Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-taught Students of Any Age

This book was made primarily for homeschoolers and for self-study. Linney does a great job at keeping things simple and proceeds logically and methodically throughout the book. He also provides free sound files online to help guide pronunciation, thus helping self-studiers gain an ear for the language. If you have never tried to learn an language before, and if you have no idea what the nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive cases are, then this is the right book for you. If you've already had some Latin, then this book will probably be too simple unless you really suck at grammar.

Like any new language skills it is important to get the basics right. Also to get pronunciation guides through access to the audio lessons and other guides I found very helpful. I would recommend this book as a good place to start exploring Latin as a language.

I have almost eight years of formal Latin study, and of all the textbooks I've encountered, I can say with confidence that this is the best for young beginner Latin students. I know because this has proven to be the case with my 9-year-old, who started on this book about a year ago and is about to finish it up. Let me preface this by saying that as an 8-year-old (in third grade), her English reading skills were not stellar. But when I felt she was old enough to sound out the Latin words (we use ecclesiastical pronunciation), we started on this book and I've been continuously astounded at how well my daughter retains the lessons learned here. The book is structured very prudently. It doesn't slam you with tough grammar lessons one-after-another, as is common with many first year Latin books. It builds slowly and incrementally, giving 10 sentences to translate at the end of every lesson in order to strengthen the lesson just learned and to review past lessons. How quickly you want to go through the lessons will obviously depend on the student. My daughter is a bit of a slow learner, so we typically do two to three lessons per week. We'll start by quickly reviewing the last five lessons or so (which takes less than five minutes), and maybe do a quick review of conjugations/declensions. Then we move on to the new lesson, read over the new concept or vocabulary, and then translate the sentences. Sometimes we translate all 10, but if I feel that she's being overwhelmed or is just mentally fatigued, we'll do five sentences and then the rest later. To translate, I have her first read the Latin sentence aloud, and I'll ask her to try to think about the meaning of each word as she reads. The book recommends that the student first identify the main verb of the sentence before attempting to do anything with the nouns, and I agree with this translation strategy. My daughter has gotten to the point where she will read the sentence in Latin and then translate it in her head before giving me her translation. Everything we do is oral. We hardly ever do written work. The beauty of this book is that it builds up the confidence of the student, because the ten review sentences every lesson are not very difficult, yet they still give the student enough of a challenge that they feel a real sense of accomplishment when they get it right. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to teach Latin to a child of elementary school age. While we started my daughter at age 8, I think this could be started much younger as long as the student has strong reading skills. UPDATE: The author has made several updates to his website, which can be used both as a supplement to this book as well as a continuation, as he has a follow-up course that takes on more advanced elements of Latin. http://www.linneyslatinclass.com/index.php

ヤマザキ・マリさんが天正遣欧使節団の４人の少年たちについて、ポルトガルとイタリアを旅する番組を見て、以前から気になっていたラテン語を学んでみたいと思い、購入しました。本のサイズと文字が大きくてシニアには扱いやすいです。音声には、ラテン語の発音だけでなく、レッスンごとに著者の解説が聴けるのも嬉しいです。１つのレッスンに１項目、エクササイズには、前のレッスンの復習問題もあり、少しずつ焦らずに進められるので、安心感があります。文法も英語と比較して説明さるほうがわかりやすく、初心者には、とてもいい本だと思います。このシリーズのほかの言語も気になっています。イタリア語とポルトガル語も出版されるといいなあ。

I changed school when 14 and was due to start Latin but that was too late in my second school. In my 40s I thought I'd give it a go, as I always regretted not learning Latin. I got the Oxford book but the first lesson in that just had far too many words in it and was totally daunting. This one introduces a word at a time and explains it in great detail so you feel you are progressing rapidly. You get a good grounding in one case before moving on to another and the book is excellent at exlaining why you use a particular case, and if a noun has the same ending in different cases how you choose which one it is. The website for the books has all the lessons explained and the examples are worked through. The downloadable classical and ecclesiastical pronunciation guides are excellent, although you do learn latin with an American accent. Now halfway through the book I'm starting to work through the Oxford book as well, but this book helped the Oxford book make sense.