FAQs

If you have a question about the Ancient Language Institute or our class offerings, take a look below. We might have already answered it. If this doesn’t help, head over to our Contact page and reach out. We’re always happy to talk!

If you want to read more about our team, check out the About page. And if you want to read about ancient languages and language pedagogy, check out our blog.

Credits and Accreditation

No. We do, however, have partnerships with institutions that grant college credit for some of our courses. Let us know if this might be relevant to you!

We do have partnerships with institutions that grant college credit for some of our courses. Further, if you are a current or future graduate student hoping to get language credit for a master’s or a PhD program, you do not necessarily need an official transcript from an accredited institution in order to get your language credit. We would be happy to talk with anyone from your institution about our courses – there is a chance that they would be willing to grant you credit for our courses. This has worked for some of our students in the past.

Often, PhD programs simply care about competency or making sure that you can pass a competency exam. If this is what your program is concerned with, we can most certainly help you with that! We have been reliably able to take students from zero knowledge of an ancient language to deep reading proficiency and competence in speaking. Our students in graduate school elsewhere have done great on their competency exams.

Yes. While most students don’t need something like this, and thus a certificate isn’t a standard part of taking an ALI class, some of our students have requested such a thing. If proof of successful completion of an ALI class or classes would be helpful for you, we would be happy to issue you a letter on ALI letterhead to show to your institution. There is no charge associated with this. Just ask!

Classes at ALI

Our pedagogical approach is focused around the Direct Method of language learning and exposure to comprehensible input. What this means is that we attempt to keep to a minimum any extended explanations of grammar or vocabulary memorization drills. Our students want to learn to read ancient texts, so instead of endlessly dissecting the target language, we get our students actively using the language as soon as possible, so that they’re building their reading skills from day one.

Practically, what this looks like:

  • Every student, as part of their tuition, gets access to an interactive, digital textbook that introduces grammar and vocabulary contextually, meaning that students learn new concepts and words accompanied by pictures and videos (rather than charts and lists).

  • Students also read through carefully constructed readers that gradually expose them to new concepts and words over time, as their mastery of the language builds and builds.

  • Once a week, your class meets with your ALI professor over Zoom to discuss the readings and exercises you’ve been doing, to ask questions, and most important – practice the language! Our professors actually speak in the target language as much as possible, and we encourage our students to speak in it as much as possible as well. Obviously no one learns an ancient language nowadays just in order to converse, but we’re big advocates of speaking ancient languages as living languages because of the way that speaking helps students improve their own reading proficiency.

If you sign up for a class, you’ll get access to all of this – it just depends on which language you want to learn! Take a look at our Beginner LatinBeginner Ancient Greek, and Beginner Biblical Hebrew classes.

If you sign up for an ALI class, you should be ready to spend 1.5 hours in class over Zoom, once per week. Additionally, you should spend 4-6 hours per week reading and studying with your course materials. 

Students come to us because they want to gain proficiency in ancient languages. We look for the teachers who can best help them do this. Therefore, the highest-priority criteria when we hire a teacher at ALI are:

A) The teacher can speak and read the language that they will teach with an exceptionally high level of proficiency, and

B) That the teacher is skilled in the art of teaching.

We love our teachers and are very confident in them. They are listed here on our About page, with bios so you can read all about them.

No. Here’s why: For one, trying to speak a new language, in front of strangers, over Zoom, is nerve-wracking enough for some people. To record them doing it is an added layer of nervousness we do not want to impose on anybody. Further, your weekly class meeting is the only time every week that you are guaranteed to be interacting in real-time with other people while using your target language. There’s no substitute for that experience of real-time active use, and we want to make sure all of our students are having that experience. Watching a recording simply cannot replace being present for class.

Scheduling, Payment, and Refunds

It depends.

Our classes generally meet once a week for 1.5 hours. For some classes, especially Old English, Biblical Hebrew, and upper-level Greek and Latin classes, we pre-select the meeting times. Often times, we give you a choice between two or three options, and let you choose which section to join. If this is the case, you’ll see those meeting time options on the class page and the sign-up form (where you can make the selection).

For beginner level Latin and Greek, however, we build class meeting times around student availability. Here’s how scheduling works: When you register, we’ll send you a link to a Google Form, which you will then fill out with all of your slots of available time. We then sort students into cohorts and schedule sessions for those cohorts based on what everyone has filled out on the Google Form. 

The windows within which you can note your availability are, generally, as follows:

  • Mondays – Fridays: 4am – 6pm Pacific (7am – 9pm Eastern)
  • Saturdays: 4am – 4pm Pacific (7am – 7pm Eastern)
  • We do not run classes on Sundays

Doing it this way means that we can usually accommodate every single student who signs up, so long as you give us more than a couple time slots to work with. On rare occasions (we’d estimate <1% of the time) it doesn’t work, in which case we will of course give a refund. But we hope it doesn’t come to that!

Synchronous class sessions are an integral part of our courses. Our Fall, Spring, and Summer classes are fourteen weeks long and meet once a week for 1.5 hours. 

Latin classes for kids (elementary – high school) run on an academic year schedule (Sept. – June) and meet once a week for one hour. You’ll certainly want to be present for your class meetings.

That said, while the time difference can make things tricky, we have had students in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and North and South America taking classes with us all at the same time (not all of those students were in the exact same class session, but we certainly have had many multi-continental classes). 

How do we do it? We build class meeting times around student availability. Here’s how scheduling works: When you register, we’ll send you a link to Google Form, which you will then fill out with all of your slots of available time. We then sort students into cohorts and schedule sessions for those cohorts based on what everyone has filled out on the Google Form. 

Doing it this way means that we can usually accommodate every single student who signs up. On rare occasions (we’d estimate <1% of the time) it doesn’t work, in which case we will of course give a refund. But we hope it doesn’t come to that!

Of course! You should never have to pay for something you can’t use. 

When you register, we’ll send you a link to a Google Form, which you will then fill out with all of your slots of available time. We then sort students into cohorts and schedule sessions for those cohorts based on what everyone has filled out on the Google Form. 

Doing it this way means that we can usually accommodate every single student who signs up. On rare occasions (I’d estimate <1% of the time) it doesn’t work, in which case we will of course give a refund. But we hope it doesn’t come to that!

All of our classes come with a Happiness Guarantee. This means that if, after the first class session, you’re not satisfied or you find that our approach just doesn’t work for you, just let us know and we’ll give you a full refund, no questions asked. And if something comes up after the 2nd or 3rd classes – no worries! We can give pro rata refunds before the 4th class. We are not able to give refunds after the 4th class.

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