When learning Greek and Latin became difficult, and what we can do about it

A word cloud for the word ναῦς ‘ship’ in Homer, generated by Perseus under Philologic

This blog post is meant as a companion to a piece I've written with my friend and colleague Daniela Negro for the next issue of Res Difficiles (Spring 2025). The piece covers the fascinating history (and pitfalls) of how Latin and Greek have been taught over the last two hundred years (as it turns out, you can always blame the Prussians!), and makes the case for embracing more progressive approaches, either by implementing a few small and gradual changes in the classroom, or by diving into the world of communicative methods (as Daniela herself has done over the past few years, with fantastic results). We incorporated many concrete pieces of advice and strategies in the paper, but we wanted to also create a space where we could share more useful resources over time.

Below you can find all of the resources that we reference in the paper, as well as a few more that we will keep adding in the future.

Training for Teaching Greek and Latin communicatively

• Centro di Studi Classici Greco Latino Vivo 

• The Polis Institute

Youtube Channels for Spoken Latin

• Magister Craft

• Scorpio Martianus

• Satura Lanx

Useful Tools for Developing Course Materials/Exercises

• Wordwall 

• Learning Apps 

• H5P 

• Perseus under Philologic 

• Vocabulary Tool on Perseus 

Textbooks that can Support a Communicative Teaching Method

Latin

• Ørberg, Hans Henning. 2011. Lingua Latina per se illustrata: Familia Romana. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

• Desessard, Clément. 2015. Le Latin. Paris: Assimil. (also available in Italian)

• Sumus (high school Latin curriculum)

Greek

• Balme, Maurice, Gilbert Lawall, and James Morwood. 2016. Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek. Oxford University Press.

• Guglielmi, Jean-Pierre. 2003. Le grec ancien. Paris: Assimil. (also available in Italian)

• Rico, Christophe. 2015. Polis: Speaking Greek as a Living Language. Polis Institute Press.

• Saffire, Paula and Catherine Fries. 1999. Ancient Greek Alive. The University of North Carolina Press.

Books to Brush up on Basic Linguistic Terminology

• Bauer, Laurie and Peter Trudgill (eds.). 1998. Language Myths. London: Penguin.

• Fromkin, Victoria, Rodman, Robert, and Hyams, Nina. 2014. An Introduction to Language, 10th edition. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

• Ringe, Don. 2018. An Introduction to Grammar for Language Learners. Cambridge University Press.

Where to Start Reading about Language Pedagogy

• Adema, Suzanne. 2019. Latin learning and instruction as a research field. Journal of Latin Linguistics 18.35–59. 

• Coffee, Neil. 2012. Active Latin: "Quo Tendimus?". The Classical World 105.2.255–69.

• Gruber-Miller, John (ed.). 2006. When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin. Oxford University Press.

• Hunt, Steven. 2022. Teaching Latin: Contexts, Theories, Practices. London: Bloomsbury.

• Hunt, Steven. 2023. Starting to Teach Latin. London: Bloomsbury.

• Keeline, Tom. 2019. “Aut Latine aut nihil”? A middle way. The Classical Outlook 94.2.57–65.

• Richards, Jack C. and Theodore S. Rogers. 2014. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.