Customer Reviews

38 Latin Stories Designed to Accompany Frederic M. Wheelock's Latin (Latin Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The "38 Stories" in the book, edited to form a progression in difficulty, are an excellent introduction to reading actual Latin authors. The most frustrating time in a Latin student's course of study may be this transition from memorizing grammatical forms to applying this knowledge in reading Latin. The stories are fairly short, so that students will not get bored by content, exposing them to many different styles of writing in a shorter period of time.

The passages chosen are also from famous authors' works, giving students a sense of satisfaction that they are now able to read the work of those authors about which they have heard much reference. Formatted like the more difficult Latin works, with notes and vocabulary facing the page, "38 Latin Stories" eases students into this style of study, better preparing them for reading works of Cicero, Vergil, Horace, and others. Moreover, this book does not need to be used in conjunction with Wheelock's Latin. Personally, I used this text after the study of grammar and before delving into Cicero's Catilinarian orations. Even just taking selected passages from the 38 stories is an excellent introduction to reading Latin through reinforcement of grammatical concepts.

The "Grammar Assumed" section lets you know exactly the grammar you are working with and, assuming you are doing Wheelock's concurrently with this book, any new vocabulary is presented on the page opposite. Everything is nicely in place.

A word to the wise (which is the main reason for this review): If you choose to order from a marketplace seller, you may want to make sure you're getting the edition you think you are. There are a lot of 3rd editions out there, and the sellers don't distinguish from these and the current 5th editions.

38 Latin Stories is an excellent source of graded Latin prose to accompany Wheelock's Latin. As the title suggests, it contains 38 stories in Latin which are graded according to the chapters of Wheelock's. Each story more-or-less corresponds to one chapter in the textbook.

All vowel lengths are marked in the stories, and each story has vocabulary on the facing page containing words not in the textbook. There is also a useful glossary at the back of the book.

However, for its price, it does not actually contain much Latin text as the stories are each only half an A5 page long, and the print is fairly large. They are, however, interesting and provide valuable additional reading material.

Despite this, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wished to gain additional experience and practice in reading Latin, over and above what is usually provided in textbooks.

Wheelock's "Latin - An Introductory Course" has proved itself to be one of the best and most popular texts for learning Latin. This work is an excellent companion and supplement to his grammar.

This selection of readings is keyed to his grammar; each Latin selection follows a certain lesson in his "Introductory Course". Each short Latin reading is on the left (even) pages, and the vocabulary and grammatical annotations for the selection are on the facing (right) page. All are heavily adapted and annotated, but less so as the grammatical sophistication of the student grows.

I found this work beneficial in several ways: it provides supplementary reading and practice to reinforce the grammar; it gives additional vocabulary, above and beyond what's given in the grammar; and it gives a good mix of cultural, literary, and mythological themes to instruct and interest the student.

An excellent learning aid, at a very reasonable price. What more could you ask for?

This book is a good supplement to Wheelock in that reading the brief stories gives the student of Latin a feeling of accomplishment. One feels a sense of progression in being able to read several related sentences instead of a list of unrelated sentences in the textbook. A glossary for each story is handily located across from that story, eliminating the need to search through pages in the back of the book. The only reason I can't give this book 5 stars is that it is too short. Considering the selling price and the brevity of the stories, several stories to accompany each Wheelock chapter should have been offered.

This is an excellent book of adapted excerpts from classic authors (Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, Catullus, and others). It works best in conjunction with Wheelock but is also a good source of assignments for first-year Latin students.

The problem I have with the readings in this book is that they are way too short, about 200 words for each chapter of Wheelock. This is enough to illustrate the points covered in each chapter only, not to cultivate an easy, natural reading ability which requires large quantities of not-too-difficult reading material. If each chapter had a 2000 word reading, that would be different. A book like that would be worthwhile. Spend your money on Hans Orberg's, Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, a skillfully created graded reader that takes you from the simplest latin all the way to fairly advanced latin over about 40,000 words of entertaining text. That is the best supplement for Wheelock I know of. (Lingua Latina actually stands on it's own, you don't need Wheelock). After that, if you want more practice with simpler latin before tackling the real thing, you can avail yourself of lots of free basic latin readers that you can find on the internet in the public domain. Nunting's Latin Reader is one example. There are many. You can find them on places like google books and archive.org.

This is a good companion to Wheelock's text. In combination, they are a powerful duo. This text starts out with easy pre-fabricated selections that retell Greek Mythology and work their way into more complex latin authors

Latin is known to all as a difficult language to learn, and difficult it is, specially due to its synthetic language character, contrary to the character analytic of the modern English language, which, coming from the Germanic family of languages, in its evolution stripped itself from many synthetic features, what adds difficulty to every student of Latin who speaks English as its mother tongue. Due also to the common Indo-european heritage both languages have, we could call Latin an Uncle of English, as if in a type of patrilineal relationship that happened in some primitive peoples. And this uncle-ish character is fully preserved in the exercise book "38 Latin Stories", by Anne Groton and James May, and this is a pretty much good surprising characteristic of it.

The book is designed for English speaking students who are using the famous and good "Wheelok's Latin" as its Latin Grammar. I bought the two books together but jumped rigth away to "38 Latin Stories" and was not disappointed at all. I got in fact a lot of fun out of it and all the pleasure and satisfaction I was expecting, which means the authors did a good job. Each of the 38 stories presented are famous texts of Latin or Greek ancient authors adapted to a modern reader, and the lessons are increasing in difficulty, according to the corresponding chapters of Wheelok's. The texts are at the left side of the page, with some remarks on the level of difficulty presented and at the right side there is the corresponding and explained vocabulary. At the end of the book, there is a very good glossary with words that are also important to the understanding of the texts, all this according to strict Latin way of presentations of verbs, nouns and all types of words.

The texts are somewhat small but very interesting, both from the point of view of the stories written, all of them taken and adapted to prose from very well-known Latin or even Greek writers (Cicero, Homer, Julius Cesar etcetera). Given the idiosyncracies of the extreme irregular conjugation of verbs in Latin, and this specially from the point of view of the English speaking reader, it is advisable to have as an add-on any of the many good book of Latin verbs, as, for instance, 501 Latin verbs, by Richard Prior & Joseph Wohlberg, which has also a good verb locator.

38 Stories is a very good help to any one interested in the Latin language, but it supposes some prior knowledge of the language. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Good reading and Valete!!

I purchased this book to provide supplemental exercises for my 11-year-old daughter who is using Wheelock's Third Edition in her homeschool studies. We are a few chapters in (we are using it to keep up with vocabulary and grammar over the summer months) and so far it is very successful. The stories provide just the right level of challenge and she is enjoying having an actual narrative to translate rather than just the list of non sequiter sentences that she is used to from the Wheelock textbook.