So looking at your list: for anyone who is starting from scratch the books they should get started on are Kennedy’s Latin Primer and the Oulton. It’s a detailed course and will deep­en your knowl­edge immense­ly while also mak­ing read­ing Latin much eas­i­er and more rewarding. Following the tried and tested approach of Greek to GCSE, full grammar support is enhanced by a large number of exercises and passages for translation. The texts are accompanied by explanations of key language points, and are supported by grammar practice exercises.

This is the way to go, as Fab­u­lae Syrae will rein­force the mate­r­i­al of the cor­re­spond­ing chap­ter in Famil­ia Romana while also adding new vocabulary. Latin read­ers is a genre of usu­al­ly short­er books pop­u­lar in the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies. Listeners who’ve seen the Life of Brian will remember the extremely funny scene with John Cleese and Graham Chapman and the badly spelt graffiti. D. com­pris­ing 2000 pages with count­less exam­ples from lit­er­a­ture, notes on usage, and ety­mol­o­gy. This series of books also emphasises the ability to learn and use conversational Latin skills, which is fairly uncommon among Latin textbooks.The first line is probably the most famous line in Latin: ‘Arma virumque cano,’ — ‘I sing of arms and of the man…’ If you start learning the first line, not only will you know the most famous line of Latin, but you’ll also begin to get an understanding of Roman history and actually how very close the Aeneid is to the Iliad.

It has been crit­i­cized through­out the years for slight inac­cu­ra­cies, both regard­ing def­i­n­i­tions and, more par­tic­u­lar­ly, to vow­el quan­ti­ties.This guy Richard decided he would try and find examples of Latin—very simple or very complicated, depending on the level or chapter that someone is on—and even right at the beginning he manages to find super simple Latin sentences from graffiti. Trans­la­tion exer­cis­es are use­ful, but they will be of lit­tle use with­out ample read­ing of lev­el-appro­pri­ate Latin. Interestingly, he leaves the object of his loving and cherishing blank, so it could apply to lovely Mrs Posh, or AN Other. In the remaining chapters, the writings of several poets (particularly Martial and Ovid) and historical figures replace the narrative. I am not going to say you become an expert on all those things, but it’s the perfect introduction to 2000 years of western European history.

The third book picks up in the Roman province of Britain, in the city of Aquae Sulis ( Bath) in particular. If you want a Latin tutor that pretends the grammar doesn’t exist in the interests of making the subject somehow more appealing in unspecified ways, then I’m not the one for you! An example I give in my book is the Latin word ‘candidus,’ the adjective meaning white, pure, unvarnished. I then spun out the story of Quintus grieving her loss and ultimately finding her again as a replacement to the thoroughly tiresome stories in Book 2, all of which I ditched.

I think even if they hate it, everyone would benefit from at least a year of doing Latin, because it’s so incredibly important. The much-awaited 5th edition is being launched as we speak, in which the authors have addressed the lack of strong female characters (Quintus gains a sister) and also the pervasive narrative of the “contented slave”, which withou

I’ve always found it very useful to make children aware of what is going on in an English sentence and quite how different it is from a Latin sentence. And, while Famil­ia Romana by itself is a fan­tas­tic book, the exer­cise book pro­vides you with count­less oppor­tu­ni­ties to drill the text­book’s mor­phol­o­gy, syn­tax, and vocab­u­lary. I liken it to a concertina: you open up the concertina when you go from Latin to English and you close it when you go from English into Latin. It’s about things that are useful or things that later on bring incredible pleasure by knowing them.

With­out the French notes and trans­la­tions, you should per­haps wait until you have a foun­da­tion in Latin.