Thus begins the second of the lengthy reviews which I promised last week without asking whether anyone wanted to read them. This will perhaps be a slightly shorter review, because it is easy to say: yes, I recommend this resource. Four and a half stars: room of room for improvement, and yet still far and away the most effective Latin resource that I have ever used.

What makes Legentibus so great? The answer is pretty simple: it’s usable. I was able to use it. I kept using it. Between the Legentibus Beginner Immersion Course and the handful of additional beginner texts outside the course, I managed to read 101,457 words (~36 hours) in slightly less than four months. That is easily the most Latin I have read since undergrad. I think I read a little more than that during my three semesters of Latin literature in undergrad–I’m pretty sure–I’m sure I was supposed to–but possibly not very much more. I emphatically confess that I did not read that Latin well; it would be more accurate to say that I Loeb’d it than read it. Alas for the G-T experience. Someday I’m going to go back and read a bunch of that stuff for real.

For now, though, I’m just going to keep reading Legentibus (or I will, after I knock out the two CLC books that I own but have never read). I’m going to see if I can make it through all the intermediate books/courses (easier with the app to estimate the total time than the wordcount, ~25 hours) by the beginning of summer. Getting through the advanced books by autumn is probably a little ambitious, but maybe I can get somewhat close.

Because it is so unusual, please allow me to underscore for the reader that I am actually confident that I will keep reading on Legentibus. The readings get harder, sure, but they also get more rewarding. I’ve been meaning to read Pugio Bruti for years; I’m now at the point where I can read it comfortably. An r/latin comment led me to glance at the beginning of Imitatio Christi; I plan to hold off on it until the vocabulary is more comfortable, but it’s not unreadable now. This is pretty exciting, to have Latin texts that I want to read within my grasp or very near to it. It is also pretty exciting to have finally finished reading Familia Rōmāna for the very first time. I have never had this kind of confidence in my own Latin reading ability before, in my entire life. I have never had so much confidence that I am actually going to keep reading Latin.

A few high points from Legentibus: the stories written by the Legentibus team are all good, and some of them are outstanding. For its length, Auda is easily the best and most rereadable narrative that I’ve ever seen for a beginning Latin student. At some point I will probably return to Victor Frans' Stories in easy Latin, Daniel Pettersson’s Fabulae Faciles, and Auda, to see what I can learn about writing compelling stories with sheltered vocabulary. The public domain stories narrated were not all equally compelling–some of them, such as Reynolds' De Stellis et Tellure, were downright dull–but the Latīnitās seemed in my view to be satisfactory, so I just sighed and read them anyway.

Another high point was the narration. I don’t often go in for English audiobooks, because it’s just too hard for me to pay attention to them. Audiobooks typically turn into this tedious endless cycle of realizing that I zoned out, then skipping back thirty seconds, then zoning out again before I’ve hit the sentences I missed, and so on. It’s just not very fun, as a way to experience a book. (I do the same thing when I’m reading a physical book, for what it’s worth, but it’s much easier to navigate going back to reread a paragraph or two, than it is to recapture whatever you missed of an audiobook. Or a conversation, for that matter!)

But the narration (mostly by Pettersson, but also Frans, Amelie Rosengren, Marina Garanin, and Diane Warne Anderson) increased my enjoyment of the story more than I expected. It’s hard for me to decide whether the narration was most impactful when it was particularly excellent per se (such as Pettersson’s on Auda, when his by-now extensive experience is applied to an obvious labor of love), or when the story was just a little bit weak (here I think not only of Pettersson on FR, but also of Garanin on Chickering & Hoadley’s somewhat uneven Beginners' Latin Stories). It is admittedly possible to guess whether Pettersson recorded a story earlier or later in the process, based on the amount of elision and confidence/skill in his Latin reading. In some ways that was encouraging to see, that we can all continue growing in our abilities, and that one does not have to be perfect to start doing worthwhile things.

The narration was also very good for me…because I tend to avoid listening to Latin. I know that I ought to be listening to lots of Latin and not just reading it, but I don’t really like the process very much at all: too overwhelming, too many words I don’t remember or don’t understand in the moment, either so slow and simple that it’s boring or so fast and complicated that I feel hopeless. So far, I have yet to listen to a Latin story on the app without following along with the text. I think however that at some point in the next few months I will give it a shot, with one of the easy stories I have already read and liked the most.

Probably being able to look up words with two taps on my Kindle (which I still do fairly often) is a functionality I could learn to implement with a different Latin app. However, it is nice for a Luddite like me not to have to worry about something like that.

If I like Legentibus so much, why is this not a five-star review?

