I come by my interest in learning Latin by a somewhat roundabout route. Once upon a time I had a strong interest in the 11th century King of England and Denmark, Cnut. This led to an exploration of Old English, which led me to an American college classics department website with the motto, 'Keep Dead Languages Alive." I first examined their material on Ancient Greek, but it seemed far too difficult for a man who has not attended a class in 25 years; so I peeked at their Latin page, and was enchanted by the assertion that word order in Latin is highly flexible, suggesting good opportunity to adjust the sound and look of a text. So I’ve decided to learn Latin. (One of my admittedly odd goals is to become proficient enough at writing Latin to rewrite my own amateur body of work in Latin and then destroy the originals. )
I am a cross between a hikimomori and a neckbeard, and my enthusiasms are highly varied. Currently I’m reading three Short Introduction Kindle books (on Psychology, LIterary Criticism and Heidegger), watching baseball on mlb.tv, watching some rathe old anime (Ouran, if you must know) on Netflix, and refreshing my knowledge of computer scripting languages. Before that I was writing about an obscure conflict between the Goddess of Good Fortune and the rather youthful God of Measurable Value.
So hello. My future posts will be largely restricted to questions or comments on the Latin language. I haven’t yet looked to see which of the three recommended texts would be most suitable for me, and if you have input on that, feel free to offer it.
About the books: d’Ooge, it seems, is (or once was) popular mainly because it was out of copyright and is reproduced on this site. Moreland & Fleischer is supposed to be good but difficult:
There’s a popular book by Ørberg (well, two books) called Lingua Latina per se illustrata (LLPSI or just Orberg). This course uses limited English and is designed to teach Latin by the inductive method; there are many on this site who use(d) it. Personally I wouldn’t trust myself to learn Latin that way without a teacher as I’d be concerned about drawing the wrong conclusions and screwing it all up, but some people swear by it. The other main text (and the one used in many college courses) is Wheelock’s Latin. It uses the traditional grammar-translation method; if that’s for you then it’s hard to find a better course IMO: Wheelock’s has many, many exercises and readings and is reasonably-paced and clear. A selling point is that the exercises are adapted from Latin literature; it’s a bit of a gimmick it’s a decent introduction nonetheless. You can find the book for under $20 on Amazon. More about it and the cottage industry around it:
To toot my own horn: my thoughts on studying Latin and how it pertains to other disciplines (my post is the most recent; it got positive feedback in a private message so I’ll post it here ):
Learning Latin is a major commitment and you should be prepared for it. Find the time for it and stick with it. From your introductory post it seems that you could do it.
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