this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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If I'd pick a global language I'd pick to return to Latin.
Hell no.
Hell no... Because the Vatican mostly uses it? So... what do they speak in hell? Klingon?
No, because it's an unnecessarily complicated language that doesn't even have that many speakers. There's basically the same amount of people who would have to learn it as for Esperanto (knowing some Latin and speaking it fluently are very different), and learning Latin to the level of fluency would take much longer than Esperanto.
Yeah and English is well established, most people already know some of it.
Still, I like languages, so Latin seems interesting to me. :D
In that case read Lingua Latina per se Illustrata by Hans Orberg. I now read quite well in latin thanks to his self teach books, but theyre really interesting - they teach using the natural method... ie there is no english or french or anything - the entire book is in latin. The first lines are :
Roma in Italia est.
Italia in Europa est.
Italia et Francia in Europa sunt.
And then you have to figure out (with the help of cryptic annotations) that est (is) is singular and sunt (are) is plural. No going back to your own language, no phrases. By the end of the first chapter you are beginning to decline nouns and adjectives. Puella pulchra est, Puellae pulchrae sunt. And you have no idea you are doing it. No boring rote learning of declensions, its like you're learning as you would as a child.
And now I can mostly understand reading romance languages I don't know well(romanian, spanish, etc) thanks to learning latin (Also, I am a fluent french speaker) and other people have copied his method into loads of languages so I collected lots of natural method books for german and italian etc.
Thank you really really much for this recommendation, seems like something I definitely want to read! :D
Familia Romana is the first book. https://archive.org/details/llpsi-pars-i-familia-romana
Thanks! I've already ordered it. Pretty excited about this.
Spero tibi librum placere
Do you happen to know whether that also exists for other languages?
I know some French and even less Ukranian, so if something like that exists for those thatʼd probably help me a lot as it seems like something I can easily do in the evening when I lack motivation for other methods. :D
So do you want to learn it in 3 months or 3 decades? Tough choice.
Children pick up languages fast. Immersion is key.
Plus Latin is already taught at a lot of schools, Esperanto doesn't have this advantage.
If I had to pick a constructed language, I think Ido or Lojba would be better. Or hell, Toki Pona if you only care about fast vocab.
The reintroduction of Welsh via primary schooling in Wales has been super successful, a really good example of how quickly kids learn and I used to know some couples who had young children that could speak Welsh and they didn't and it really bugged them as they had no idea what their kids are saying. But pretty much in one or two generations of children, a very endangered language is coming back.
Yeah, it's beautiful. Here's to hope that that'll happen to Irish too.
Esperanto has far more C2 level speakers than Latin. Teachers teaching Latin in European highschools generally can't speak it themselves. It's not taught as a living language to use on your life, it's taught in order to understand ancient scripts.