I would definitely recommend starting at the beginning, not skipping anything just because it seems easy, and not moving on to the next lesson until you've thoroughly mastered it. Gets you to be able to read Latin without translating in your head. Starts off super simple, but progresses quickly enough and gets advanced in volume II. Orberg is an advocate of the so-called "Natural Method": i.e. >No one is to be admitted to the study of philosophy or theology except he be thoroughly grounded in this language and capable of using it.įWIW what most helped my Latin was, by far, Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina. (Cf what John XXIII says about it in his encyclical dedicated to Latin, Veterum Sapientiae: Latin is the sine qua non for getting deep in this stuff IMO. I hope this helps! If you'll have any questions on the material, redditors on /r/latin are very nice and are always willing to help.Ĭompletely agree. There is a Lingua Latina deck available for anki, divided into chapters: thus you can easily add words into your flashcard pool after completing every LL chapter.
I used anki, a spaced repetition software based on flashcards, to study words. Some students find Lingua Latina's method to be sufficient for spaced repetition of new words, but it wasn't enough for me. Latine Disco and Neumann's companion are useful companions, which will help you understand grammar introduced in each chapter of Lingua Latina (you only need one of them).įinally, memorizing words is necessary with any language, and Latin is no exception. I would recommend not just filling the gaps in, but writing whole exercises out in a separate notebook - making the mechanical memory help you memorize words and grammatical structures. Excercitia Latina, which follow Lingua Latina chapter by chapter, will give you enough practice to get a firm grip on each chapter's material. All of them can be bought on amazon, or acquired by other means if you wish to cut your costs. While Lingua Latina is a great textbook, I would advise getting some supplements to augment your studying process. You can understand it easily, and you've already learned 4 words! To give you an idea, its first sentence is "Rōma in Italiā est". It's based on the natural method: it is written completely in Latin, beginning with very simple phrases which speaker of any European language can understand, and slowly progresses further. Lingua Latina, on the other hand, focuses on reading comprehension and is considered by /r/latin users to be a superior learning method. It focuses on rote memorization of grammar. It seems to be a consensus at /r/latin that Wheelock's, while being a good textbook, teaches to translate, not to read. Firstly, it's not going to be very easy, but it will be a lot of fun - learning Latin will teach you a lot about linguistics, history, and even English. Hi! It's great that you want to learn Latin yourself - I was in a similar position not long ago, and can share my experience.