![]() ![]() He knew what he was up to, because he had written the first English edition of the definitive 19th Century German Conversational textbook, and a German-English dictionary (both are still in print, over 150 years later). Once he had left the University, and didn’t have to worry about his career, and he did something totally off the wall – he wrote the first proper book in English for studying conversational Latin as though it were French or German or any other living language. Really, I’m serious they locked him up in a mental asylum. Adler was one of those super geniuses who was so bright he went nuts. The backbone of the podcast is this amazing book by a guy called George Adler that I stumbled across online using Google Books. What sort of stuff do you have on the podcast? There have been over seven million file downloads since the podcast started in May 2007. I have more students online now, using the podcast, than I would ever see in a lifetime at school. I decided to put some serious work into it, and now it is full of wonderful Latin to listen to. This applies to most adult students, everywhere, as there are almost no informal programmes to speak of for teaching Latin to adults outside of the big universities. The podcast gives access to a full education in Latin, to students in countries with no tradition of teaching the language, and who otherwise would not have access to anything other than a textbook. There are now a few thousand file downloads per day, and the user base is international. Then I noticed it was getting hits, and these were increasing exponentially. I wasn’t really thinking that anyone would be massively interested it was going to be my personal archive of Latin stuff online. ![]() I originally set up the podcast just for myself. Most of the files online in 2006 that were in Restored Classical pronunciation were in realaudio, and these can’t be played away from the computer, or saved in iTunes. In the beginning,I was doing this for myself. So I started to write to people with audio in Latin that was already online, for permission to transfer the files to mp3 format, so I could stick them on my iPod. ![]() I’d had enough of learning Latin that way, and nodding off over declension tables. Grammar books, unfortunately, send me to sleep. and I also didn’t want to have my nose in a book for longer than necessary. I don’t like sitting in front of my computer all day,unless I am doing something, like building a website, or making something, or writing. With Latin, this always presented me with a problem, as there was almost no stuff around that I could put on my MP3 player. My natural way of learning a language is to listen to a lot of it. I have been studying Latin for some years now, in a desultory fashion, and decided I wanted to rev things up a notch. Well, like many things, it happened by accident. ![]()
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