Curso-taller de Griego y Latín.

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO

ESCUELA NACIONAL COLEGIO DE CIENCIAS Y HUMANIDADES

La Comisión encargada de la Actualización de los Programas de Griego y Latín invita cordialmente a todos los compañeros docentes de Letras Clásicas al Curso-Taller Difusión de los avances en el proceso de actualización de los Programas de Latín y Griego que se celebrará del 7 al 11 de enero del 2013, en Av. Universidad 3000, con horario de 10 a 14 hrs.

Quienes no se hayan inscrito en el portal académico, podrán hacerlo el día de inicio del curso.

Griego I-II  y Latín I-II

Curso-taller: Difusión de los avances en el proceso de actualización de los Programas de Latín y Griego

Av. Universidad 3000

Del 7 al 11 de Enero

Matutino de 10:00 a 14:00 hrs.

RECURSOS PARA ATHENAZE

Athenaze

http://abney.homestead.com/athenaze.html

ATHENAZE - Introducción al Griego antiguo 

http://athenazegriego.blogspot.mx/

KETOS online exercises to accompanyAthenaze: an Introduction to Ancient Greek

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~ketos/

INSTITUTE OF BIBLICAL GREEK

http://www.biblicalgreek.org/grammar/athenaze/materials.php

ATHENAZE: problemas y soluciones

http://aigialos.blogspot.mx/2010/11/athenaze-problemas-y-soluciones.html

Ejercicios en Griego para Athenaze

http://aliso.pntic.mec.es/agalle17/Athenazecast/Athenaze%20Greek%20Exercises.htm

BLOG

El empleo de internet para la práctica de los ejercicios de etimología no sólo es recomendable, sino que, además, debería ser motivo de un apartado específico dentro del horario de griego. 

Existen numerosas páginas Web en nuestro propio idioma que contienen prácticas de etimología griega a todos los niveles y con todo tipo de étimos. Una cuidada selección de las mismas supone la garantía de un elevado rendimiento en el trabajo de aula,y a tal efecto, se ha creado un blog específico:

http://athenazegriego.blogspot.com

MATERIAL BÁSICO.

A) PRIMERO DE BACHILLERATO:·

ATHENAZE (Volumen I del método homónimo)

·MELETEMATA I de Carmelo Consoli, relación de ejercicios capítulo a capítulo, desarrollados específicamente para ATHENAZE en versión italiana.

B) SEGUNDO DE BACHILLERATO:· ATHENAZE

(Volumen II del método homónimo)

· MELETEMATA II de Carmelo Consoli, segundo volumen de los MELETEMATAI, destinado, en este caso, a los capítulos XVII a XXXI de ATHENAZE

·Selección de textos de autores obligatorios para las PAU. Dicha selección se hará necesaria siempre y cuando los autores requeridos paras las PAU no coincidan con los que aparecen en ambos volúmenes (Hesíodo,  Tucídides, Platón, etc.). En caso contrario, dichos autores se introducirán cuando el número de capítulos alcanzados en ATHENAZE favorezca la comprensión fluida del mismo en todo o en la mayor parte.

MATERIAL COMPLEMENTARIO:·WORKBOOK I, relación de ejercicios diseñados para la versión inglesa de ATHENAZE, especialmente indicado para los centros bilingües, donde no será necesario acudir a la traducción de los enunciados en inglés y será una magnífica práctica en ambos idiomas.

·Materiales adicionales tales como DVDs sobre películas históricas que complementen los temas culturales, mapas, programas de software educativo relacionados con la materia, relaciones de páginas Web, etc. De hecho, ATHENAZE, es, en menor medida que LINGVA LATINA un método que cada vez cuenta con un mayor número de recursos Web en español, pero, al igual que su homólogo latino, es también muy significativo el material web de origen foráneo,especialmente en lengua inglesa. Todos estos recursos, debidamente seleccionados y programados por el profesor en conexión con los contenidos que se están trabajando en cada momento, se emplearán si las condiciones de desarrollo de los contenidos mínimos lo permiten, en el aula (si se está en un centro TIC) o en un espacio destinado a tal efecto.

