Oxford Latin Language
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Oxford Latin Language
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Oxford Latinitas provides world-class active language teaching in ancient Greek and Latin.
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© 2022 Oxford Latinitas Ltd, Company no. 13396137
At Oxford Latinitas we teach and study ancient languages using the Active Method. We currently offer Ancient Greek and Latin, and are actively planning the addition of Sanskrit. Many of us learned through this method ourselves, including some who had previously been told they would never be able to ‘catch up’ in Latin and Greek; others among us were taught traditionally but have found renewed enthusiasm and joy in teaching through the Active Method.
Learning a language is hard work. We have to acquire new vocabulary, absorb new grammar, understand new ways of thinking. The active method doesn’t make parsing, translating, and carefully analysing constructions any less important or necessary, but we believe it makes all of it more enjoyable — and feedback from our students consistently confirms this to be the case.
The Active Method means that all our classes are taught in the target language. Right from the first lesson, our students speak, hear, read and write in Latin or Ancient Greek, experiencing it as what a language truly is: a means of communication and a mode of thought.
This method develops all four skills that constitute a language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The target language is often used for conversation outside the classroom too — for example on visits to ancient sites and museums during our residential courses.
Bringing ancient languages to life means fully experiencing what ancient texts offer us, whether in the classroom or on the streets of Athens and Rome. Students are enabled to engage actively with the language they are learning, and thus to learn more quickly and effectively.
We use the Active Method because modern neuroscience, as well as our own experience as teachers and learners, tell us that this is the most natural way to learn a language — especially for students with no previous experience in classical or other foreign languages. In particular, speaking and listening require real-time language processing, which forces one to be much faster at thinking in the language and increases one’s fluency, not only in speech but in reading too.
Researchers agree that, to learn a language well, we need to be exposed to it as much and as often as possible. Using it as the main language in the classroom means students get much more exposure than in a traditional classroom, while reading the text and then explaining it in the original encourages a deeper understanding of the language than is typically achieved through translation exercises.
Speaking the language also encourages a strong appreciation of the importance of grammar, because grammatical mistakes inhibit understanding.
The active method is enjoyable and stimulating for the students — we can do anything from talking about our personal experiences to acting scenes from Greek dramas, transforming Latin poetry into rhetorical scenes in which characters in the story describe their experiences, organising mock trials in Latin, and so on. The variety opened up by the active use of the language helps keep our students motivated.
Our core teaching principles are excellence, academic rigour, and immersion . To maintain these we constantly pursue all three within the teaching team. All our communications with one another are carried out in Latin or Ancient Greek. We meet regularly, by video-conference or in person, to share ideas and learn from one another. We undergo teacher observation and feedback on each of our courses, and participate in regular debrief sessions at the end of each programme.
All our teachers are experienced in and able to adapt their skills and abilities to the different teaching modes we offer (online classes, in-person study programmes and tutoring).
Our courses follow the same basic curriculum, but teachers have the freedom to tailor their teaching to students’ progress and the needs of the class. This freedom is a source of continuous improvement and helps to generate innovative ideas within the teaching team.
Our classes follow a precise curriculum, designed to ensure the best results in a short amount of time. Teachers assess students’ progress through a variety of exercises and assignments, covering all areas of language studies.
Speaking : small class sizes give every student the chance to interact with the teacher in all possible situations, and allow the teacher to correct and guide students to greater confidence and fluency. Students may find themselves, for example, answering questions, telling stories, engaging in philological conversations and philosophical debates, describing pictures and impersonating characters from the ancient world in impromptu ethopoeiai .
Listening : we like to challenge our students by degrees. Teachers progressively increase the pace and difficulty of their spoken Latin or Greek, gradually adopting more complex constructions and challenging vocabulary. By the end of the course, students are able to understand and engage in conversation and discussions with greater fluency and often at a much quicker pace than when they started.
Writing : throughout our courses, our teachers assign writing exercises to track students’ grammatical, lexical and phraseological progress, by challenging them with different genres and styles. Students may find themselves, for example, writing rhetorical speeches, stories, letters, or dialogues in Cicero’s or Lucian’s style, or retelling or summarising passages of ancient prose or verse. For each of these tasks, our teachers provide students with careful corrections and suggestions for grammatical as well as stylistic progress.
