Each term, we have certain modules for beginners of Latin and Greek, and others for more advanced students of Latin literature and composition. Due to the success of such classes, we have been continuing to organize distance learning courses - through summer, and through the Academic year. In 2021, unable to continue in-person summer classes due to the unexpected difficulties caused by the coronavirus, the Academy, relying on years of experience teaching students from all over the world remotely through private online classes, introduced the first online intensive course for Latin and Greek.
This mixed approach, tested for years by the experts of the Academy, allows students to attain in only eight weeks the same results that would elsewhere require up to three years of study. Through active use of the language - daily conversations and writing exercises - students may experience the method of teaching employed in the Humanistic schools during the Renaissance. The course utilizes specific teaching techniques, from induction according to the natural method to the Total Physical Response, from "suggestopedia" to storytelling as well as the Rassias Method. Since 2011 the Academy has put its competency, acquired through years of research and teaching, at the service of those who wish to learn Latin with effective results and need to do so in a rather short period of time.
It has founded an international school to which students have poured in from every continent, where they acquire a full and total command of the Latin language within a very short timespan. It has held international conventions concerning the topic from 1991 to the present day, with the participation of the greatest experts on earth, leading to the contextual-inductive method for teaching classical languages to being diffused in Italy and revitalized in Europe as well as the United States. The Academy Vivarium Novum has acquired a worldwide fame throughout the last decade for having studied, identified, and introduced methods for teaching Latin and Greek which may remedy this situation. From the discussions held during that time the need to analyze the course of history and the art of teaching Latin arose: How did the Humanists learn this language? How did Politian, Erasmus, Vives, and Comenius teach? For this research, the students analyzed the most effective methods of modern language teaching: How was it possible that a parliamentary interpreter of Finno - Ugric languages could learn to perfectly read, write, and speak Hungarian in a relatively short period of time, but a high school student, after four or five years of study, could not comprehend even the simplest of Latin texts without the aid of dictionaries and grammar books, and without having to laboriously translate the language into his own? And yet students had four or even five hours of lessons a week, dedicating at least as much time to individual study.
Young people from schools and universities from all over the world came to join them to spend years studying Latin and Greek - two languages that hardly anyone in our times manages to completely master. The method of the Vivarium Novum: A brief historyĭuring the 1980s a group of young classicists in Southern Italy began to gather around an old teacher and discuss the necessity of renovating the didactics of the classical languages.