MATERIAL DE USO PARA EL PROFESORADO:·

El profesorado cuenta con un LIBRO DEL PROFESOR en versión italiano:

GUIDAPER L’INSEGNANTI, que actualmente está siendo traducido al español y adaptado a las necesidades y condiciones educativas de nuestro país. Se puede disponer igualmente de la versión inglesa: TEACHER’S HANDBOOK  (I Y II).

Además de los materiales comentados anteriormente, será de gran utilidad el empleo de recursos didácticos relacionados con el aspecto auditivo del griego; son numerosas las grabaciones de capítulos realizadas por profesores de lengua griega, y que se pueden descargar fácilmente desde internet. Un ejemplo de ello sería la web de recursos para Athenaze denominada ARIADNE, según un proyecto del Cornell College

http://www.cornellcollege.edu/classical_studies/ariadne/audio/index.shtml

PROGRAMACIÓN DIDÁCTICA

PROGRAMACIÓN DIDÁCTICA

GRIEGO I

ATHENAZE

(VERSIÓN ITALIANA DE LA ACADEMIA VIVARIVM NOVVM, BASADA EN EL TEXTO GRIEGO ORIGINAL DE OXFORD, TRADUCIDA Y ADAPTADA A LA NORMATIVA VIGENTE DEL MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN Y DE ANDALUCÍA)

VOLUMEN I (PRIMERO DE BACHILLERATO) EMILIO CANALES MUÑOZ.

Programación didáctica dirigida al profesorado que desee aplicar el método ATHENAZE en su versión italiana.

http://es.scribd.com/doc/58493796/PROGRAMACION-DIDACTICA-GRIEGO-1%C2%BABACHILLERATO-ATHENAZE

ATHENAZE

Athenaze

Since Athenaze is almost identical in concept and production, I would like to make the same unqualified recommendation for it. Unfortunately, I can't. Unlike its Cambridge brethren, OUP does not cater to the self-learner. In fact, it seems this is intentional. But read on.

To pursue Athenaze on your own, you need the following volumes (Athenaze distributes its thirty chapters over two books, so you wouldn't have to get the second books immediately):

• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Book I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Book II
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Workbook I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Workbook II
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Teacher's Handbook I
• Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Teacher's Handbook II
• An Audio CD to accompany Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek

Unfortunately, OUP only makes the teacher's handbooks and audio CD available to teachers and institutions purchasing the set for classroom teaching. They have confirmed this is their policy, for example, in correspondence to me from their Marketing department: "For obvious reasons we do restrict distribution of any text that provides the solutions or answers to the problems in the student books. I understand that this leaves the self-taught student in a difficult position." Actually, the reasons are not obvious to me, especially since it doesn't seem to trouble JACT, but that's OUP's policy.

For the record, I was ultimately able to persuade the publisher to sell me the teacher's handbooks and the audio CD, but it was an ordeal, and you should assume you wouldn't be as lucky. The teacher's handbooks indeed are not just the translations and exercise keys; they are full of suggested teaching techniques and so in fact addressed to teachers and not students. Unfortunately, as a self-learner, I am both the teacher and the student. And the handbooks are the only source with keys to the exercises in the main books. (It's shortsighted to try to learn a language without doing exercises and without checking your answers. I continually amaze myself at how stupid, or careless, I can be.)

The Introduction to Ancient Greek Books I and II contain the stories plus grammar and exercises. As I've said, only the teacher's handbooks have the story translations and exercise keys. The complementary Workbooks I and II provide additional exercises for each chapter, with an answer key included. And no audio guidance. So it's a mixed bag. (The Reading Greek 2-CD set sweeps the Academy Awards for best performance by male and female leading and supporting actors, best sound and dramatic effects, and best documentary explaining the restored pronunciation. But the Athenaze CD serves its purpose; I especially like that it sticks with the pitch accent throughout its readings and does so at a pace you can follow and practice.)

