The next step

First off - to introduce myself - hello all. Wonderful looking site here.

Now then, I need some advise on how to improve my latin. Some background - I’m in my fourth year of Latin in high school and one of the best in my class (if I do say so myself, with a 4.2 GPA to back it up). Currently we are translating the Aeneid in preparation for the AP test in late March/April. Although I have a good teacher, we don’t do any independent translation and in class he tends to give us the sentece structure while we fill in the vocab. As a result I’m not that great at translating on my own, and somehow I don’t have as large a vocabulary I want to have. So to sum it up, I know the language, just not well. What I need is a way to improve my translation skills, increase my vocabulary, and maybe brush up on my grammer - I just don’t know a good way to do it.

So what’s a good way? I’ve thought about trying to go ahead of the class, but they would catch up with me every day, thus I would be doing patches of translation rather than a complete work. Perhaps translating another work independently, or something else all together?

Hi Strider! Welcome to Textkit!

4.2 GPA? Impressive… but I thought 4.0 was the highest?

some places have a 5 point system.

I would recommend working on something different than what the class is working on. Find yourself a good reader (there are some on this site) and just start working through it. You can ask your teacher about any pieces which stump you, and your class learning will enhance your reading…

Thank you very much. I’ve started to download one of the readers on Select Orations from Cicero. However, Cicero is prose (right?) but Virgil is poetry. Should I stick with the poetry?

mariek: 4.5 is generally the highest possible, but it gets messed up with weighted classes like honors and AP.

Hi strider1551

I just wanted to say hi since I see you’re from Cleveland ohio. Textkit is created out of Strongsville.

thanks for coming,
jeff