Customer Reviews

Learn Latin: A Lively Introduction to Reading the Language

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I took one semester of Latin in college 12 years before I got this book. As soon as I started reading it I knew it would be a great way to get back into Latin. I've looked at every beginning Latin book I could find; none are better than Learn Latin. If want to teach yourself Latin and do so from a book that makes it interesting, funny, and therefore painless, this is the book!

After dealing with my son's Latin courses and instructors, let it be said that this book is revitalizing. Most of my son's Latin teachers in high school and now college were and are now clustered, humorless, unreal people. Mr. Jones changes all of that. His book makes the subject of learning latin as light as it should be.
I am coming from the point of view of an American Catholic who had to mouth our "Pater Noster"'s and Litany of Saints without having any idea what was being said. No longer. He almost makes me want to pick up Latin again as he adequately explains tenses, cases, gender, person and verbs with a layman's level of accessibility. And then he intersperses these lessons with witty digressions on Roman history. He even tackles the awkward subject of Latin poetry. My son tells me that the rhythms are quite interesting. I might just have to purchase my own copy, because this book can be appreciated on so many levels.
Also I wish to affirm after helping my son, this book is the best available. We slogged our way through the abstruse "Wheelock's Latin" and will never do that again. In 20 lessons he does what that previous book couldn't do in 40. (By the way, in response to incredible demand, he has also written a follow-up to this called "Learn Ancient Greek". My son also tells me that this makes greek no longer "Greek" to the reader.) (The rest of foreign language teachers should take note of him. If they could all write or teach with this much clarity, society would have fewer stressed out parents and disengaged students.)

From a 'blog entry ([...]):

I wrote recently about my interest in learning Latin. It comes in part from wanting to be able to instruct my children in the language, but also with the realization that, with my thirty-eighth birthday around the corner, there are only so many things I'm likely to accomplish before I turn forty. Learning Latin and the rudiments of Greek is something I think I can do.

For "primers" I chose two books: Peter Jones's "Learn Latin" and G.D.A. Sharpley's "Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin." Both volumes are very good, beginning with lessons in the first conjugation and adding a dozen or more words in each chapter to help students build a vocabulary. If I had to choose between them, though, Jones would be the favorite. Based on a series of articles that ran in the Telegraph of London a decade ago, "Learn Latin" promises to leave students able to read basic Latin in nineteen weeks. "I guess that anyone who completes the course will have covered about two-thirds of a GCSE course in Latin."

The book is laced with Jones's wit, humor, and knowledge of the intersection between English and Roman history, but this is no gimmicky approach to learning the language. You are asked to drill, drill, drill. After completing just the first chapter, I had filled four pages of notes with work from the requested exercises.

And it works. I walked my kids through the first lesson of Latina Christiana I without having to consult the teacher's guide.

Sharpley is good, but his approach is somewhat less methodical than Jones's. He also occasionally lets fly pedantic zingers like this one:

"The classical period of Latin was a moment in the language's evolution which could not endure, for no living language can remain the same for long. The efforts of later grammarians to preserve classical Latin were a symptom of its passing."

So am I studying a collection of disease-like symptoms, then? If so, why bother learning it at all? On the plus side, he does spend more time on pronunciation. (Remember, Jones's is a reading course.)

In sum, you can't go wrong with either author, but go with Jones in a pinch.

I have tried them all. Latin instruction books are usually not very user friendly. I have Rosetta Stone full version and while it is great for expanding vocabulary, it doens't even attempt to deal with grammar. Most books, Wheelock, etc. assume you have a degree in English grammar. (Which I do but it still doesn't help)
Peter Jones book seems to do a better job than most in explaining why Latin sentences are put together the way they are. It also does a good job of explaining endings...both nouns and verbs. It doesn't explain the ablative case. No book I have found so far has, but it does at least show pretty clearly what it looks like.

I totally agree with the reviews below.
I'm korean and never knew latin, and this was a bliss.
It's so easy and fun to learn latin with this book~

This book is a package of Peter Jones's twenty newspaper columns on learning Latin, augmented with a glossary, grammatical reference, and index. There are several key features: short chapters, fun and lively writing, focused vocabulary, grammatical explanations, selections from Catullus and the Bible, and tidbits on Roman culture and history. The style and format make it easy to use for self-study. A possible improvement might be to add more reading selections (e.g., Caesar), at the risk of increasing the length of the chapters.

This is a good book for adults trying their self-teaching skills at learning Latin. Good explanations of grammar and history. Not a good book for school settings or younger students, particularly in a group setting, due to its historical and illustrated content.

Not very engaging; unsuitable for a beginner. Try Latin for Beginners, from Teach Yourself publishers, for a true introductory course. "Learn Latin", on the other hand, is just someone writing about the grammar of the language. Nice, but not how you learn. A bunch of newspaper columns bound together in a book with a new fancy cover, isn't enough to learn anything, much less a highly inflected ancient literary language quite different from English.

If you are reading this review you probably do not need me to convince you that Latin is not useless in our contemporary era of PC and Playstation and you will probably share my enthusiasm in greeting any serious attempt at diffusing the language.
Prof. Jones's is a very serious one, coming from a competent latinist, even if each and everyone of his explanations is intermingled with funny puns.

His goal is to stimulate his reader by providing a very basic grammar and authentic, interesting texts so as to lure him/her into loving the language before the necessary effort wipe out his/her enthusiasm.
Unfortunately he might have achieved this particular goal but he fails at the rest.

First, his approach is a traditional one: explanations - examples - exercises.
It is my firm opinion that if Latin is to survive as a school subject any beginner's course should handle the language as if it were a modern one, with a moder approach: lots of dialogues and pictures too. Grammar should be left for later.
There are pictures in this course - even if I do not like Mr Benoit style they are more useful than heaps of examples- but they are not enough.

Second the exercises are not nearly enough to memorise the language: unless the reader is so highly motivated as to translate each single sentence into Latin and back a couple of dozen times he/she will forget almost everything soon.

Things change if you have already had Latin at school and wish to refresh it: in this case this course will be fun and it will help you decide whether you really want to pick it up again.