The Italian Athenaze

If you browse around, you'll undoubtedly find references to an Italian edition of Athenaze, by Luigi Miraglia and T. F. Bórri: Athenaze: Introduzione al greco antico. You can get more information from the publishing arm of the Accademia Vivarium Novum. Miraglia took the first edition of the English-language Athenaze and Ørberg-ized it (my vulgar term, his acknowledgment): He and his co-authors added stories (without disrupting the Dikaiopolis plot line) along with Lingua Latina-like marginal notes (all in Greek, of course) and illustrations, with the pedagogical goal of learning vocabulary and grammar more by contextual induction, less by native-language glosses. In a virtuous circle, the second edition of the English Athenaze in turn acknowledges "inspiration" from Miraglia.

The Vivarium Novum web site claims a teacher's guide is in the works (Guida per i docenti), but it seems it's been in the works for over ten years. In lieu of the guide itself, the site provides Miraglia's sketch for a guide. It makes for interesting reading. Despite a classical education many of us would be jealous of, Miraglia gives autobiographical witness to what Dowling warns of: After years of diligent memorization of grammar, after many guided readings, confronted with the simplest sentence, without the aid of translation or glosses, you still have to "sweat seven shirts" and frantically consult the dictionary just to elicit a plausible "deciphering" of the sentence's meaning.

Like the English editions, the Italian Athenaze distributes its chapters over two books,Athènaze A (I) and Athènaze B (II). Each has a companion volume of additional exercises, written by Carmelo Cònsoli, Meletèmata A (I) and Meletèmata B (II). For the sixteen chapters of Athènaze A, Alessandro Barbone has provided yet more supplemental exercises, Quaderno d'esercizi (cap. I-VIII) and Quaderno d'esercizi (cap. IX-XVI). And as supplemental reading to chapters twenty and beyond, Alessandro Barbone and T. F. Bórri have added an edition of The Tablet of Cebes (La Tavola di Cebète), an allegorical work passed down in the tradition as being the work of Cebes of Thebes, a pupil of Socrates.

The Italian Athenaze has no exercise keys. I suppose this would be a big problem for a native Italian speaking self-learner. For my purposes, especially since I am also brushing up on my Italian, I use the Italian edition as a fun and useful supplement, to aid my Italian as well as my Greek. As with Lingua Latina, I find the all-Greek marginal notes and illustrations a big help in learning the Greek vocabulary. 

If you live outside Italy, getting the Italian Athenaze is not necessarily easy. The Vivarium Novum web site is an eye feast and very informative (you can click on each book, enlarge the display, and leaf through its pages). But the shopping cart checkout is broken (as they acknowledged to me) and in any case only takes bank transfers, not credit cards. The only way you can hope to reach them is by phone. A well-meaning young man there tried his best to help me, but they just don't have the logistics to handle overseas orders. You can get the books through other Italian online sellers, once you struggle through trying to create a profile with a U.S. address. I got the books from libreriauniversitaria.it.

(By the way, if you're teaching yourself Italian, I highly recommend La Lingua Italiana per stranieri: Corso Elementare ed Intermedio, by Katerin Katerinov and M. C. Borioso Katerinov. [For the exercise key, La Lingua Italiana per stranieri: Chiave degli esercizi e dei test, and for the corso medio and corso superiore volumes in this series, you'll have to shop around on Italian web sites.] The book is an exemplar of the immersion method: Each chapter starts with a dialog, then grammar, without a single non-Italian word. Caveat: While still available, the publication is from 1985, so the content feels a little dated.)

MATERIAL PARA LATÍN Y GRIEGO. FRIDA ZACAULA SAMPIERI

HANS H. ORBERG. LINGUA LATINA. PER SE ILLUSTRATA. PARS I. FAMILIA ROMANA. INTERACTIVE LATIN COURSE I.

HANS H. ORBERG. LINGUA LATINA. PER SE ILLUSTRATA. PARS I. FAMILIA ROMANA.  LATINE AUDIO. CAP. I-X

NIKI WATTS. COLLOQUIAL GREEK. THE COMPLETE COURSE FOR BEGINNERS.

ANNE H. GROTON. FROM ALPHA TO OMEGA. A BEGINNING COURSE IN CLASSICAL GREEK.

Qeovdwro~ Stefanovpoulo~, Elevnh Antzoulhv. Arcaiva Ellavda. O tovpo~ kai oi avnqrwpoi. Anqolovgio.  B v GUMNASIOU.

