Course updates!

Many have asked when the new ver­sion of the begin­ner course is com­ing. I can­not yet say for cer­tain but I hope we can launch it dur­ing the fall. Here’s a brief update.

The new ver­sion of the begin­ner course is large­ly some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. At itds core will remain the adven­ture nov­el about Auda and Wulfin, but I have embed­ded this nov­el as a cen­tral part of a much larg­er frame course. Each mod­ule of the course will con­tain a chap­ter from the nov­el but also new­ly writ­ten dia­logues and addi­tion­al read­ings all meant to cre­ate an immer­sive in-world expe­ri­ence.

The goal is to cre­ate the most engag­ing and immer­sive Latin course all in Latin. (I’m writ­ing the notes with def­i­n­i­tions and expla­na­tions in Latin too). I’ve more or less com­plet­ed the the text of the first two mod­ules that togeth­er make up ca 6000 words to read (still with a small unique word count for high com­pre­hen­sion).

I’m cur­rent­ly work­ing on mod­ule three which will add some 3000 words of read­ing. It takes a gigan­tic amount of time and work to craft the text of this course in such a way that it builds grad­u­al­ly from vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing to being able to han­dle com­plex nar­ra­tive with plots. I want to make sure that the increase in lex­i­cal and syn­tac­ti­cal com­plex­i­ty is very smoothe and keeps the text com­pre­hen­si­ble. In addi­tion, in the new ver­sion learn­ers will also learn about top­ics rel­e­vant to the sto­ry e.g. Roman army, Ger­man­ic life etc.

Amelie is work­ing hard every night after we put the kids to bed on research­ing and cre­at­ing illus­tra­tions for every­thing. The amount of research and care she puts in to make sure that every­thing looks accu­rate (down to minute details of how a shield looks!) is inspir­ing.

We aim to launch the course with the first 5 mod­ules (but it depends one how much time it takes) which would then total around 14000 words. The course I am envi­sion­ing will be mon­u­men­tal (around 60 mod­ules), but I hope it will turn out high­ly use­ful and engag­ing for learn­ers of Latin.

It will be a long jour­ney and we will share our progress here.

Thank you for all your kind words and sup­port!

Daniel Pet­ters­son