After trying for awhile, without a great deal of success, to practice Latin on my own, I decided to start taking weekly Latin lessons from an online teacher. It’s been a little over three months of lessons now, and I am really, really enjoying it.

It helps that I have a fantastic teacher. She is very good at knowing where I’m at with the material and pushing me just beyond that, so that I can get there with a little help. I feel like we have covered a lot in a short amount of time.

During the last lesson, we worked on some translation and a sentence from the letters of Seneca came up. It was fun to be able to read what he wrote, as he wrote it, and understand it! Of course, it was only a single sentence, but it’s a start and I am happy with it. I’ve read his letters to Lucilius translated into English, so it felt pretty neat to read even a single line in the original Latin.

This is the sentence: “Homines dum docent discunt.” It can be translated as something like: “People learn while they teach.” There is a Latin proverb that may have been distilled from this line…“Docendo discimus.”