NTORA PAPAÏWANNOU. ELLHNIKH MUQOLOGIA. OI HRWES. 

RECURSOS PARA GRIEGO Y LATIN

RECURSOS DE GRIEGO Y LATÍN.

SANTIAGO CARBONELL

http://aigialos.blogspot.mx/

BLOG DE FILOLOGÍA CLÁSICA.

http://filologiaclasica.blogspot.mx/2011/01/latin-griego-y-nuevas-tecnologias-tic.html#!/2011/01/latin-griego-y-nuevas-tecnologias-tic.html

ATHENAZE- INTRODUCCIÓN AL GRIEGO ANTIGUO.

http://athenazegriego.blogspot.mx/2009/01/captulo-vi-teseo-y-el-minotauro.html

Teaching Yourself Latin and Greek - Notes of an Autodidact.

http://latinandgreekselftaught.blogspot.mx/2011_05_01_archive.html

Parlare Greco Oggi (Conversazione Moderna in Greco Antico)

http://es.scribd.com/doc/94988536/Parlare-Greco-Oggi-Conversazione-Moderna-in-Greco-Antico

MATERIALES PARA GRIEGO Y LATÍN

MATERIALES DISPONIBLES DE GRIEGO Y LATÍN.

Almodovar Garcia, Javier. Griego. Madrid: Editex. 2002. (Se encuentra en la Biblioteca  de cada plantel del  CCH.)

Manzanero Cano, Franciso. Latín. Madrid: Editex. 2002. (Se encuentra en la Biblioteca  de cada plantel del  CCH.)

Reyes Reyes, Juan. Introducción al griego clásico. México: CCH “Sur”. 1996.

Zamorano García, Santiago. Hélade.  México: CCH “Vallejo”. 2012.

Zamorano García, Santiago. Pánton métron ánthropos.  México: CCH “Vallejo”. 2012.

Curso en Internet de Griego II. Moodle. Tu aula virtual.  Griego II Taller. Santiago Zamorano García.

http://www.salonenlinea.unam.mx/habitatpuma/moodleacademia/course/view.php?id=1699

Portal Académico del Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades.

Profesores en Línea. Talleres.  Curso Griego II. Santiago Zamorano.

http://portalacademico.cch.unam.mx/moodlecolegio/course/view.php?id=30

LIBROS ELECTRÓNICOS:

Almodóvar García, Javier  y Juan Manuel Gómez Tirado. Griego.  España: Ed. Editex.

González Castro, José Francisco  et. al. Griego I. Bachillerato a distancia.  España: CIDEAD. Ministerio de Educación.

Castilla López, Ma. Ángeles  et. al. Latín I. Bachillerato a distancia. España: CIDEAD. Ministerio de Educación.

Wheelock, Frederic M. Wheelock´s Latin.  New York: HarperCollins .

ONLINE LEARNING GREEK AND LATIN

Online learning

Are there online sites you can use to teach yourself Latin or Greek? I have not made a thorough study of this. It's to be expected that some Web-empowered individuals, some university professors and departments, some classical learning ecosystems and aspiring ecosystems have attempted an online service for learning Latin or Greek. What I've seen, I'm not impressed by, LATINUM excepted. One day maybe someone will find a successful formula. In the current state, if you're not Dabbler but Serious or Intense, my advice is to download Millner's Latin podcasts, then disconnect. Spread the printed or digital or Kindle versions of Adler, Lingua Latina, Reading Greek, and Athenaze out onto your desk - sure,Wheelock's Latin and Crosby & Schaeffer too. Close the door so you can read out loud. Resolve to be patient, get to work, have fun!

Latin/Millner/LATINUM

I have been a huge proponent and user of Evan Millner's LATINUM podcast. See my first post "Teaching Yourself Latin and Greek" for how I used what I called "Adler + Millner + Ørberg." See my "Beefing up your Latin Vocabulary, and How I Learned to Love Comenius" post for the role the LATINUM podcast played in beefing up my Latin vocabulary.

