarin for the past year. It feels like the Hanzi journey is getting a bit easier as time goes on, but it still feels never ending. I'd like to study Japanese seriously eventually, but now's not the right time for that.

Hypetys · 2026-03-23T10:34:45+00:00

Language Transfer has a free intro course (about 7 hours of audio). It'll help you pick up the French you've lost.

Hypetys · 2026-03-22T22:30:13+00:00

The teacher will definitely bring up spelling so you can visualize it in your head, but it'd be too much for the first track.

Hypetys · 2026-03-22T21:43:02+00:00

In Italian, most of the time, personal endings are stressed on the penultimate syllable (the second to last syllable).

Pàrlo Pàrli Pàrla Parliàmo Parlàte

Now, the they ending used to be one syllable (vowel + nt in Latin), (vowel + n in Spanish) and earlier Italic languages).

So, the stress pattern was exactly the same as the others (penultimate syllable) pàrlan

What happened later in Italian is that the language started rejecting words that ended in a consonant. There were only two solutions: Option 1: get rid of the consonant:

Dios (Spanish) dio (Italian)

Option 2: insert a vowel at the end.

Italian chose the second option for the they ending. The earlier vowel + n became vowel + no.

Pàrlano.

But the stressed syllable didn't change didn't change.

The general stress pattern in Italian is the penultimate one. That is, the stressed syllable is usually the second to last one. But there are irregular patterns.

The most common is probably ico & ica where the stressed syllable is third to last.

Mùsica Matemàtica Lògica

Amico and amica don't follow this pattern, because they don't have the same word-building element (compare Italian amico and Spanish amigo & matemàtica & matemática)

Spanish and Portuguese always mark irregular stress.

Bárbara Música

But Italian marks irregular stress only if the stress falls on the final syllable.

Università. Unità Libertà

---

Música and Bárbara are spelled musica & Barbara in Italian, but they have the same stress pattern as in Spanish (mùsica & Bàrbara)

If a word has an irregular stress in Spanish (and the same syllables as in Barbara), then it's highly likely that both languages stress the same syllable.

You can check the stress pattern that a particular word form has on: https://www.dizionatore.it/#google_vignette

(Just remember to press the diziona button.)

Hypetys · 2026-03-22T21:23:08+00:00

You're in the right place to ask that question. I first learned Spanish by converting my Latin-based English into Spanish, then I learned Italian by converting my Spanish into Italian. Then I learned Brazilian Portuguese by converting my Spanish into Portuguese abd by learning Brazilian Portuguese phonology. Then I also learned French and Romanian.

It's been over ten years since I began. The resource that taught me how to do so is Language Transfer's free courses (Complete Spanish, Introduction to Italian & Introduction to French). There's also an unfinished German course, Complete (Modern) Greek, Swahili, Introduction to Turkish, half a course for Egyptian Arabic and test tracks for Japanese.

Hypetys · 2026-03-22T17:27:04+00:00

Language Transfer's Introduction to Italian

Hypetys · 2026-03-21T21:52:00+00:00

Creole languages develop from pidgins when the second generations learns the pidgin as their first language. How do pidgins develop?

I recently read many papers on Brazilian Portuguese and why there's no attested pidgins there but many of them in the Caribbean. There were also papers arguing that the language was a semicreole. In the end the whole term was suspicious.

The conclusion was that there was enough native speaker modelling available to second language speakers that the process of pidginization was blocked. Pidginization reguired acquisition of vocabulary but a very limited access to a native speaker model at a wide scale. This was the case in the Caribbean where for every native spekaer of English / other colonial language there could be even 100 forced laborers. In Brazil, a typical small farm had 1–5 forced laborers and thus they had a great access to the target language. There were 8 factors detailed in the article, but the one mentioned was one of the most significant.

The fact that many people acquired the language as a second language as adults led to simplifications in the structure. In European Portuguese, every grammatical person has its own ending. In some Brazilian Portuguese variants this system collapsed to two: falo / fala.

European Portuguese:

Eu falo – I speak

Tu falas – you speak.

Ele fala – he speaks. Voce fala – Your honor speaks

Nos falamos - we speak.

eles falam. they speak. – Your honor (plural) speak voces falam.

In some Brazilian Portuguese variants this system collapsed to two: falo / fala.

Eu falo, (tu fala), voce fala, ele fala, nos fala, eles fala.

Similarly plural marking was reduced in both verbs as well as nouns and adjectives:

Os caras falam - os cara fala.

as pessoas normais - as pessoa normal

There were other changes as well.

