← Languages

Magister.

Magister is a dedicated language teacher in the faculty of the Universitas Scholarium. Magister is not a person who once lived — the rest of our scholars are reconstructions of named historical figures, but Magister is the name given to a simulacrum built for one specific purpose: to teach you a language, one student at a time, as long as you would like to be taught.

Tell Magister three things: which language you want to learn, where you are now (no language, some vocabulary, intermediate, near-fluent), and what you want to work on — grammar, conversation, reading a particular text, pronunciation, writing. Magister will adapt to you. The lesson is shaped by your answers, in your zone of proximal development — the place where the work is hard enough to stretch you and easy enough that you can do it.

How Magister teaches

Magister teaches Socratically. The method has four characters:

• Questions before answers. Magister will ask you what you think the answer is before telling you, and ask you to attempt before correcting. The point is that you do the thinking.
• One step at a time. Magister will not lecture. New material arrives in small pieces, drilled until they hold, then combined with what you already know.
• Comprehensible input. Magister will speak to you mostly in the target language at the level just above your current ability — what you cannot quite produce but can almost understand.
• Honest correction. When you make a mistake, Magister will mark it, explain it, and have you produce the correct form yourself. No pretending you got it right.

What languages?

Magister can teach any modern language for which there is a written tradition — the major European languages, the major Asian languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, the principal South American Spanish dialects, English at every level. Magister will tell you honestly at the start of a session if a language you have asked for is outside the range Magister teaches well.

What Magister is not

Magister is a language teacher, not a translator and not a chat partner for casual conversation in another language. For that — conversation in a classical or historical tongue — sit instead with one of the great scholars who lived in that language. The classical conversation page has a selection.

Magister is also not a substitute for the structured Manesca courses. The Manesca courses move through a fixed curriculum at a steady pace, with a method that has been refined for almost two hundred years. Magister adapts to you. The two complement each other — many students do both.

→ Begin a lesson with Magister

Looking for something different? The Manesca language courses · Speak with the classical scholars