Not all English words come from Latin…

Many of my students often have the misconception that all languages, including English, come from Latin. Nope.  Not true.  A lot of languages come from Latin, but English is not one of them.  English is a Germanic language. We have borrowed a ton of vocabulary from...

Which meaning?

I received this question: My son came across a problem on Visual Latin 1 Lesson 15. On the answer sheet it says that the word “feminam” means wife and “feminas” means wives but on the vocabulary list, it is not listed. It is listed as woman....

Better than flash cards?

I received this question: My question: my 10-year-old son and I are super enjoying VL1. You are a brilliant teacher. Now that we are on lesson 10 he has a lot of vocab words to memorize. He writes out the flash cards and reviews them almost daily. Are there any better...

How to learn all the vocabulary…

Estimates vary… but, it seems you need at least a few thousand words in your head to be able to speak fluently in another language. Since there is no way to nail down an exact number, I am going with 2,000. If you learn just 50 words a week, you would possess...

A note to a discouraged student…

I received this email: I am very worried that I am not doing well with my Latin. Up until around Chapter 32, I can read most of the chapters pretty well, even if I read pretty slowly. But I can hardly read Chapter 32 at all, and I know we’re supposed to be...