Embark on this unrivaled adventure with Latin 101: Learning a Classical Language, 36 innovative lectures that cover the material normally presented in a first-year college course in Latin. By watching these entertaining lectures, practicing the drills, and doing the exercises in the accompanying guidebook, you will gain access to some of the world’s greatest thought in its original language. You will also understand why no translation can reproduce the elegance and charm of Latin. Your guide is Professor Hans-Friedrich Mueller of Union College in Schenectady, New York, an award-winning teacher and textbook author who brings warmth, humor, and enthusiasm to the age-old profession of Latin master. To his students, Professor Mueller is simply Molinarius, which is Latin for his surname, Mueller, which means “miller” in English. Fully equipped to live in ancient times, Professor Mueller speaks Latin using the restored classical pronunciation, which melodiously approximates the way Latin was spoken in antiquity. When he speaks, Latin is indeed alive!

After just a few hours of Greek 101: Learning an Ancient Language, you’ll understand why no translation can capture the expressive power of this incomparable tongue. In some ways simpler than English, in other ways more complex, Greek is a delight to study. As you work through these 36 engaging half-hour lessons, mastering the graceful alphabet, the precision of the nouns and verbs, the endlessly flexible syntax, and a vivid vocabulary, you’ll learn words and phrases such as these:

• μῆνιν: Pronounced mēnin, the first word of Homer’s Iliad means wrath, setting the tone for the entire epic, which is about the consequences of Achilles’ anger and how it leads the Greek army to the brink of ruin in the Trojan War. In this course, you read the first 125 lines of the Iliad—in Greek.
• ἥρως: Once sounded out—hērōs—this word is obviously hero, and such larger-than-life warriors from Greek mythology are the chief characters in the Iliad. After learning the Greek alphabet and diacritical marks, you suddenly see the wide influence of Greek on English.
• μαθηταὶ: That’s you, the students, pronounced mathētai, and it’s how Professor Hans-Friedrich Mueller addresses you throughout this course. It has the same root (a verb that means “to learn”) as our word mathematics, and in the New Testament it comes to mean disciples.
• μὴ γένοιτο: Pronounced mē genoito, it means literally, may this not happen. More colloquially, it translates, God forbid! and it isone of St. Paul’s favorite expressions, used in Romans 7:13 and elsewhere. In this course, you read many such extracts from the New Testament—in Greek.

Dr. John McWhorter, one of America's leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 300,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 7,000 languages used around the world today.   An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune. The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter's arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."