Leitner

Learn Latin by reading the endings, not the order

Every English speaker arrives at Latin with one expensive habit: that the first noun is the subject. It is not — the ending says which word is doing what, and the order is free to do something else entirely. Until that has been felt rather than explained, every sentence is a puzzle solved by guessing. So the block below spins the endings and lets you shuffle the words to prove the order was never carrying the meaning.

Spin the endings and the English follows. Shuffle the word order and it does not — that is the whole of Latin case.

Latin · inflectionS/O S/O V
puellaNOM SG
poētamACC SG
laudat3SG PRES

the girl praises the poet

orderpuella poeta laudat

Shuffle the word order. The English does not move, because none of the meaning was in the order — it is all in the endings, and this is the habit an English speaker has to break to read Latin at all.

Start a Latin planThe first lesson of every plan is free

What people come here to do

You describe the goal in your own words and it asks questions back until the plan is one you would actually follow. These are the shapes that goal usually takes.

  • Read Caesar or Virgil without a facing translation
  • Pass a Latin paper I have to sit for a degree
  • Get through a GCSE or A-level set text
  • Pick Latin back up years after school

What a Latin plan covers

Not a fixed syllabus — the plan is built around your goal and cuts what does not serve it. These are the topics it draws from, and whatever you get wrong comes back until it stops coming back.

The cases, and what each one marks
The five declensions
Verb conjugation, tense and voice
Participles and the ablative absolute
Subordinate clauses and the subjunctive
Reading real prose at speed

Other subjects

The mechanics are the same whatever the subject — a slider is a slider whether it is moving a coefficient or a rate of return. What changes is what it is a slider for.

Or see how it works and what it costs.