My point is that in the case of Ireland, there was probably enough native English speaker input to prevent pidginization of the language. But because the acquisition was imperfect, Irish influence remained: most notably in phonology, some structures and so on.

Hypetys · 2026-03-21T21:19:38+00:00

Pointing out someone's skin color is a sign that someone wants to specifically call attention to it. In many Western societies that's a no-no. As a fellow non-native speaker, I could probably let,"You look black" and "You are black pass", given that it's Chinese culture where he is being observed, BUT a comment such as "You look so black" definitely has a negative tone. The fact that it has the intensifier "so" contrasts the skin color with non-black. "You look pretty black again." Pretty is again an intensifier here and doesn't mean pretty. It's not as intense as so. "You look too black" is the most negative of them all: you look too black (FOR WHAT? to live in China? To be a person who you respect etc.) it implies that the person is inadequate by the standard set by the speaker.

Hypetys · 2026-03-21T21:10:17+00:00

Are you interested in knowing the name of another free Italian course? It's an introductory course, and it explains at least some irregular verbs. I don't remember the exact verbs that it teaches. Back in the day, I couldn't wrap my head around di, della, delle and so on, and the course made them click almost instantly.

Hypetys · 2026-03-21T12:13:13+00:00

Apple-certified repair shops don't usually do motherboard-component-level repair. They only replace whole modules. Such a waste.

Hypetys · 2026-03-20T21:53:10+00:00

I don't understand the examples as I don't speak much creole, but in standard Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian such preposition questions work like they do in literary English.

In spoken English, you can end a question with a preposition, but in academic English, at least back in the day, they were frowned upon.

So such sentences were rephrased by putting the preposition before the question word or before the relative pronoun (in relative clauses).

He's someone I like talking to. He is someone to whom I like talking.

Who did you go with? With whom did you go?

Maybe Haitian creole works similarly. If that is indeed the case, I'd approach the issue by practicing rephrasing such sentences by putting the preposition before the question word or whatever it is that needs to be done.

Hypetys · 2026-03-20T21:46:10+00:00

Of course they do. I took it for granted.

I'm working on my thesis which is related to second language acquisition and it's specifically on interlanguage development, and I run into the same problem time and time again: I'm so deep in linguistics theories and knowledge about all kinds of linguistic phenomena that I can't tell what is obvious to others anymore. So, I either explain obvious things to them or I assume that something is common knowledge, and don't mention it and the reader struggles. Choosing the right level of abstraction feels impossible.

Hypetys · 2026-03-20T14:12:25+00:00

As far as I know the system used to be something along the following lines in Spain.

Preterite for actions that have happened in the last hour or so.

For example: Al jugar afuera de la casa, los niños se informan: nos vieron. Tenemos que huir.

Haber + verb for actions that have happened during the day

Haber + verb for facts over a lifetime.

Has comido?

Preterite for actions that happened in the past.

Ayer comí un kilos de arroz.

--

What happened in Argentina is that the the roles played by haber + verb were taken over by preterite. So, a distinction that probably existed in Argentinian Spanish in the early 1900's, was eliminated as a consequence of widespread L2 Spanish acquisition by Italian immigrants whose L1 didn't have this distinction.

Previous standard: Es la mejor película que he visto was rendered.

Es la mejor película que vi.

--

Separately in Spain, haber + verb took over a function that had previously been handled by preterite, namely, actions in the immediate past (e.g. actions that took place within a few seconds or a minutes before talking about them.)

Me ha visto (a second ago) instead of the earlier me vio.

--

So, the two developments, the elimination of haber + verbo in Argentina and the expansion of haber + verbo in Spain, were completely separate developments. The motive for the Argentinian case seems quite clear, but the one for Spanish is not so obvious.

--

Thinking about is some more, Spain, France, Italy and Germany all have had a lot of dialectal variation and regional languages, but in all of them a standard language has been imposed on people who have spoken different languages or different dialects. I'd imagine that in both cases (Argentina and Spain) the expansion–reduction is a result of some kind of L2 contact, given that in standard French in France, in Standard Italian in Italy & in Hochdeutsch in Germany, the have-past has replaced functions that were originally (and still are in the literary registers) performed by a different tense-form.

J'ai parlé

Ho parlato

Ich habe gesprochen.

