This is a good time to point to some errors I made in my self-instruction.
I moved too quickly from the beginner textbooks to reading unadapted Latin. The textbooks have easier sentences on which to learn the grammar.
Because many Latin texts have no macrons, I finessed vowel quantity. I’m playing catchup on vowel quantity now.
I assumed that lots of unadapted texts read superficially would add up to an intuitive grasp of grammatical principles. That didn’t work. Now I read the same text again and again, until the vocabulary and grammar are easy. For example, the first unadapted text I read was Caesar. Because it contains so many reports of conversations, tactical speculation, and counterfactual thoughts, it would have been an excellent workout on the subjunctive and on direct and indirect discourse. For this reason, I should have read it several times before moving on.
I assumed that I need not do all the textbook exercises that required rewriting English sentences in Latin. For me, this was an error, because going from English to Latin requires deeper reflection on the Latin grammar.
The moral, as it has always been: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
The Latin I read was contained in the exercises in Moreland and Fleischer. I didn’t read Ritchie or Lhomond. At the beginning, my goal was to speed through M&F, and then start in on Caesar. I had read some Caesar in high school back in the 1950s, and overestimated how much of it remained in memory. At that time, I believed superficial reading of many unadapted Latin texts would cause the grammatical knowledge to grow, more or less in the background, and give me an intuitive knowledge of the grammar. This did not work for me. Recently, I’ve started making sure that, besides having a satisfactory meaning, I can also account fully for the grammar of the sentence.
I learned the vocabulary and inflections in the order in which they were presented in M&F. I also wrote out inflection tables again and again, and wrote out many verb synopses. Nevertheless weaknesses remained, and I still practice some inflection tables now and then. However, I skipped most of the Latin-to-English exercises in M&F. I now see that this was an error. Going Latin-to-English quickly reveals weaknesses in grammatical rules and in the memorization of the inflections.
Not being in a class with a teacher has been a great disadvantage, much greater than I suspected at the outset.
In former times, all exercises were Vernacular to Latin for learning the forms. It requires considerably more mastery than passively recognizing forms.
At that time, I believed superficial reading of many unadapted Latin texts would cause the grammatical knowledge to grow, more or less in the background, and give me an intuitive knowledge of the grammar. This did not work for me.
That is no surprise. You have to be discriminating about what and whose posts to trust on textkit. Still, once you have learned the grammar (with examples), reading will automatically consolidate and expand your knowledge of it and you’ll find you need to consciously analyze less and less as you read. Then you’ll be able to read fluently and accurately.
Oh, that preconception was not provided by any textkit posts; the error was entirely my own. As I now see, it grew out of an faulty understanding of some of my earlier learning experiences. Moreover, when I started I believed that the Latin I had learned long ago would come back to life in my mind, but that didn’t happen either. I did understand the general idea of an inflected language, and bits of the inflection tables had persisted in memory.
As far as I can recall, the textkit responses to my queries have been consistently helpful.