Customer Reviews

Wheelock's Latin (Harpercollins College Outline)

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've used Wheelock's Latin from both sides: as a disaffected student, eager to learn a language that I didn't have to -speak-, and as an instructor, in several of Indiana University's entry-level courses.

As a student, I fell maddeningly in love with this book. It's not an easy read, nor is it like most college textbooks. It can be pedagogical at times, old-fashioned at others (another reviewer pointed out the recent excisions of some non-PC examples), but above all, it's -thorough-. It was written in the 1950s, when most college students were expected to have a better grasp on English grammar and general history and mythology than perhaps students do today. If you don't know your reflexive pronouns from your prepositional phrases, you'll run into trouble even in the early chapters. But with a little effort, you'll find that Wheelock's really teaching you -two- languages: Latin and better English.

As a teacher, I evaluated a few different texts (such as Hillard and Botting), before settling on Wheelock. I'll admit that a large part of my decision was based on my own experience learning from it (and why not? If -I- didn't like learning from it myself, why would I want to subject my students to it?), but there were other factors, such as its -less- pedantic tone and better-organized way of introducing grammatical concepts. Based on feedback from the three courses in which I used it, most students had positive things to say about the book, appreciating the demands that it made on them. Of course, some students didn't like it at all, probably because of those same demands.

There are a couple of drawbacks that prevent me from awarding Wheelock that fifth star. First, the current (6th) edition isn't as solid (for lack of a better word) than the 3rd, which you should immediately buy if you ever find it for sale. Second, the reading passages in the back of the book aren't nearly as useful (or interesting to most students) as the ones in Groton and May's _38 Latin Stories_. Third, as other reviewers have pointed out, Wheelock doesn't contain any sort of anecdotal historical or cultural information to liven up the delivery of what can be pretty dry grammatical material. This is an especial weakness, in light of my comment in the previous paragraph about how little historical background knowledge students usually have. But there are no other Latin introductory texts that strike Wheelock's perfect balance between the classical pedagogy of the 19th century and the more recent attempts to mass-market Latin to "complete idiots" and "dummies".

WHEELOCK'S LATIN is clear, well-organized, and brief. There's only a few pictures and not much talk about Roman history, but for those of us who are serious about wanting to learn Ancient Latin, their absence is not sorely missed.

Since the chapters are short (about 5-7 pages in most cases) the book is ideal for self-study. I would add, however, that whether studying in school or on your own, but especially this latter, the addition of a companion guide will prove to be invaluable.

For this, I recommend Grote's COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO WHEELOCK'S LATIN -- a book that offers a little more repetition, fuller grammatical explanations, and is written in a calm, reassuring style. (Another plus is that it, unlike others, has its answer key printed in the back of the book -- so you don't have to wait a few months for your answer sheet if you get one at all.)

I've read the critical reviews of Wheelock, and I must say I'm bemused. This book has survived for so many years, and in so many editions, because it is a straightforward, clear, precise introduction to ancient Latin--period. Let the historians teach the history and culture of Rome: students in Latin I and II will not have the time or patience for watered-down lessons with colour pictures anyway.

I have taught with this book, been taught by this book, and recommended it to others who then taught themselves with this book. It works. And there are numerous online resources, created by faculty around the world, which can be used to supplement the text. No other text has such a wide user base to draw upon.

I'd have given it five stars if the most recent edition hadn't added the "Latin est gaudium--et utilis!" section, which I find silly and distracting.

Some criticize this book difficult because of the strong emphasis on grammar. But grammar is the ticket to understanding, and if it's not your strong point, don't bother learning Latin. Get some tapes or software and learn a modern language that you can become immersed in without a heavy grammatical emphasis.

If you learn best in a no-frills text, Wheelock will be perfect. Many textbooks today include colorful photos and pop culture references, but Wheelock is dense, with little room for fluff.

The translation exercises are taken from classical sources, so you get some exposure to Roman culture. The short historical and literary commentary at the end of each chapter is a nice, unobtrusive way to tie things in to the bigger picture of Roman culture, but it doesn't affect the focus of the course.

When my professor assigned us this book for first-year Latin I groaned -- no pictures! That was back in 1992, and I'm still using the darn thing. In my 8 years of study I have used many books, but this one has been my constant companion, and I feel that I passed a graduate test in Latin because of it. For self-study this book is invaluable. The lessons are thorough and you can grade yourself with the self-tutorial exercises and answer key -- a definite plus to this book is that it has an answer key so you can see how you are doing. There is also ample reading material, some of it altered for the beginner, some of it unaltered so you can test your wits.

In short, I must grudgingly admit that this is the best book I have used, all around. I gave it four stars because it lacks pictures, myths, cultural tidbits, etc. But there are other books that have these things; for grammar, syntax, etymology, all the mechanics of Latin, you can't beat it. I highly recommend it.