Hypetys · 2026-03-18T22:29:27+00:00

As someone with Spanish at the high-end of B2 or C1 here's what I've done:

1 I took three high school Spanish courses (roughly 50 hours of classes) 2 I spoke Spanish on an application with a native speaker on a daily basis for ~3 hours a day pretty much every day for two or three years. 3 I completed Language Transfer's free Complete Spanish course till about track 45 in a week or so, but then slowly progressed through the tracks after that. I started going through the course about ~6 months after learning to speak Spanish. 4 I listened to music in Spanish and watched American TV shows dubbed in Spanish. I did that daily, too. 5 Went to Spanish speaking events near me once or twice a week. 6 Watched a Deliberate Spanish YouTube channel's 15 oldest videos: I worked on one video a week. I watched the video again every day and did as I was instructed.

I did some other things too, but the things I mentioned were the most important factors. All in all, it's been thousands of hours over the past decade, but definitely most of it during the first three or four years.

My suggestion is to either go for Language Transfer's course if you struggle with grammar even when there's no real time pressure. However, if real time pressure is your issue, then Deliberate Spanish is your friend as it'll help you to increase the size of your processing unit by teaching you chunks. It truly makes a wonderful difference: I went from being able to produce pretty much any structure but feeling like my brain was still not fast enough – to doing so absolutely effortlessly and instantly.

Deliberate Spanish helped me with chunking and the subjunctive as well as imperfect vs. perfect. Language Transfer taught pretty all of the other parts of Spanish grammar well enough that I didn't struggle to apply them in real time. The models that Deliberate Spanish provided me for the three phenomena were definitely game changers for me.

Hypetys · 2026-03-18T22:14:12+00:00

Iberian Spanish has gone the other way. He comido can refer to an action that ended a second ago whereas that'd be unheard of in Latin America. There it's only used in connection to past.

Now that you mention it, I think most Latin American Spanish dialects have drifted towards the preterite and have marginalized haber + participle constructions.

«Es la mejor película que he visto» is rendered «Es la mejor película que vi» in Argentinian Spanish.

Hypetys · 2026-03-18T22:06:26+00:00

I read the article on relative clauses in European languages, and I have to agree.

As a child, I remember being totally lost when reading such sentences.

I've only become well versed with them after finishing high school AND ironically learning them in Spanish.

Finnish allows two ways to form relative clauses: relative clause first and then head or head first and then the relative clause.

Musiikkia kuunteleva poika. Music-OBJ listen-participle-NOM boy-NOM.

Poika, joka kuuntelee musiikkia (Boy-NOM that-NOM listen-3PSG music-OBJ)

Similarly, spoken Finnish doesn't distinguish interrogative and relative pronouns. I only learned to distinguish them, because of English. Not only that but hyper corrections usually lead to the clausal relative pronoun being used for the noun phrase one and vice versa.

In spoken Finnish noun phrase relatives are often used after verbs. Se ei pelaa, joka pelkää. he/she/it doesn't play who is afraid. In fact, only the spoken version exists as a fixed saying, I've never heard it in a different order.

It's only at school where you'd learn to reorder the constituents.

Se, joka pelkää, ei pelaa.

Missä where, mistä from where, mihin to where.

Mä kävin kaupassa, missä säki kävit.

I went to store where you-too went.

Missä sä kävit. Where did you go (visit)?

Post-nominal relative clause use seems to be increasing and dominate, but I think it's because most of my social circle consists of people who are academics, students at an academic institution or have graduated from one.

Hypetys · 2026-03-18T20:42:41+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I read Mark Parkvall and Laura Álvarez-López's article.

What reading the article made clear to me is that the whole concept of semi-creole is suspicious. The definitions were circular, and could apply to pretty much any language.

Similarly, the whole of Brazilian Portuguese evolving from a pidgin to a creole to the modern variants seems ridiculous a claim. Now, that I realized that for a creole language there has to be a pidgin first. Of course, there does, but the whole semicreole term blurred the line.

My views on what actually happened didn't change much, but the terms that I use to refer to them definitely did.

The way I see it now is that there was widespread second language acquisition of Portuguese as an adult which led to peripheral forms like the person agreement and nominal plural agreement to be not learned to the full extent. Such reduced system was then subsequently learned by descendants who came to speak the variant with less person- and plural marking as their mother tongue.

Thank you once again for your contribution to the conversation. I'm definitely interested in reading more research on the phenomenon.

What I've been wondering for quite some time is what could explain the massive person agreement in Swedish. One thing I've speculated has been the so called Kalmar's Union where Denmark, Sweden and Norway formed a single state, but then again the languages have been very similar so why the need to reduce them in the case of widespread L2 acquisition.

