Does anyone here who has studied Latin have a favorite textbook for self-study? (Remember, there won’t be a teacher handy.)
Dragonbabe has the Cambridge Latin Course set and Prior’s Everything Learning Latin, but now that I’m starting to use them too, I might be interested in picking up another one to use alongside these. Cambridge is nice, but skimpy on grammar. The grammar books are often horrid, unreadable things. I might like something somewhere in between.
No, but I’d just like to mention that I got 28% in my final Latin exam (after studying for 3 years). I’m happy to report that I was officially the worst in my year.
I swear to the FSM, I can’t remember a single word of Latin.
so I cannot compare with other books. Here’s what I can say:
Wheelock has been around for quite a while so it has been debugged and expanded quite a lot since its first edition. With each chapter there is ample material to drill you on the grammar. I’ve had first hand experience with books which do not have enough exercises. My Attic Greek textbook was okay but for Sanskrit I’ve never found a textbook which had enough exercises to really drill the grammar into my head. I know Sanskrit grammar now because I took formal classes. In comparison, it is quite doable to drill Latin grammar into your head by using Wheelock.
IIRC there are good companion books to Wheelock out there.
When I used Wheelock there were online study groups which were using Wheelock as their textbook. So I studied with an online group. It is better than studying in isolation because you can compare your answers with those of other people, discuss alternate translations, ask questions if there’s something you don’t understand, etc.
I saw some recommendations elsewhere of “Latin for Americans” but I just couldn’t bring myself to buy something with that horridly ethnocentric and daft a title.
It would be remiss not to include in any discussion of Latin textbooks, the trusty tome which began many a Latin scholar on the road to complete and pointless fluency in a language only understood by other public schoolboys.
and for reading in Latin, try (initially) the Asterix comix that have been translated, and then, keeping to the theme, get hold of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, his “Wars in Gaul”.
Julius writes in a very clean style, with not too much of the complicated and elliptic grammar seen in more literary Latin.
Ecce Romani! I note that you picture a snazzy third edition in full colour, LL. I got busted colouring in all the togas in one of our classroom editions.
I am not a public schoolboy but I know all about Cornelia and her dog.
Ok, seriously, a lot of people are recommending Cambridge, which I’m actually using right now, but it’s my dissatisfaction with it that drove the OP. Here’s my main beef: When it introduces new vocab, it only gives the form (case etc.) in which it is actually encountered in the dialogue (e.g. pavonem), rather than its base form (e.g. pavo – at least I think of the singular nominative as the base form of a noun); even the vocab list accompanying the dialogue only gives the declined (noun) or conjugated (verb) form, and I REALLY don’t care for that. I’d strongly prefer a book which at least gives the base form of each alongside, such as the sing. nom. noun plus its gender and genitive or conj. group #, or for a verb, the typical, meager dictionary entry info.
It’s really nice that Cambridge doesn’t scare newbies away from the complexity of the grammar, but it actually misleads you into thinking that ‘peacock’ is ‘pavonem’, rather than presenting that as its (essentially) object form, and failing to even provide the supplementary info on this noun in an index. How hard would that be, y’know? :loco:
And just saying ‘turn to Wheelock’ or ‘turn to such and such a dictionary’ isn’t really satisfactory, although that’s what I’m doing now.
What I’d really like is a textbook that has this info, self-contained, to accompany the main dialogues and vocab lists, but which (if possible) is still half as readable and enjoyable as Cambridge. Importantly, I’d like one that is ordered by dialogues of increasing complexity, like Cambridge, rather than one which has chapters by grammar, with no dialogue.
So now that I’ve clarified what I’d like, does anyone have any further suggestions?
Are we talking about the same Cambridge Latin Course books 1-4? No, this gives NO information on the vocab at the time of presentation other than the form present in the dialogue, e.g.:
Stage 1
p.2 familia
p.3 Caecilius est pater. (no translation given)
p.5 pater est in tablino. pater in tablino scribit. (no translations)
p. 6 Vocabulary: est is (no additional info whatsoever on this verb, its conj. group, or infinitive form – just this single 3rd person present form) pater father (no info on gender or decl. group) in tablino in the study (just the ablative form here – even the nominative is not given) scribit is writing
In the index one will find only the nominative of nouns, e.g. “tablinum study” (no gender, no decl. group, no genitive or plural), and for verbs, a meager amount of info, e.g., "scribit writes: scripsit). Sorry, I’m being lazy and not doing the macron here.
That’s it. And in miniscule amounts, after every 3-4 chapters, the merest hints of grammatical explanation (e.g. changing to accusative for 1st thru 3rd decl., and 3 persons - sum, es, est) start appearing in trickles. But you won’t reliably find the base forms, the genders, or the declension or conjugation group identification for any of the vocabulary, nor are complete charts for any particular declension or conjugation or even the persons given, at least not as far as I’ve gotten, and I don’t see them in the back of book 1 either. I expect they’ll start to appear in higher books.
Mmmm, no. My course was an intensive course intended to bring a student up from scratch to independent reading in a year. There were two books which were used together, one a thick grammar book with loads of vocabulary, grammar, and exercises in each section (and very detailed grammar tables in the back), and the other a book of selected Latin readings from classical sources, the early ones simplified, the later ones unabridged original texts. This is the latest edition of the grammar book.
Thanks!
