Rating: 
Summary: Ave Wheelock!
Review: This is the king of all Latin books. Nothing has yet to surpass the golden standard set by this old favorite.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad Latin
Review: Use this book if you want your students to hate Latin. Although it is a slight improvement over the torture of the original Wheelock text, it nevertheless does not take into account scholarship in the area of the teaching of reading. Too many Latin teachers at the college level have no or very little understanding of how the average learner acquires literacy. But Wheelock ain't it. (It seems that most Latin teachers at the college level are not interested in average learners; they want "the brightest minds," little computers, coming into the classics department. Unfortunately, many people with an interest and a yen to learn Latin are going to be thwarted by texts like this. I would recommend that a teacher use the first two volumes of the Oxford Latin Course and then get the De Bello Gallico of Caesar published by Bristol Classics Press, edited by Colin Ewan, available from [Amazon.com]. The Caesar text would be excellent for the second or third year. After Ceasar some of the philosophical writings of Cicero would be great, such as De Amicitia. This is in fact closer to the way people were taught Latin in the past and still are in Europe. The fragmented, one-sentence-at-a-time approach was always a mistake. And there is no reason to teach students all of the grammar first. This is not how we learned to read English, why on earth do Latinists think this is the best way to learn Latin? I personally think they don't care. If you want to learn to read Latin, they figure, you are going to have to do it on your own. Why then don't they just have their students buy the grammar by Gildersleeve and Lodge and turn them loose? Wheelock is little better than that.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent and enthusiastic Latin book
Review: I have seen a lot of language books in my time, and I have to say that this is my all-time favorite. Despite the fact that Latin is a dead, grammatically complex language which, by its nature, involves a lot of rote learning, Wheelock has boundless enthusiasm for the language, and it comes across infectiously in his book. He has broken the grammar down into manageable chunks, each of which can be done in a day or two. Each chapter has a grammar summary, vocabulary, and excercises (both made for the textbook and taken from actual Latin literature), and a fun little note at the end. If you take his advice about how to proceed through the chapters, you can't go wrong. I recommend this book highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't believe the hype
Review: This book is pretty good, and I'm giving it 4 stars rather than 3 only because I want to err on the side of caution. It deserves points for its winning enthusiasm and smarmy humorousness; it garners negatives for the awful "snippety" nature of its exercises in which no context is given and sentences are expected to be understood. I am not sure about the reviewers who discuss how Wheelock alone made them understand grammar: it seems that other books are good at that as well. I think that overall I recommend it (having learned Latin from it) but not as wholeheartedly as some of the other reviewers.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Resource for those who wish to learn Latin!
Review: This is probably the most widely used first-year Latin text, and with good reason. It's a 40 chapter cornucopia of readings and exercises, many culled from ancient authors. Starts easy, and is well-paced, but doesn't cover the subjunctive until very late in the book. Longer excerpts from classical texts and optional self-tutorial exercises (and answers) in the back. The accompanying workbook can also be a helpful motivator.
Rating:
Summary: A Solid Introduction to Latin Gammar
Review: This is an excellent introduction to Latin grammar. Wheelock's offers a lot of practice exercises that accompany each unit, which reinforce the new skill. Right now I am using this book along side of Latin Via Ovid, which offers a lot of classical readings, more than Wheelock's, in fact. Reading it is important for reinforcement of both vocabulary and grammar, so I would definately suggest to those learning Latin on their own to use both of these texts.
Rating:
Summary: Gateway into the Roman World
Review: I decided to take Latin after having studied French for six years. Latin is an extremely difficult language to learn, even with prior Romance language experience. The goal of the introductory Latin sequence is to provide students with the tools necessary to read the ancient texts. This means that you will learn, for example, the perfect and present active systems in the first few weeks of the course, followed by passive, etcetera. It can take an hour or two to translate a few English sentences into Latin.
However, unlike French or Spanish, you are also translating texts of cultural importance. My professor takes the time to provide the context of the Latin passages, which are extremely interesting. The study of ancient languages is your gateway into the mind of the ancients. Latin is one of the more important languages in the history of Western civilization (if not the most important; I'll let scholars of Greek and Latin fight that battle). Wheelock's Latin provides the elementary tools necessary for a better understanding of a time and place that serves as a base for our own, and which can also prove to be rather alien to the modern mind.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of yes and a little no!
Review: I decided to teach myself Latin a few months ago, and bought this book, the workbook, the "comprehensive guide", a dictionary, and the Latin Now! computer CD. I probably spend 3-4 hours a week studying.
This book is all it claims to be. The material is presented clearly and fairly completely, but you will be happy to have the other resources if you are working on your own.
As others have mentioned, the lack of answers to the exercises is a very major drawback, only partly compensated for by the self-tutorial exercises in the back of the book. Giving translations for the sentences and little stories would be a big help.
However, that hasn't stopped me from working with the book. Latin IS difficult. My hope is that it is keeping my brain young!review by Janet Knori, author of Awakening in God
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: MAGNVM OPVS LATINITATIS
Review: 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)
|
