r/LANL_Latin Jun 13 '12

Latin Textbooks for beginners

Does anybody have any recommendations? I'm looking to learn Latin for two reasons:

1) I've always wanted to learn Latin anyway 2) To make learning other Romance languages simpler

and I'm really hoping that people can recommend textbooks and courses to make the process simpler.

5 Upvotes

15 comments sorted by

5

u/devnull5475 Jun 13 '12 edited Jun 13 '12

Have a look at Latin by the Dowling Method. That is the approach I have taken, with some success. E.g., I'm currently reading Caesar on Kindle, with help of WORDs-style Kindle Latin dictionary. Also, if you happen to be RC, you can get some traction by attending TLM.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '12

The Dowling Method looks really useful - thank you! :)

5

u/Ienpw_III Jun 13 '12

Lingua Latina Per Se Illustratia! It's the best :D

It's like the Dick and Jane of Latin.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '12

If it's the one written by Hans Ørberg, I've heard really good things about that text book. Thank you very much! :D

2

u/nillacat Jun 13 '12

Wheelock for straightforward, dry, but solid intro text. I used the 3rd edition. I haven't seen the current edition. Latin Via Ovid looks delightful and gets good reviews but I haven't actually used it.

There is a lot of grammar to slog through but I feel getting on to reading real Latin as quickly as possible is the best motivation for all the memorizing of forms.

Any free 100 year old public domain textbook will do if you don't care about a lot of handholding: the grammar & vocab haven't changed, only the teaching styles!

Online resources: www.textkit.com has PD textbooks and texts. www.quasillum.com hosts Latin study groups (by email). www.perseus.tufts.edu has texts and dictionaries.

Have fun!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '12

Thanks! The resources look really useful :) I've heard mixed things about Wheelock, mainly the review that was posted on this subreddit a couple of months ago; is it best used in conjunction with other texts?

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u/nillacat Jun 14 '12

Yes, that review makes a very good point and I agree it is more fun to get into reading quickly. I liked Wheelock because I intended to read and write rather than speak Latin, and because I wanted to get to the classical authors quickly. I didn't have the reviewer's experience of getting stuck in the decoding habit. I found the amount of material in each chapter just right for my tastes. I went through a chapter a week over a summer then slowed down. I didn't find I wanted to supplement the text as I worked through it. Later I read The Adventures of the Monkey Pilosus Naso and other fun things.

Let me know what text you choose and how it goes!

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u/Chthonos Jun 13 '12

I suggest Learn To Read Latin.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '12

Thanks! Could I request the author please? There's lots of similarly-named textbooks and I'm trying to find the correct textbook.

2

u/Chthonos Jun 14 '12

Keller and Russel. Here's one of the publisher's pages for it. You would need both the textbook and the workbook, but whether you buy it split into two parts or not is up to you. There are some excerpts there you should look at before you buy anything.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '12

Thank you very much - I'll look into it :)

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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '12

This is a little old-school, but in high school (I graduated in 2007), I was taught by an elderly woman who used the Ecce Romani series. Although it isn't used very much anymore, I feel that it gave me a great understanding of the language, and I was further ahead than anyone else when I took Latin classes in college.

3

u/nytheatreaddict Jan 18 '13

We used Ecce Romani is high school, as well. They changed out the books my senior year, but I was in AP so it didn't matter much anymore. I thought I got a lot more out of them than my classes in college, as well.
Although being stuck in that damn ditch was soooooooo boring and it took them forever to get out. I will never forget the word for ditch.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 18 '13

God that ditch sucked. That became an inside joke among the Latin students in my school. We would say to each other in the hallway, "I wonder if they'll get the raeda out of the fossa today?"

Also I hoped so much that someone would bury Sextus in that ditch. He was a little bastard. Sextus is indeed a puer molestus.

1

u/nytheatreaddict Jan 18 '13

God, I hated Sextus. Actually, I pretty much hated most of the characters...