Here's why you cannot actually 'learn to speak Latin as a living language'

The reason serious people may choose to study ancient languages is for linguistic curiosity and the exploration of cultural heritage. Their motivation is not to cosplay as ancient Romans in the sense that the likes of Metatron, Martianus and other such people essentially do. As a modern person your only real contact with an ancient and irrevocably dead language can only be spiritual, not corporeal.

I am normally active on German platforms where most people are not lightweights. I am sorry to say this but I have to be brutally honest. My experience talking to native English-speakers has taught me that their intellectual level is generally far inferior. Like autistics they have trouble paying attention. And like functionally illiterate people they feel very uncomfortable reading sentences with embedded clauses (and funnily enough such people aspire to read classical authors). Many of you can't even understand the use of metaphors so I must explain what I meant by 'spiritual' and 'corporeal'.

Spiritual contact with a language is contact that happens on the abstract level. Reading Cicero is like reading the Bible. It's a spiritual experience done for spiritual fulfillment. Unless you are a biblical scholar or a classics scholar you normally see no interest in polluting this experience with material concerns. I mean, you see no interest in painstakingly analyzing the grammar or doing exegesis. You don't care how Cicero sounded, you don't care what motivated Cicero to say this or that and you don't even care all that much about the historical context of one particular speech. All you want to do is take his words in and enjoy a certain museum vibe, in other words, to glimpse into the skeleton of an ancient soul in about the same sense you would marvel at the skeleton of a pre-historic beast at a natural history museum.

The drive to speak and use an ancient language as a 'living langauge' is the irrational fetishistic drive to turn this sublime spiritual museum-like experience into something more concrete and fleshy and familiar. But this is fundamentally impossible and quite literally utopian. You think that language is just a jumble of words? Think again. Please pay attention because the following sentences require actual intellectual effort on your part. I'll do my best to present you an easily digestible baby-food version because I know complex sentences confuse many of you.

According to cosmologists the universe is mostly made up of dark matter. Okay? A given human language is also mostly made up of dark matter that you can't see. This linguistic dark matter - that you can't see written with your eyes and that you can't hear spoken with your ears - is something called 'semiotic repertoire'.

Without a time machine that would enable you to have real contact with real ancient people in a living ancient culture, you cannot EVER learn to use the semiotic repertoire of ancient Roman speakers proficiently, not even close.

Here's an example of what I mean. Many linguistically naive observers are under the impression that such modern terms as 'development', 'influence', 'interesting' etc. represent essential concepts of human thought, and that no language can afford to be without them. But, although all three words are of Latin origin, not one of them occurs in Latin in anything resembling its modern meanings. But most European languages, from Welsh to Russian, have accepted them either as loanwords, or calques, as these equivalents of the word 'influence' indicate: German Ein-fluss, Russian v-liyaniye, Welsh dy-lanwad, where the second element in each case means ‘flowing’.

Modern Latin 'speakers' would grammatically reformulate the modern Latinate word 'influence' as 'influentia' and then employ it with the modern meaning of 'influence'. But this isn't Latin. It's just a modern interpretation of Latin. It's exactly the same thing like you wearing a toga and calling yourself a real Roman senator.

So modern Latin is what happens when you take a purely modern semiotic repertoire but try to express it using latinized vocabulary. It's a linguistic form of transvestism and just like transvestism it can be understood as a form of fetishism.

As if all this wasn't enough nonsense the peddlers that teach Latin as a 'living language' and profit from people's cosplay fantasies insist that we learn the correct pronunciation too.

In fact, we can only know the general outlines of Latin pronunciation but because many phonological details elude us (and the devil is in the details) we cannot actually teach someone to do it flawlessly.

Most people cannot even learn the pronunciation of living foreign languages despite years of conscious effort and heavy exposure to actual native speakers. And you seriously believe that Cicero wouldn't have laughed his ass off at your pathetic pronunciation and at your complete ingnorance of the Latin semiotic repertoire?

Unfollow 'Martianus' and study Latin in the spiritual sense I told you. This is the only way to go if you have any dignity.