So You Really Want to Learn Latin Book 1: A Textbook for Common Entrance and GCSE

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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. If you have worked through Famil­ia Romana method­i­cal­ly and dili­gent­ly, you will be able to read Fab­u­lae Faciles com­fort­ably. It’s a detailed course and will deep­en your knowl­edge immense­ly while also mak­ing read­ing Latin much eas­i­er and more rewarding. e., not just read­ing it once) Lin­gua Lati­na Part I: Famil­ia Romana and the exer­cise book, and you’ll be able to read Epit­o­me His­to­ri­ae Sacrae with­out too much trouble.

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. I learnt Latin as a 9-12 year old in the '60s, then abandoned it at secondary school for Russian (Cold War - so more relevant etc. Educated at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, he is the author of the international bestseller Amo, Amas, Amat. With updated storylines, new characters and cultural background sections, students can immerse themselves in the Roman world, engage with authentic texts and start reading Latin from page one.The course consists of a series of chapters, each of which includes stories and dialogues in Latin as well as vocabulary and grammar explained in English. However, if the main goal of learning Latin is to be able to translate the texts that the Romans wrote (and I fail to see why else one would bother! All Latin teachers who use this course supplement the grammatical content to a greater or lesser extent, and who hasn’t been frustrated by the fact that many of the chapters introduce a new grammatical concept and then give a load of exercises about something completely different? But, actually, if you went purely on your Latin, you couldn’t say that candidus has a direct connection with a candidate. I’ve painted a picture of doom and gloom, which I still think is true of the decline of rigorous study of Latin over the last 50 years.

If you are an advanced learn­er and want to dive deep into the dif­fer­ent nuances and usages of words, Oxford Latin Dic­tio­nary is a great resource. It’s very consoling to anyone who does Latin and finds it a bit difficult that Romans got it wrong too. When I studied Matisse and Picasso at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, my professor, who was a modernist and hadn’t studied Latin, couldn’t get over the amount of classical content even in the painting around the 1910s. Then you con­tin­ue to Fab­u­lae Faciles; There might be some words or points of gram­mar that are dif­fi­cult in Fab­u­lae Faciles, but then you can check the glos­sary and the com­ments in this edition. He tries unsuccessfully to save Caecilius in Pompeii, eventually leaving when Caecilius urges him to find Quintus and deliver his ring to him.

It's very obvious that Mr Oulton has a deep affection for the Latin language and this comes across in his books. I think even if they hate it, everyone would benefit from at least a year of doing Latin, because it’s so incredibly important. Sometimes the book deviates to talk about Caecilius' two slaves, their cook Grumio, and Clemens, and their frequent humorous mishaps.