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Learn Latin by reading the endings, not the order

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 an English speaker has to break the habit of reading by order to read Latin at all.

Spin the endings and the English follows; shuffle the word order and it stays put.

English speakers arrive at Latin assuming the first noun is the subject. It often isn't. The ending says which word does what, and the order is free to do something else. Until you have felt that, every sentence is a guessing game. The block below spins the endings and lets you shuffle the words, so you can see the order never carried the meaning.

What people come here to do

You describe the goal in your own words and the plan asks questions back until it is one you would follow. Goals usually look like these.

  • “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

There is no fixed syllabus. The plan is built around your goal and drops what it does not need. These are the topics it draws from.

  • 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