Meet the ancient world in its own words.
Learn a few minutes a day, from the first letters to real texts, with every line spoken in the language's own tradition. Start free with Latin or Greek, or with Egyptian, Hebrew, and more.
Product tour
What's inside
Lessons, review, a conversation Coach, and a guided Reader make one path, from your first letters to the texts you came for. Pick the style of your lesson pictures, or turn them off.
Why learn one
Learn what they learned.
Newton published his laws of motion in Latin. Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Latin at twenty-four. Jefferson called reading both in the original a sublime luxury. Gandhi failed Latin, sat the exam again, and later read Roman law in it. For more than a thousand years this was what an education meant: Latin and Greek in Europe, Classical Chinese across East Asia, Sanskrit across South Asia, Classical Arabic from Córdoba to Java.
Your own words
More than half of English vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek, much of it through French. Every species known to science is named in Latin, and law and medicine still run on both languages. Learn the roots, and words you never studied begin to explain themselves.
Why things are so
A senate is, in Latin, a council of elders. The notes re, mi, fa, sol, and la are syllables from a Latin hymn. Algebra is an Arabic word from the title of a ninth-century book. History, law, music, and mathematics keep their reasons in the languages they were worked out in.
Other people's mistakes
Thucydides wrote the history of a ruinous war as “a possession for all time”, for anyone who wants to see clearly what happened and what will happen again. People have been learning from it for twenty-four centuries.
Where you come from
A scripture, a liturgy, a family's prayers, the lines your culture quotes without remembering where they began. Come to them with skill of your own, and keep scholarship and living interpretation at hand.
In the original
Translations remain essential companions. Learning the language adds sound, structure, ambiguity, and context.
What you can't see yet
Few people who learn calculus become mathematicians. Schools teach it anyway, on the old conviction that exact, difficult work forms a person in ways no one can list in advance. For centuries teachers held the same of Latin and Greek, where no sentence can be skimmed. Jefferson's father put him in a Latin school at nine. At fifty-six Jefferson wrote: “I thank on my knees him who directed my early education.”
Not a dead end
Among applicants to US medical schools for 2025, humanities majors got in at a higher rate than biology majors (AAMC). That reflects who chooses the humanities, not what causes what, but it answers the worry that this path leads nowhere.
A prince's schooling
A library of Latin classics was edited for one boy, the heir of Louis XIV. Elizabeth I, her tutor wrote, still read Greek every day as queen. The fables of the Panchatantra are framed as lessons for three princes. For most of history this schooling took a tutor and a family able to pay one. Here it is free to start.
Homeschool
Latin you can lead at home.
Teach at home is a mode for parents and teachers: plan PRAVIEL's Latin lessons, follow each student, and keep a record, in Classical or Ecclesiastical pronunciation.
Plan each week
A scope and sequence, a weekly plan that moves around holidays, teacher notes, and answer keys.
Follow each student
Students 13 and over link their own account, so you see their next lesson and checkpoint scores.
Print what you need
Flashcards and worksheets for the lessons, and a dated record of each student's work.
Greek follows Latin. On our roadmap: a path to college credit, starting with Latin.
What they found inside.
A few unedited words from early learners. Feedback is shown anonymously and remains in its original English.
I'm glad I've finally found a reliable, free source for learning ancient languages.Blog
Journal
Essays on language, learning, and the craft behind the lessons.
The Minoan Word We Learned by Doing the Sums
Linear A, the script of Bronze Age Crete, can be sounded out but not understood. Its most secure word is the exception, and we know what it means only because the numbers before it add up.
Read essayThe Oldest Recipes Leave the Cooking to You
Babylonian tablets from about 1730 BCE hold the oldest known recipes. They name the dish, list what goes in and say almost nothing else. One Akkadian word and one Latin word show how much the cook was trusted to know.
The Cyclops Joke Nolan Couldn't Translate
Christopher Nolan left Homer's most famous joke out of The Odyssey. "Puns in translation are tough," he said. In Greek the trick works twice, and the second half has never survived translation.
View all essaysFAQ
Questions before you start
Short answers to what people ask most before their first lesson.