Wheelock's Latin has been around for over 40 years, and for good reason. It is the best introductory grammar of Latin that I've come across.

People bring to the study of a foreign language different expectations, different levels of linguistic sophistication, and different learning styles. So it's no surprise that there are a wide variety of reactions to Wheelock's text. I think it's the best for the following reasons:

1. It doesn't assume you know a lot of grammar - they don't just drop 'demonstrative pronoun' and 'subjunctive' on you; the concepts are explained clearly.

2. Lessons contain one or two grammatical points, with many examples of their proper use.

3. Practice exercises (and answers!) are given in the rear of the book. You could also buy the companion exercise book if you want, but caveat emptor! - the answers are not included. (I wrote to Harper Collins, and they sent me the URL and password for the website that contains the answers.)

For my money, it's the best and gentlest introduction to Latin available, and it's suitable for all ages, from high school on up. With Wheelock under your belt, you'll be ready to take on annotated readings, and hit some of the more advanced grammars.

I've tried picking up Latin on my own but it never worked and when I finally was able to take Latin in college the textbook the professor used was Wheelock and I was amazed. For the first time all those endings made sense and why the endings changed made sense also. Learning grammar may be old fashioned but I prefer to know it. For me, it makes things easier. Instead of looking at a Latin sentence and being completely lost, I could easily look up the gender of a noun (if I didn't remember it) and figure out what function it served based on its ending, what adjective went with what noun because of agreement, what tense the sentence was in because of the verb and anything else I needed to know about the sentence so I could translate it. Wheelock takes quite a bit of studying and I have had to buy several extra books because my command of English grammar is laughable but Wheelock is the only Latin book that I've ever been able to understand.
And Wheelock doesn't really bombard you with too much information at once either. At least not for our class since we do a chapter a week. Each chapter has the new information first, a list of vocabulary next, and sentences to translate along with a paragraph at the end. That's pretty much all I pay attention to and while Wheelock doesn't provide answers for the chapter exercises, they can be found on the internet (most of them), and the exercises in the back of the book have answers to them.
Labor me vocat!
Labor- 3rd declension masculine noun and because of the form it is in, it is either the nomitive (subject of the sentence) or the vocative (direct address). Labor means work, toil, etc. Me- pronoun meaning me. Vocat- the t tells you it is third person singular (he/she/it) and since this is a first conjugation verb (vocare- to call), it is in the present indicative active (basically he/she/it calls, is calling, does call). And the it refers to labor since labor's form indicates that it can be a subject. Work calls me. Work is calling me. Work does call me.
I just gave you a long tedious explanation but I can assure you, I feel much better translating a sentence and being able to tell exactly why it is translated that way instead of being lost. I quit taking Spanish, and still loathe the subject, because I was lost. I made good grades, could write it, read it, but I had no clue what I was doing. Just stuck stuff together because I had memorized what sorts of things went with what sorts of things. Being able to pick apart a Latin sentence and be able to tell what the subject is, direct object is, indirect object is, the tense the sentence is in, and everything else is a wonderful feeling. If you want to skip the grammar, go ahead, but I prefer to be able to understand what I'm doing and Wheelock is the only book that seems to understand that.

Several reviewers have attacked this text for using shortened versions of latin text, which is exceedingly unfair. This is an introductory text, and as such, accomodations must be made rather than using the entire text out of some elitist notion(as a parallel, how many children know the real nursery rhymes?). Also, the physical quality of the book has been assailed, which I see as baseless and without merit; its just as quality as any other paperback book. The text itself is straightforward, and fairly easy to read. Little time is wasted on cultural issues, which to be honest, I find refreshing (I study ancient history and find it implausible that a book purporting to teach latin could also do a half-way plausible presentation of the attached cultures and periods). Overall, a good text.

Since the first edition of Wheelock's Latin appeared in 1956, it has been the textbook of choice at many US colleges. According to a survey done by the American Philological Association a couple of years back, about 50% of all departments responding used the third edition of this textbook, whereas Moreland and Fleischer, the second most popular textbook, was used by only 8%. The book offers an introduction to Latin grammar and the technical terms used to describe language that is easy to understand even for absolute beginners. I also like that the book provides macrons and stress marks for every Latin word and insists on loud reading with the correct pronounciation which will make life much easier for students should they ever come to study Latin poetry in the original. Whether this textbook is the best introduction to Latin imaginable, however, is a matter of debate.

A lot of instructors assign Wheelock's Latin with considerable hesitation. Especially in the beginning chapters, the book doesn't really offer the "real" Latin that it promises. Except in the case of short proverbs, all the sentences taken from, e.g., Cicero, Horace, and Seneca have been shortened and simplified to such a degree that I find it hard to call them "real Latin".

