Customer Reviews

Cambridge Latin Course Unit 4 Student's book North American edition (North American Cambridge Latin Course)

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This is the best book in the Cambridge series of Latin courses. It finally gets intoo actual Roman texts, including the epigrams of Catallus and some writings from Ovid. I found that the previous books in the Cambridge series did not adequately prepare one for this book. Before you even think about opening this book, you need to know your declensions like the back of your hand! There is a great deal of poetry in this book, in fact, I would say that the emphasis is on Latin verse rather than prose. And often the adjective that modifies a particular noun is not even on the same line of the poem and thus, to make any sense out of the verse whatspever, you NEED to know your inflections, and the previous books in this series were not that great at driving that home. You cannot get by with just vocabluary in this book. But the texts that were chosen for the student to translate were good, and were usually of considerable historical interest. Some were a bit wordy, but that's often the way Roman writers composed. These pasages are the real thing, not made-up dialogues created for pedagogical purposes, so before you attempt it, be prepared. A big minus is that no composition exercises were included, and I have found that once composition has been mastered to even a small degree, the reading becomes much easier.

I started using the Cambridge Latin Course just under a year ago while taking an independent study course in Latin, and I think these are by far the best language books I have ever used, both in class and on my own. Some of the people who have reviewed these books (book four in particular) make the point that they don't really force you to learn your endings by heart. But the beauty of these books, in my opinion, is that the stories are logical and predictable enough that you can figure out what adjectives go with what nouns and so on without spending hours trying to memorize boring lists of case endings. And yet, while doing this--what some teachers may consider dangerous shortcuts--students are nevertheless learning their endings, and are doing it while seeing how the endings work in real sentences. The repetition not only of vocabulary but also of grammar is what makes these books so helpful. I think many people are turned off to language study because they think they have to remember 100% of their vocabulary lists and 100% of their points of grammar the first time around. Very few people can do that. But when the words and the endings are repeated over and over in different contexts, they will eventually sink in, and I think this approach makes the study of languages a lot less tedious and far more rewarding.

Hello, I'm a student who's class uses the cambridge latin series up through book four,(which I am now begining). As a student I love the books, which have an intricate plot and likeable characters. My greatest critism is that the book does not do a wonderful job of introducing the grammar. Instead of asking you to learn to conjugate each tence, it mearly introduces them. As I previously said, I love the book and if a teacher is prepaired to teach most of the grammar, he or she should find this book to be wonderful. I would not suggest this series for someone trying to teach themselves latin

I learned Latin by using the Cambridge Latin Course. Unit four has got to be one of my favorite works of this series because it contains Latin poetry and truly brings together all that a student has learned in units one through three. A student learns Latin inductively by utilizing the Cambridge series. There are stories in which similar grammatical features recur again and again (rursus et rursus). Part I of unit four has a review grammar with information on nouns like puella, servus, mercator and leo. It deals with the Latin adjectives bonus, pulcher, fortis, and ingens (inter alia). There are also sections on regular and deponent verbs in the indicative and subjunctive mood. Furthermore, this unit reviews uses of the indirect statement, conditional sentences and gerunds/gerundives. A complete vocabulary and helpful indices are provided too. Finally, I would say that the cultural sections in the Cambridge series accentuate the lessons that one learns from this series. The downside is that an instructor may not spend all that much time teaching declensions or verbal conjugations. But an advantage to this series is the broad vocabulary that a student can acquire by means of studying these units.

I took Latin I and II using the Ecce Romani series. When I switched schools, I had to switch to using the Cambridge Latin Course Unit 3 book for Latin III. It is a very poorly written textbook. The new vocabulary for each chapter is not put together very well in a way that makes it easy to learn. Since there are many little stories in each chapter, as opposed to the one big one and occasional second enrichment reading in the Ecce Romani books, there is vocab under each story. They tried to make a vocabulary list at the end of each chapter, but it never contains all the vocabulary listed under each story. The Ecce Romani books do a much better job of condensing the vocabulary and putting it all in one place, making it easier to learn. The Cambridge books are very confusing to look at and read because only proper nouns are capitalized. The back sections of the Cambridge books also only contain a Latin-English dictionary, so you're out of luck if you want to look up what an English word translates to in Latin. The Ecce Romani books contain both an English-Latin and Latin-English dictionary. The Ecce Romani series also does a much better job of explaining the grammar you learn each chapter. All the Cambridge books do is give you an example, not actually telling you how to form it in a sentence. The Ecce Romani books also have more challenging practice problems, and more of them, than the Cambridge books. On a more artistical note, the Ecce Romani books are much more interesting to look at, with color pictures that don't look like quick sketches, like the black and white Cambridge pictures do.
DO NOT buy the Cambridge series books. The books are very poorly written. The Ecce Romani series is a a much better Latin textbook series, which I highly recommend for anyone studying or planning on studying Latin.