Wheelocks Latin (Wheelock's Latin)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Frederic M. Wheelock Our price £7.79 (£11.99) New from £7.33 Used from £3.61 Pages: 560 (Paperback) ISBN: 0060783710 Pub: HarperPerennial Pub date: 2005-07-07 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 184597

Reader Reviews:

Very disapointing (10/11 people found this helpful)

SALVUS SIS !

I have decided to bring back my old knowledge of Latin back on track and I bought this book,along with the Cambridge Latin course .. I must say that the Wheelock is ever so disappointing.The book is done in 40 chapters, all introducing specific points of grammar, more or less clearly explained, and by the end of lesson 2, you end up being totally confused as what ending goes to which kind of names, not sure if you re dealing with either a verb or a noun.. some of the exercises have no links whatsoever with the grammatical topic just explained,(the book only gives some partial answers to exercises.. ) and at the end, you feel so frustrated that you want to throw the book against the wall.

The Wheelock course may be a suitable textbook in a classroom, under the guidance of a teacher, but if your goal is to either learn latin at home, at your own pace or simply brush up what you ve learned in school..and don t have the chance to have a teacher... Sorry !
Go for the fantasticly well done "Cambridge Latin Course", or the ever so funny and witty "So you REALLY want to learn Latin" or more serious but by far the best Latin textbook I ve ever dealt with so far
"Reading latin" by Peter Jones & Keith Sidwell. Cambridge University Press .
I rated 2 stars for the binding and the lovely front cover...

Remember this though. Latin, though an extinct language, is a Difficult language to learn. Even a simple sentence requires dealing with declensions cases, and you can t expect reaching a good reading fluency as fast as you would with any other language. so be patient, take a deep breath and enjoy it.

BENE REM GERE !

A great way to learn Latin (25/25 people found this helpful)

I first learned Latin using Wheelock's text (as have many, many students over the years) nearing 30 years ago, with the 3rd edition. While going through the text, the teacher or professor would add many items of consideration not in the text, as the text to be as comprehensive as it should be would need to be twice the size.

When I picked up my copy of Wheelock years later to refresh my knowledge of Latin, I discovered just how valuable the instructors' input had been been, as I kept coming across questions of grammar, tense, declension, etc. that were not fully explained, or clearly explained, in Wheelock. For a good eighty to ninety percent, the Wheelock explanations were sufficient, but for those who need a mastery of the language, eighty to ninety percent is not enough.

The sixth edition, which I bought to see what improvements had been made, is essentially the same text with additions. It is still divided into forty chapters, with each dedicated to one major grammar section; it has sentences (often from original sources) that need to be translated (without a key in the back), and other sentences (often constructed sentences) with a key in the back. The sixth edition has additional readings from primary sources in Latin above and beyond what were included in the third edition; also, the page layout and size of the book is different (and I must confess, I preferred the smaller format book to the workbook-size of the sixth edition).

If using Wheelock as a self-study, I particularly recommend Grote for assistance when Wheelock is talking about the various voices and verb conjugation issues, and the spelling/vowel changes that occur in conjugation or declension, Grote's notes are very valuable. Also, Grote seems to have more a sense for the modern student, adding little flourishes in the text, both in the description as well as the examples, to make things more fun and interesting. Sometimes I wondered in Wheelock if the only thing Latin was good for was writing funeral dirges or speeches about duty (I wonder how Gilbert & Sullivan would sound in Latin, since they are all about duty? But I digress...)

As Grote says in the introduction to his book, students are having increasing difficulties with mastering Latin grammar because they have less training (it seems) in English grammar. Studying Latin becomes a formal training not only in the foreign language, but also in general language structures. I must say I am envious of his students, having two semesters to get through the forty chapters of Wheelock; when I took the course, we did the whole thing in one semester, and it was an abbreviated summer term at that!

One very useful piece of Wheelock is that students learning Latin from it will simultaneously learn English grammar structure much more thoroughly.

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