Grammar : our teachers assign various exercises on all grammatical topics covered in class, taking them from textbooks such as Familia Romana or preparing them ad hoc (some of our teachers often surprise us with their drawing skills! What’s better than studying participles with some drawings of the Parthenon or ancient Greek kings?).
We never cease to be amazed at how quickly our students improve in a few days. Take a look at what students themselves have to say about their progress!
At the end of each course we provide class certificates to students who require them.
Oxford Latinitas was founded by Guenevera Jo in 2017, as a student society at the University of Oxford, running increasingly sought-after term-time classes, seminars and musical evenings, and study trips to Rome during the vacations. In 2020 we took our classes and seminars online, and ran our first Summer Schools; and in 2021 we incorporated as an independent company and launched our tutoring service and a wider range of study trips to locations with classical connections. Although the company was set up by people who met through Classics at Oxford University, it is entirely independent of the University.
Dr Melinda Letts graduated with a first class degree in Literae Humaniores from St Anne’s College, Oxford, followed by two years as Research Assistant to Professor Keith Hopkins, with whom she collaboratively authored a chapter of his book Death and Renewal (Cambridge, 1983). She then decided to try life outside academia, working first in overseas development and subsequently in a series of leadership roles in UK health charities and public bodies, for which she was appointed OBE in 2003. She returned to academic life in 2009 and is Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages at Jesus College and Lecturer in Classics at Harris Manchester College, Oxford . Her doctoral research, undertaken at Christ Church, Oxford, brought together both strands of her career in a study of the 1st century Greek doctor Rufus of Ephesus’s unique treatise on the importance of questioning patients about all aspects of their life and condition. Melinda loves teaching ancient languages because it enables her students to engage for themselves with the thinking and experience of those who have gone before us, and bring their own interpretations to texts that have been read and discussed for millennia.
Althea R. L. Sovani is currently reading for a BA in Classics with Sanskrit at Somerville College, University of Oxford. In 2020 she won the Chancellor’s Latin Prose Composition Prize, and in the same year she was awarded a Qatar Thatcher Scholarship by Somerville College. She comes from Italy, where she first learned Ancient Greek and Latin at the state school G. Berchet in Milan. While at school, she won national translation competitions from Ancient Greek. She is passionate about Indo European philology, grammaticalisation and periphrastic constructions. Nothing delights her more than enquiring into the origin of words and decoding grammatical structures. She loves Pseudo-Longinus, Marcus Aurelius and the Sanskrit philosopher-grammarian Bhartṛhari. Her role models are Pāṇini, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Benedetto Croce. Althea cannot bear the use of the term thing — except in philosophical discourse — and defends all words from maiming abbreviations, adjectives from superlatives, clauses from stylistic impoverishment and synonyms from oblivion.
Brian Lapsa is a D.Phil. student in Classics researching the late pagan and early Christian use of exempla for ethical formation. After a BA in History and German at the University of Virginia, he worked in marketing and translation, ultimately returning to academic life to read Philosophy (M.A., M.Phil.) at Leuven and Classics (B.A.) at Oxford. He has taught at the University of Leiden and is currently Assistant Researcher in Roman History at the University of Latvia. In 2018-19 Brian served as President of the Oxford Latinitas Society.
Cole Whetstone is from Durham, North Carolina, USA. He completed his undergraduate degree in Classics and Philosophy at Harvard University in 2018, and this summer completed his MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford; where he also taught Spoken Ancient Greek for the OLP. Cole lives for philosophical conversation. Left to his own devices, he spends all his time quibbling over curious (not to say profound) inanities. His new favourite is whether the aphorism “vinaigrette is only stable when it is moving; and so with all things” is completely or only partly true.
Cynthia Liu is a third year DPhil candidate at Jesus College writing her doctoral thesis on the role of mystery language and imagery in Greek and Roman poetry. Though she grew up with Ancient Greek and Latin, she only began speaking them when she joined the Oxford Latinitas Project in 2018 during her MSt at Brasenose College. Before coming to Oxford, Cynthia received her B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Baylor University in Classics and Linguistics. Along with reading and teaching Latin and Greek, she is passionate about music, dance, and food.
Guenevera Jo was the founder and first president (2017-18) of the Oxford Latinitas Project, and the director of its first two Septimanae Latinae . She is currently a DPhil candidate in Classics (Language and Literature) at Oriel College writing her doctoral thesis on dialectic in Latin Philosophy, specifically the Augustinian fragment ‘de dialectica.’ She has also taught Latin at Jesus College and is an intern at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, currently working on the word revirescere . Besides academics, she loves classical music, good arguments, running, and reading with friends.