There are still some items that the team can continue to improve. First of all, and most important–I would be very interested in hearing how well the app has worked for a true Latin beginner, and not just for someone who only ever really learned how to decipher (and that a long time ago). I suspect that it would be a very difficult process, the success of which depends mainly on the student’s inherent linguistic abilities and/or their ability to tolerate delayed gratification. I think, for example, that it would have been extraordinarily difficult–maybe not possible–for me to have learned Latin from scratch using Legentibus. Okay, probably not impossible. But making Legentibus work for a beginner means repeating the readings pretty often; for a good student with a large L1 vocabulary full of helpful cognates, I’m guessing 3-4 repetitions of each text. I would not be surprised if a large number of beginners needed more on the order of 6-7 repetitions of each text to get really comfortable with their grammatical features and their vocabulary. That amount of required rereading is not a small order of difficulty for a student, I think–it is exactly what I have never been able to do with Familia Rōmāna–and it is the area in which I think Legentibus has the most room for improvement.

Again, please reach out if you think I’m wrong! If you learned Latin from scratch with Legentibus and you weren’t tired of the beginner immersion course long before it ended, I’d love to hear about your process. If you are struggling and you’re looking for more free beginner reading material, check out the level 1 difficulty stories on Fabulae Faciles, the Fabellae Latīnae, and/or the early volumes in the Cambridge Latin Course.

I do think they’re a little bit hamstrung by having chosen FR as the core text for the beginner course. When one of their authors sits down to write or adapt a new story, I assume they start with a list of the vocabulary used up to that point in the beginner course and/or FR. Unfortunately, the sequencing of vocabulary is not one of FR’s selling points. Discounting the grammatical vocabulary–since the “Grammatica Latīna” sections are heavily de-emphasized by the app and the pēnsa don’t appear–it is still normal to see about 35 new words per chapter and not unknown to see 88. (Yes, 88 new words in a single chapter! That’s capitulum XXXIV, so it’s not as though you’re going to see them again in this book.) It is simply not a terribly well-chosen list for beginners. My dream is that someday Carla Hurt & co. would come up with a Medulla list of, say:

  • 500 or fewer words, not 1000

  • roughly in order

  • that are key for communicating basic concepts

  • with an early emphasis on key verbs à la the Quaint Quinque, Elite Octō or Sweet Sēdecim

  • that are good for telling short/simple stories (fewer “here are a bunch of animal names/body parts”, unless those nouns are used to dramatic effect in a story)

  • perhaps even with a focus on the vocabulary of some highly-accessible and culturally important authentic text.

Those are the basic goals of my Ancient Greek 101 list, which I pulled from when drafting my own introductory graded reader. The goal was to work from the vocabulary of three different beginner-ish texts to create a graded reader with a particular focus on the vocabulary of the Gospel of John. The draft is stalled out at around 6,000 words while I finish my PhD (and while Seumas Macdonald revises his LGPSI), but someday I hope very much to return to an improved version of that 101 list and my Εἰσαγωγή.

And until someone comes up with a much better Medulla list (which, pace Hurt, is in my opinion going to require ditching a commitment to any particular textbook–they’re just not that compatible in terms of vocabulary), the Legentibus team will presumably keep trying to come up with a sufficient volume of compelling content that sticks roughly to the vocabulary sequence of FR. I wonder very much how that awkward FR list is going to shape future chapters of Auda, which introduces new vocabulary at a perfectly acceptable rate and is (again) the most compelling beginner Latin text I’ve ever read. Will the Legentibus team ever shift the centre of vocabulary towards Auda, rather than continuing to try and fit new texts in with the FR sequence? I hope they consider it. If I was ever trying to work on a Medulla list, I would absolutely make Auda one of my core Latin 101 texts.

In terms of the interface: my UX is not 100% flawless. I don’t know if this is because I am running the app on a Kindle Fire (which required sideloading the Google Play store), or because the app actually has a bug that makes the navigation quite laggy. However, the convenience and comfort of having Legentibus on an e-reader are far too great for me to ever complain very much about eg slow loading, or the fact that your total number of words read won’t show up until you’ve exited and restarted the app. I have seen the odd complaint about the Latin dictionaries the app uses; I don’t know that they’re great, but they haven’t bothered me at my current level. I mention these things mainly so that the user will not be surprised or disappointed if the app doesn’t run flawlessly. I can’t speak to the desktop versions until there’s one for Linux :)

To reiterate in conclusion: as a remedial student, subscribing to Legentibus is the single best decision I’ve ever made for my Latin, and I’m pleased to be supporting Pettersson’s continued excellent work on Auda and other easy Latin stories. I still think this is a very steep curve for true beginners, but unlike with other introductions to Latin, not an impossible one. If you’re willing to reread/re-listen to texts a few times, then this app can get you from square one to reading real Latin pretty comfortably.

I’ll try and post another review once I finish the intermediate texts in the app. In the meantime, fēlīciter legātis!