Well, especially in the world of technology, things change rapidly. Evan used a hosting service mypodcast.com to host his podcast, and mypodcast.com has gone belly up. Without ceremony, it's gone, kaput, along with Evan's podcast, never to return. Evan is not starting a new podcast, so some recordings from the podcast are irretrievably lost. However, all is not lost, and LATINUM itself continues on You Tube. Start by subscribing to Evan's You Tube channel, evan1965. Then observe that the videos are mostly or eventually arranged in playlists of related content. Then let me point out a few more things.

Video vs. Audio

The content on You Tube is of course videos. While I enjoy from time to time seeing and watching Evan as well as listening to him, the video for me is mostly distracting. My need is mostly for audio files I can 100% focus on (often indeed with my eyes closed), whose pace I can control, and which I can listen to while walking or working out. However, some past audio and in the future new audio will be made available on the LATINUM store (you can also link to the store directly from the You Tube site), which was associated with the podcast and remains associated with the You Tube channel. Previously with the podcast and continuing with You Tube, Evan periodically creates audio books (DVDs with MP3 files plus a .PDF for the text he is reading) and puts them for sale dirt cheap on the LATINUM store. So with respect to podcast recordings I referenced in my previous posts, you'll see in the store catalog the 3-DVD Adler course, Swallowing the Dictionary and, from his Comenius recordings, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus and the Januae Latinitatis Vestibulum. Unfortunately, the other podcast recordings from Comenius are lost, though I hope he will be doing more in the future. 

And doing them more comprehensively. In the last several months before the demise of mypodcast.com, Evan announced that as much as possible he was going to try to record entire works, rather than parts of works. So far, it looks like he is sticking with that policy on You Tube, and for me at least that is a very good thing.

Greek, Crosby & Schaeffer

In my "Teaching Yourself Latin and Greek" post, one of the resources I mentioned was the venerable Crosby & Schaeffer. In that discussion I wrote, "There are no 'officially' published keys to the exercises in Crosby & Schaeffer that I am aware of. This and its brevity of exposition seriously limit its value for the autodidact."

Here is a correction to that statement. First of all, I was not aware that along with their original publication of the textbook, in 1929, the authors also published a Teacher's Manual. That 1929 Teacher's Manual is still collecting dust on some library bookshelves (see Google Books, but it's not scanned). However, I got lucky and saw on Texkit a recent discussion about the availability of the Teacher's Manual, and in that discussion you will find a link to a .pdf scan of the Teacher's Manual on SkyDrive.

That is something of a precious commodity, and I would grab it while it's still there. I haven't looked at it closely yet, but it's got a lot of interesting commentary besides just the translations of the English-to-Greek exercises.

With that said, I would still recommend to the autodidact Athenaze and JACT over C&S. (See my "Teaching Yourself Latin and Greek, Part II" post.) But many, like myself, had their first pass at Greek via C&S, remember it fondly, and will want to use it again. Having the Teacher's Manual certainly makes it a viable candidate for the autodidact. (And again, I used all three for the resurrection of my Greek; they're not mutually exclusive.)

If you're interested in seriously pursuing C&S, you may also want to check out Rob McConeghy's Yahoo study group for C&S.

TEACHING YOURSELF LATIN

Latin

Wheelock

So let me start with Latin. The epitome of grammar-first is Wheelock's Latin, by Frederick M. Wheelock, revised by Richard A. LaFleur, available since 2005 in its sixth edition and also now in a Kindle version. (As i write this in May, 2011, I see a seventh edition scheduled for availability in June.) Wheelock's Latin gives all the foundational elements of Latin grammar in forty compact chapters. Each chapter contains one or more elements of grammar plus a vocabulary list, example sentences, brief quotes from classical authors, and Latin-to-English etymological tidbits. The example sentences are not translated, but an appendix has self-tutorial exercises for each chapter and answer keys to these exercises. In this approach, you learn the grammar first, while staying motivated by the tidbits and quotes, then follow up with guided readings from Latin authors, for example, using Wheelock's Latin Reader. (There is also a Workbook for Wheelock's Latin, which I am not familiar with.)

The sixth edition of Wheelock explicitly caters to independent study as well as to the classroom. For Serious, I think it works fine, and being in its sixth edition, it clearly has worked for many others, not just Serious. In my quest to resurrect my Latin, I started with Wheelock.

