Martinus Loch

Another great lesson with Martinus. I still feel my Latin improving with Martinus every session and it has been fun to see my improvement: I happened to have an exam that involved scansion and it was funny to see how learning to speak Latin with vowel lengths enabled me to extremely rapidly scan 20 lines of text at perhaps 500% speed compared to my prior speed.

Another good lesson with Martinus about chapter XIII of LLPSI I. He certainly knows a lot of antiquity trivia which is always fun to be taught about in Latin. In addition, he spoke quite a lot during this lesson but at the end said next lesson he'll think of different questions so as to enable me to speak more, which does show he thinks about his lessons a lot which is great.

Another good lesson with Martinus about theRoman army (chapter 12). He was slightly late and left early, but I guess I cannot hold him accountable for that as it is not unusual for the lessons to last a little bit longer so that the net result is probably the same.

Great lesson with Martinus about Cicero's "de Nature Deorum", in specific the passage about the senses. It's fun to discuss texts like that with Martinus, fully in Latin of course, and at the end to be able to easily understand it without resorting to English by any means. I will eagerly continue studying until we have finished Familia Romana and look forward to when most of our lessons will be such discussions of real texts, although I like that Martinus doesn't give up on FR yet (since it is important to get the basics right and not to rush things).

Martinus makes Latin very fun, and using the language actively has really made me a lot more excited about Latin than I used to be (especially as someone who at least used to have more love for the Greek side of things). Today we read a hexametrical inscription about the dog Margarita on which Ørberg based the dog Margarita of the family, as well as some related verses of the Aeneid concerning Dido which I had read in class. It was fun to see how he was able to quote them by memory in beautiful Latin, which again is a testament to his great expertise in Latin. Martinus should definitely be your first pick if you're looking for a Latin speaking teacher on here, and I'm 100% sure anyone who does so will enjoy it. Although I have had years of reading experience, saying even the simplest things was quite hard initially but now I notice Latin has already become much easier to speak after just three weeks with Martinus, so I can only imagine how well everything will be in a year or two.

We had an excellent lesson today: while describing some funny comics ;-) we used many important structures like Accusativus cum Infinitivo, Ablativus Absolutus, “cum” + Coniunctivo, Participium Coniunctum, Gerundivum et alia. Gratias, Martine!