Title of the resource
Title of the resource in english
Original language
Target and Age Group
Students, general public
Link to resource
Accessed on 25 August, 2020
Author of the Entry:
Marta Pszczolińska, University of Warsaw, m.pszczolinska@al.uw.edu.pl
Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Elżbieta Olechowska, University of Warsaw, elzbieta.olechowska@gmail.com
Second Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Ayelet Peer, Bar- Ilan University, ayelet.peer@biu.ac.il
Katarzyna Jasińska-Zdun
Katarzyna Jasińska-Zdun is an alumna of Classical Philology at the University of Warsaw, where she also studied musicology in addition to the class of opera singing at the Joseph Elsner State School of Music.
She is a recognized Latin palaeographer (works on the text corpus of Johannes Dantiscus’ correspondence) and an editor of modern Latin sources, who also works with digital humanities (encoding of texts in the TEI standard). She works at the University of Warsaw at the Faculty of Artes Liberales as a specialist in editing of modern Latin texts as well as at the Faculty of Classical Philology as an instructorin Latin, palaeography and digital philology workshops. She also teaches Latin at other faculties.
She is passionate about teaching Latin, where she employs interesting and unconventional methodology. She demonstrates that learning Latin is not merely a boring duty, but rather a great value which can in itself also be quite entertaining.
As the author herself notes, her personal passion is also vocal classical music. She is a friend of animals, especially dogs, for whom she always has an open heart and all the goodness they might need. Her best friend is an adopted rescue dog Nocek, who loves Latin texts, a few of which he has happened to literally consume.
Contents & Purpose
The website provides students from diverse groups with a variety of educational aids. It contains original downloadable scripts to be used in class (see print screen), as well as a variety of files with learning resources: grammar, vocabulary, exercises, texts for self-study, a selection of prose and poetry (including audio recordings) or lyrics of Latin carols.
A significant portion of the website is dedicated to mythology and includes a genealogical chart of the gods, a quiz and a test on the knowledge of myths, access to the text of Parandowski’s Mythology and more specific resources about particular gods and myths. The Latin textbooks with illustrations are downloadable from the website and feature mythical characters and their adventures which allows to learn both the language and mythological knowledge at the same time. In addition to the Latin texts, the textbooks also provide exercises that allow to easily master the new language skills.
The website also supplies palaeographic resources and hyperlinks to other useful websites, such as dictionaries, sources of texts and translations, translation tools, text corpora, and so on.
Further comments
As an unusual amusing bonus, the website includes entertaining examples of poor translations done by Latin students (e.g., quid times? [what are you afraid of?] - “what’s the time?”, eodem die [on the same day]- “Eodem died”, XL naves [40 ships]- “extra-large ships”).
You can also watch a recorded lecture Dlaczego (nie) uczyć się łaciny [Why (not) study Latin] given by the author in the finals of the Best Lecturer Plebiscite 2014.