Adler, Millner/LATINUM, Ørberg

However, for Intense, I soon became aware of the natural-language approach, which in my experience yields superior, I would say far superior, results, provided you have the patience. This approach is sometimes also referred to as the immersion method, as it is similar to the immersion methods often used in learning a contemporary language. The particular method I followed I dub "Adler + Millner + Ørberg." I got my direction here from Alex Sheremet's customer review of Wheelock's Latin on Amazon and an online essay Sheremet cites by Rutgers professor William Dowling, Latin by the Dowling Method. Dowling had me with his first sentence: "The problem about Latin is that you can study it for six years and still not be able to read a Latin sentence." As a one-time Ph.D. candidate who passed all his language exams with flying colors, this brought back the gnawing guilt I felt at the time that Latin seemed to me more like a puzzle to be solved than a "real" language.

Read Sheremet and Dowling. They explain the problem better than I could. The point is to learn Latin (and Greek) as a natural and living language, not as an exercise in grammar. For my part, let me describe what "Adler + Millner + Ørberg" is.

Adler refers to an 1858 Latin grammar by George J. Adler, available digitally and in print, called A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language: With Perpetual Exercises in Speaking and Writing (1858). Notice "perpetual." Notice "speaking." In ninety-seven chapters (remember, patience!), it covers grammar as thoroughly as any book I know, far beyond foundational. But you get there in parallel with graduated ("perpetual") exercises in speaking and writing "everyday" Latin, question and answer pairs to be translated into, and spoken aloud, in Latin. (Adler provided Latin translations for the exercise questions and answers in a separate volume, A Key to the Exercises Contained in Adler's Practical Grammar of the Latin Language.) "Have we any more hay?" "We have some more." Can you say "any more" in Latin? "Some more"? Without having to think about it? The point is to learn the language first, rather than leaping from grammar directly to the high art of a Vergil or Cicero or Horace, writers who, as my graduate school Latin professor put it, manipulated the language like a late Beethoven string quartet.

The Latin content in each Adler chapter includes forms and vocabulary that haven't been covered yet but whose meaning can be induced from the context and from knowledge of cognates and similar forms. This method of inductive learning is employed to one degree or another by all the natural-language or immersion approaches.

Speaking? Here's the cool part. Evan Millner has put all ninety-seven chapters of Adler in his LATINUM podcast: grammar exposition, grammar drills, exercise sentences (that is, their Latin translations from Adler's Key). It took me about a year to get through the ninety-seven chapters, reading each, listening to the podcast, frequently hitting the pause button to repeat the Latin out loud, but believe me, at the end of the year Latin for me was a living language, not a grammatical puzzle. Not to mention I could achieve this while on my exercise bike. Check out LATINUM for many other valuable resources, and if you believe in the humanities, make a donation.

As I worked through Adler + Millner, I read Ørberg. Ørberg refers to Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina. Lingua Latina comes in two halves: Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Pars I Familia Romana is the foundational Latin; Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Pars 2 Roma Aeterna is the reader. (English-speakers, you want the Focus edition of Lingua Latina, which you'll find on Amazon or directly from Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company.)

You will search in vain for any non-Latin word in Lingua Latina (except for the title page and back cover of the Focus edition). Immersion. There's no preface; you dive in with the first sentence of the first chapter of Familia Romana, "Roma in Italia est." On that simple linguistic, historical, and geographical foundation, there follows thirty-five chapters of delightful, often wry stories about a family from Tusculum in the second century CE, stories that in my opinion rise to the level of art. All-Latin marginal notes and illustrations (per se illustrata) greatly assist comprehension. At the end of each chapter is a Grammatica Latina section, in which all grammatical terms are likewise in Latin. (Focuspublishes various ancillary materials in the Ørberg Series, including a handy thirty-two page paperback all-Latin compendium of declensions and conjugations, Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Grammatica Latina. There are also CD's that are probably to be recommended, but I'm not familiar with them.)