Jan Preiss grew up in Bohemia and is currently reading for his BA in Classics at New College, Oxford. He learnt Latin using the active method and, having experienced its effects first-hand, he is passionate about making it accessible to everyone. Jan is notorious in the Oxford Latinitas team for preferring Homer over Virgil and for being way too keen on all things technological. He has a long-standing interest in China and Chinese culture. He also likes philosophy, opera, and tennis.
Dylan Jones, Our Senior Independent Director, is a graduate of University College Oxford, where he read Modern History.
During his 35 year executive career he led businesses for Coats, Bunzl, Staples, Northgate and KKR, including 18 years living and working in Peru, Japan, Hongkong, Australia and Italy, learning Spanish, Japanese and Italian “in situ”.
More recently Dylan has taken on the role of Chair at several dynamic young companies, including “Devoted” – marketing premium pet foods – and “Stitch & Story”, offering materials and instruction for textile crafts. He is also Vice Chair at HMT, a medical charity with two hospitals, several dementia-specialised care homes, and over 500 employees.
Dylan loves cricket, conversation, and cultural exploration.
Alwaleed Alsaggaf was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and lived there until the age of 16 when he moved to London to pursue his studies. Having received his IB diploma in 2015, he went to Birkbeck, University of London to read philosophy, and graduated from there in 2019. After finishing his first year at Birkbeck, he went to study Latin and Greek at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in 2016-2017. Alwaleed is now an MA researcher in Ancient Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, where he also currently teaches a course entitled “Latin for Philosophers”. He previously worked as a teacher of Latin language and literature at Eton College for two years.
His main research interests are ancient philosophy and its reception in the Arabic and Latin world, as well as contemporary analytic philosophy. Alwaleed is also passionate about Latin composition and teaching philosophy in Latin.
Ayelet Wenger teaches the OLP introduction to spoken Latin and was the coordinator of Septimana Latina 2020. She spent two years studying classical rabbinic literature in Israel, received her B.A. in Classics, summa cum laude , from Princeton University, and is now pursuing a postgraduate career in Judaism and Christianity in the Graeco-Roman World. Her thesis analyzes Septuagintalisms in the Gospel of Luke. Ayelet loves backpacking and other forms of wandering, Derek Walcott, and frequentatives.
Finlay O’Duffin is an independent Latin tutor and scholar serving as a non-executive committee member of the society. In Trinity Term of the OLP’s first year (2018) he developed and taught a weekly Schola Rhetorica in Latin on the basis of ancient progymnasmata. In 2016 and 2017 he taught at Vivarium’s summer schools, for which he also developed a Palaestra dicendi curriculum for practical oratory. His studies were in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic (B.A., Jesus College, Cambridge); the Western Literary Tradition (M.A., Leuven, 2013); Latin and Greek (Vivarium Novum, 2013-14); and Law (LLB, London College of Law, 2018).
Iván Parga Ornelas is pursuing his PhD in Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick, where he is a Chancellor´s International Scholar. Iván has previously worked as an assistant teacher at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Rome, where he started his Latin studies in 2009. He graduated in Classical and Christian Literature at the Pontificium Institutum Altioris Latinitatis in Rome, and received his MA in Medieval studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. He organizes events for the OLP in Rome and Oxford. His interests are in medieval and Neo-Latin literature, especially Petrarch, Erasmus, and Maffeo Vegio. His favourite authors are Virgil and Jorge Luis Borges. Iván served as the Vice-President of the OLS for the academic year 2019/20.
Harry Forsyth is in his fourth year reading for his BA in Classics at New College, Oxford. He comes to the team after helping to launch a highly successful educational start up. He is keen to use his marketing skills to help as many students as possible be exposed to the active method and dramatically improve their language skills. In his spare time you’ll find him charging about on the football pitch, rowing for his college, or even on the mic at a karaoke night.
Jack Woodworth is from California and is studying for a bachelor’s degree in Classics with Sanskrit at Corpus Christi. He began learning Latin and studying historical linguistics as a young teenager and has since begun learning Greek and Sanskrit at Oxford, where he is now in his fourth year. He teaches the beginner’s Latin class for the OLP and occasionally gives sma
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