In order to reach these completely unconnected snippets of text, one has to work his/her way through a list of 25 new words, only to discover that one is unable to translate about half of the practice sentences without further vocabulary help although some of them don't consist of more than two or three words.

Nevertheless, Professor Lafleur improved Wheelock's original course considerably. He not only removed sexist sentences like "the glory of girls was and is and will always be their beauty" (formerly ch. 6) but also by adding more reading passages. Again, these are based on ancient texts but offer only a very distorted view of the original. I wonder if it doesn't do a disservice to students to present Horace and Catullus to them in this mutilated fashion. The poets themselves, I'm sure, are rotating in their graves whenever somebody reads the freely adapted prose versions of their poems in chapters 2 and 4. In addition, these reading passages are still considerably too short to give students enough practice in reading and translation. For this reason, many instructors assign Groton and May's "38 Latin Stories" in addition to Wheelock's textbook.

Finally, the book doesn't offer any illustrations. It leaves it up to the instructor to try to make Rome and its culture come alive by supplying background material and visual input. Other textbooks offer (sometimes even colored) pictures that give students an idea of what a <i>Roman<i\> house looked like (as opposed to their own) etc. At the same time, these illustrations often go with the reading passages and allow students to develop valuable pre-reading strategies by deducing as much as possible about the content of a passage from the picture and the words they already know. These pre-reading strategies will come in handy when they tackle real Latin literature later on.

In sum, Wheelock's Latin is a textbook that has worked for many people. How many of them really went beyond mere translating to <i>reading<i\> and appreciating Latin literature is another question. Some obviously did, but it seems to me that they managed to do this despite the outdated pedagogical method of the book, not because of it.

It would be hard for me not to give five stars to the single series of books (all the wheelock collection) which enabled me to attain fluency in this extremely difficult and complex language. I consider myself very qualified to write a review on the book in that I have very slowly and arduously digested all 40 chapters of the book over a period of five years and the concepts I learned from this grammar have been reenforced repeatedly through readings of original authors. While the grammar may not be as completely comprehendsive as other more advanced grammar books it is extremely practical, essential, and straight forward. The books main strengths are

1) Its very informal, non technical language and lucid explination. Some reviewers have expresed a feeling that the book pre-assumes knowlege of english grammar in order to explain latin grammar. This is to be expected and is perfectly rightly so. As a matter of fact, if you havent learned the grammar of the language you speak, how can you ever hope to understand an explination of the grammar to a language you dont speak? We would have to call nouns "those things that are names for things" and past participles "those words you use to refer to a verb that has been done already" You see many of the detracted stars this book has recieved are not due to faults in the book but in its readers. This book does a very good job of making the explination understandable without overloading you with technical grammatical terminology. I own 8 grammar books some of which date back to the early 1900s and by far this one is the most expressive.

2)It contains extra practice exercises and material that many other grammar books dont such as a large selection of original latin litterature in the back and a dictionary that is both latin english and english latin. Some people have moaned about the fact that the book dosent contain much cultural/historical info on ancient roam. This is beause the book is already about 1.5 by 7 inches of pure unadulterated linguistical and lexical magnificence intended for one purpose only, teaching you the fundamentals of the latin language. While it is good to learn of the culture you can do this elsewere in other books and if your learning a language you should never use only one text anyway.

3) it gives detailed etymological info and even a humorous bit called "latina est gaudium et utilis" in which the reader understands how latin developed into the romance tongues and how it has effected english. There are many cheesy jokes in the gaudium and utilis bits but these are a noble attempt to lighten the already onerous burden of bearing the weight of complex grammatical constructions. And if the reader consideres this material to be extraneous or superfluous he can always simply skip them with no detriment, I dont understand why some reviewers have actualy taken off stars for this. where else can i learn interesting things like "malo malo malo malo" (id rather be in an apple tree than a bad man in adversite) and that sic transit gloria mundi realy translates to (gloria gets sick at the train station on monday)

All potential readers can completely disregard the comments made by those who have given the book one star for teaching grammar the "old fasioned way." It almost sounds like someone would have us beleive that we as mature adults can learn a language only by hearing it spoken thereby bypassing the effort and work requried to internalise grammar. It is known that only infants can do this and the process is very difficult to reproduce in a classroom with adults. This is like trying to learn to play a musical instrument solely by listening to mustic, its valuable for learning how it should sound and does you great benefit, but how can you ever expect to be a motzart unless you play with a piano. Similarly if you never put forth the effort to learn, how can you say somethign like this: Quisquis vult sic latialiter loqui, hunc librum legat discatqve ut volubiliter ac libenter dicat. (whosoever wants to speak thusly latinly, let him read and learn this book that he might speak it fluently and freely)