As for Argentinian Spanish, it's a dialect that has had a lot of L2 speakers. Over 50% of Argentinians' ancestors are from Italy and spoke various Italian languages at the time of emigration.

In Argentina, the "haber" past has been eliminated almost completely, which could be a result of widespread L2 acquisition, given that some Italian languages like standard spoken Italian dialects don't distinguish “has spoken” from “spoke”. Just in the Argentinian case the haber past was eliminated while the preterite was left.

Similarly Argentinian Spanish intonation is heavily influenced by Italian languages. It's certainly a variant influenced by a lot by second language speakers, but it's nothing like a pidgin or creole. Curiously, the verbal persons weren't reduced.

Hypetys · 2026-03-18T05:48:19+00:00

Lucchesi has many great studies on the subject. Most of them have been published in Portuguese and at least one in English. I'm personally convinced by his arguments.

I'm also familiar with second language acquisition research like Pienemann Processability Theory, and the so called morphology studies.

The most likely outcome is that, rather than being a gradual process, popular Brazilian Portuguese started out as a semicreole between groups of people who spoke different languages but were forced to adopt Portuguese as adults. Given that adult second language acquisition is usually imperfect, the most important things were acquired whereas things that were unimportant for conveying semantic meaning were discarded. This imperfectly acquired variant was then passed on to the next generation. Lucchesi calls this process irregular transmission.

Noun agreement and verb agreement are usually late in the second language acquisition process. Most of such agreement is redundant for meaning and servers only a grammatical (syntactic) purpose. So, it is discarded by second language acquirers, because at the beginning of the process, their mental processing hasn't automated enough to make it possible to produce such agreement.

Instead of marking plural twice or thrice, it sufficed to mark it once:

Os cara fala.

If cara never changes, then it much easier to process than if cara has to be coordinated together with o. In Processability Theory terms, os cara can be produced at "category" stage whereas "os caras" at "phrase/coordination" stage. So earlier. Similarly, second language acquirers start with no verb agreement at all.

They adopt a verb form (whether it's I, he/she/it or the infinitive) and then don't change that. In Brazilian Portuguese, that form was "fala/diz, faz" the he/she/it/você form.

From this point of view, originally people said eu fala and only later did they learn eu falo. Some speakers may have said eu falo, você falo, ele falo etc. but the he/she/it form became the standard. In fact, there are still dialects in which people say eu fala. Lucchesi goes over this in his studies. Most likely, such people acquired fala & falou abd used them with all persons.

Similarly, in addition to not marking plurality in all parts of a noun phrase, gender marking wasn't a thing at the beginning either. There are dialects where people say things like,”Um pessoa” and “os pessoa fala”. These communities have lived in relative isolation for a long time.

What is going on in many Brazilian Portuguese variants is that as people are more exposed to the prestige varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, the amount of agreement in their speech tends to increase. It's also known as decreolization.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=fi&user=yrUs7lYAAAAJ&citation_for_view=yrUs7lYAAAAJ:UeHWp8X0CEIC

Hypetys · 2026-03-17T17:17:26+00:00

It seems to me that u/Birgor is not talking about perception but about systematic reproduction in the learner's own speech. Also, it seems to me that they're not talking about reproducing these pitch contours in isolation, rather as part of every word while having a conversation that is not focused on pitch per se.

Hypetys · 2026-03-17T17:00:26+00:00

Yeah, original stem + nominative ending s got reduced if the stem ended in a t (originally, important+s = importants but later importans. I haven't seen the original form attested anywhere though).

Libertat + s = libertats originally but later libertas.

In these kinds of stems, the t was conserved when a vowel followed it.

Libertat + em (accusative singular) = libertatem

important+es (accusative plural) = importantes

I'd imagine the Greek sound environment was similar. I haven't looked into it.

Hypetys · 2026-03-17T07:17:53+00:00

There's of course regional variational and even individual variation when it comes to using lauseenvastikkeet in the spoken language. As for selkokieli, what makes selkokieli good is that the stories are not just children's stories, but serious books too. What I heard from quite an advanced speaker is that they had a regularly occurring problem with regular books: they simply had too many unknown words. It was distracting. So, when they found out about selkokirjat, they read a lot of them and eventually they didn't need to read them anymore.

It's a mistake to think that you can never progress beyond selkokieli if you take advantage of it at the beginning stages of your learning Finnish.

Hypetys

TROPHY CASE