The sophistication of the Latin and your Latin reading skill progressively build as you work your way through the fictional stories about Julius, Aemilia, and their family. The only quotes from classical authors are brief selections from Ovid and Catullus, recited in a later chapter by family and guests at a family-hosted convivium. The chapters present related vocabulary about a given subject (farming, animals, army life, the Roman calendar, etc.) together, in connected prose. This is far more effective than vocabulary lists of unrelated words as a means of building your lexicon. Your vocabulary at the end of Familia Romanais much richer than at the end of, for example, Wheelock's Latin.

In sum, obviously you need to learn Latin grammar in order to read Latin. You can learn grammar first, as an exercise largely unto itself, or in the process of learning to speak and read the everyday language. Dowling points out the danger in the grammar-first approach - not the inevitability, but the danger - i.e., that at the end you still can't comfortably read a sentence of Latin! I guess the danger of the natural-language approach is, you're itching to read Cicero and Ovid and you lose patience.

Latin, Intermediate Level

One way or the other, you'll learn the grammar and want to begin reading the ancient authors. And one way or the other, you'll need to go through an intermediate stage before confronting Latin in its full nakedness, say in a Teubner or Oxford Classical Text edition. Of course there are numerous contemporary textbooks for doing this, not to mention the proliferation of reprints of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century student editions. I read Ørberg's Roma Aeterna and Wheelock's Latin Reader in their entirety and recommend both.

Roma Aeterna provides the dual benefits of solidifying your Latin while teaching you Roman history. The first chapter is Ørberg's walking tour of the ancient buildings and monuments of the eternal city through the reign of Antoninus Pius. The remaining chapters are slightly adapted selections from Vergil, Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and others that cover the history in chronological order from the mythical foundations through the fall of the Republic. (The Vergil is mostly prose versions of the verse.) Each chapter concludes with all-Latin, mostly fill-in-the-blank exercises to reinforce specific points of grammar. I am not aware of any keys to the exercises, but they are pretty easy, and if you're not able to answer them with confidence, you've probably gotten too far ahead of yourself. To beat the immersion metaphor to death, by the end of Familia Romana and Roma Aeterna, you're swimming in the deep end of the pool.

(For some reason Roma Aeterna, unlike Familia Romana, doesn't contain an index to the vocabulary. You'll want to get from Focus Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Indices, which indexes the vocabulary for both volumes.)

Hans Ørberg passed away in February, 2010, almost to the day when I began Familia Romana. I am very sad I cannot email my eternal gratitude to this great and warmhearted humanist.

Wheelock's Latin Reader contains mostly unadapted selections from Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Pliny the Younger, and, what I especially like, some Vulgate and Medieval Latin. It is in the format of Latin on the right page, concise English-language guidance on the left. It would have been nice if the Vocabulary in the back was indexed to at least the first occurrence of each word. And one pet peeve I have is the asterisking of words in the Vocabulary that occur "five or more times in the book" because such words "should be memorized." Doesn't memorize mean learn? So I shouldn't learn, for example, oleum(olive oil) or operor (to work, labor), and not have to look them up again and again? There is no shortcut to learning a language. Can we please not dumb it down.

Latin Dictionaries and Reference Grammars

Though in theory not necessary while working through the introductory and intermediate texts, which have their own vocabularies, you'll probably want a dictionary. Cassell's Latin Dictionary: Latin-English English-Latin is excellent and reasonably priced. Save the $300-ish Oxford Latin Dictionary for when you are both rich and Intense Intense (Oxford Latin Dictionary replaces Lewis and Short for classical era Latin, if you go back in the day)!

Similarly, the appendices in any introductory text provide templates for all the declensions and conjugations, but eventually, if you're somewhere between Serious and Intense, you'll want a full reference grammar that covers the nuances of syntax much more comprehensively than an introductory text. Adler, while not a reference grammar, is excellent for this. In addition, many of the early twentieth-century reference grammar classics are, well, classics, and available in a number of reprints. The most thorough Latin reference grammar I know is Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar (1898/1903). I also use Charles E. Bennett's more concise New Latin Grammar (1895/1908/1918). (One advantage of having these is that many of the reprinted late nineteenth and early twentieth century student editions cite them. Except for Adler, I'm not providing links to the reprints, because there are many of them and I don't want to vouch for their quality.)