Hi everyone,
I wonder if any of you can recommend some book of the Latin language. I mean like a “learning latin book” which is not for beginners. Maybe written for use in the university or something like it.
There aren’t any good ones written in Swedish so I’d really like to hear your experiences about ones in English.
How about Lingua Latina II: Roma Aeterna - it’s the second part of a completely inductive method that uses little stories to introduce grammatical concepts. This second part focuses more on the actual reading of authors, starting with adapted texts of Virgil, and finishing with unadapted Livy among others.
I, and many, many more on this forum can heartily recommend this method (just ask the forum member Lucus Eques, who is sure to drop by on this thread at some point or other )
Yes, I too recommend Lingua Latina Pars II: Roma Aeterna. I’m only in the first few chapters, and I’m absolutely loving it. No overly complicated grammar explanations, just good reading and deducing. And if you have any questions, there’s a thread in this forum specifically meant for discussing that book.
I agree with the other posters that Roma Aeterna es excellent. I’ll probably break out my copy soon as I am conducting a review of everything that I have forgotten. But if you are interested in a formal and complete review of the latin grammar in English, and one that is not too taxing, I would recommend to you B.H. Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer. Used copies are available from Amazon in the U.K. For your convenience here is a link which I have “tinified”
Actually, Moreland and Fleischer’s Latin: An Intensive Course would complement Lingua Latina (Familia Romana & Roma Aeterna) very well. With M&F, you can rigorously review the grammar points, some of which have no doubt gotten a little fuzzy, as often happens in my mind; with Lingua Latina, you can improve your reading fluency by immersing yourself in interesting, carefully graded texts which culminate in unadulterated Latin.
Hear, hear! I do just this. I’ll read a chapter in LL, review the grammar introduced (I’m still on Book I) in M&F, and then reread the chapter and answer the questions out loud. I then record myself reading the chapter out loud into my computer and slap it on my iPod. I then listen to it and previous chapters while getting ready for bed at night until I finish reading and recording the next chapter. Some chapters take me more than two readings to fully comprehend all of the new vocabulary and grammar, but I eventually get to the next. The thread mentioned above is the place to go to get further clarification (if needed) or to pose a new question.
The stories within LL are incredibly entertaining if not outright hilarious. Plus, my reading comprehension of Latin has blossomed. Sometimes, I can’t believe how much I’ve learned. (I’m trying not to sound like a commercial here.) I also bought a couple of the other books which complement the series, like the Colloquia Personarum and the Sermones Romani. There’s a free PDF you can download too. I know someone else here (I can’t remember who) mentioned in another thread that they were reading the LL supplemental reader on Trimalchio’s Dinner.
All in all, David’s advice is well worth taking, as the only complaint I’ve ever read here about LL is the lack of grammatical explanation. There have been a couple of gripes about vocabularly reinforcement, but there’s only so much a single reader can accomplish without each chapter growing exponentially in length. Of course, the supplemental texts go a long way in helping out (read: haurire and exhaurire are used several more times in the Colloquia and the PDF! ).