Complete Latin Beginner to Intermediate Course: Learn to read, write, speak and understand a new language (Teach Yourself Language)

Learning on my own. I think the book will assist me.

Very Professional Book! My Mother Loves it!

great

This is a typical grammar-translation course. Chapter 1: nouns of first declension, Chapter 2: verb endings, etc. Lessons typical cover a few grammar points and there is some exercises and reading. Expect charts of noun declensions and verb tables. Expect to refer to them often. There are additional exercises and readings at tylatin.org. It's a lot of "book work", which people associate with dead languages.There is a (single) MP3 CD included. It has a ~20 minutes of spoken Latin on it, which is somewhat of a marvel in itself. The fact that I'm impressed that there is //any// spoken Latin at all is a sad detail. I was greatly disappointed by this, having using "Teach Yourself Complete Italian" where each unit (even the beginner units!) contained multiple dialogues. The audio is all for later lessons, and honestly, by the time you make it to those lessons, you won't be able to understand anything that is spoken because you've spent zero time until now listening to Latin and understanding it when read at a normal pace.I pick up this book and work through a chapter every so often, and it's pretty much everything that is wrong with language learning pedagogy. Have we not learned from Stephen Krashen that grammar-translation is just not that effective? I took four years of Latin in an (admittedly American) high school, and I could barely speak anything, barely understand anything spoken, and I was the _best_ in my class. I visited a Latin class in Germany as part of a school trip. The teacher barely wrote on the board at all -- he spoke Latin (that I could barely understand) to his second year students, and they replied to him, slowly of course, in Latin. I was ashamed to realize that for all of my struggles with Latin for many years, here were second year students far exceeding my skill. How were they so much better than me?What do you think the missing component was? It's engagement, it's input, it's audio, it's comprehension! Contrast that to this book's tone. The author, as early as Chapter 2, writes, "As the sentences below are more difficult than those in Unit 1 and do not fall so readily into English, it is necessary to approach them in a logical and systematic way." and proceeds to explain how to "decode" a sentence in Latin for nearly two pages. Ugh.Are you serious? What happened to "keep it comprehensible"? This just isn't how language acquisition works. Can you imagine the silliness of giving a student of Spanish or French a long sentence on day 2, handing them a dictionary, and telling them to spend minutes decoding it? If Latin, to you, should be treated like solving a math problem: systemic, logical steps ruling out all possible interpretations, then this method is for you. And good luck.For me, this sucks out all of the fun. Don't get me wrong, I know that learning a language is a lot of work, and I'm willing to do that, as I have before. However the question at hand is //efficiency//. It is an _efficient_ use of my time to stare at charts and do exercises? Do I internalize the language better? And once again, Stephen Krashen's L2 research demonstrates that, no, it is NOT a good way to build fluency.If you can read/write French, I suggest instead  Assimil Le Latin sans peine . It is by no means absolutely perfect, but it has > 5 hours of audio, cute dialogues, and even some music to help build your ear and internalize patterns. This has been way more effective for me to actually understand Latin. It should be unremarkable that hearing Latin and be forced to comprehend it as it is spoken at a natural pace does wonders for reading comprehension, because the decoding has become "automatic" rather than a mental process that requires me to "systematically and logically decode" it. It's almost like... comprehensible input works! And it's a challenge!So if you want to learn the grammar of Latin and systematically decode sentences like on page 17 "Poetae agricolas saepe concitant ubi fabulas de feminis Galliae narrant" (Poets often stir up farmers when they tell tales about women of Gaul), while constantly flipping back to a dictionary because each unit contains 30+ new vocabulary items, then this course is for you. By the end of it, you will probably be able to read some texts very slowly. If that's all you want, then go for it.I want to understand Latin at a pace similar to that which I understand other modern foreign languages. I want to be able to form and say thoughts quickly. And why not? Yet, this course provides no training for such a thing. It's no wonder Latin remains the deadest language when we can't be bothered to give it even the smallest amount of life in our studies. Latin remains inaccessible except to the most dedicated who can work through boring books like this one.Yes, I will continue to slog through it as a sort of practice book, but ultimately, majority of my gains and "aha!" moments have come from Assimil's course.

The book is complete in everything, if you want to learn Latin, this book is a straightforward must.

Not for beginners. Aimed at an adult learner.

Wonderful, thank you

has helped immensely in my course at uni and would recommend it to anyone

Loving it