So You Really Want to Learn Latin Book 1: A Textbook for Common Entrance and GCSE

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It’s not a magic quality of Latin, it’s because of the old-fashioned qualities of Latin teaching at its best, that grammar was taught. There are an awful lot of parents who learned Latin and Greek who are concerned that their children no longer are. I had previously tried Peter Jones' 'Learn Latin' and had then tried reading the Latin translation of the 'The Hobbit' (a book i'm highly familiar with in English) and some Julius Caesar - thinking i'd be able to 'fill in the missing gaps', but i soon realized i was going nowhere fast! Grumio is the name of the slave in the TV series Plebs, and characters named Metella and Flavia also appear. Listeners who’ve seen the Life of Brian will remember the extremely funny scene with John Cleese and Graham Chapman and the badly spelt graffiti.

The books are clearly laid out (left hand pages introduce grammar concepts/vocab, whilst right hand pages provide exercises) and Mr Oulton has a great knack of clearly and succinctly explaining grammar concepts in a fun way. If you are an advanced learn­er and want to dive deep into the dif­fer­ent nuances and usages of words, Oxford Latin Dic­tio­nary is a great resource. Only Latin and Greek were treated in this way — I think because of the associations with elitism and public school.He came up with this brilliant idea of publishing both Greek and Latin books with the Greek and Latin on the left hand side of the page, and the translation on the right.

When I read books that teach Latin, they always try and comfort the pupils, right at the beginning of the first lesson, saying, Latin is so like English — look at the word ‘ambulo,’ I walk, it’s just like ‘perambulator,’ a pram. It is difficult reading Greek and Latin but you can look across just like that and it makes it very, very, easy.These sen­tences are writ­ten to be trans­lat­ed using the cur­rent chap­ter’s gram­mat­i­cal top­ic while also prac­tic­ing pre­vi­ous points. You’re not constantly looking back to a dead subject or dead language of 2000 years ago, you’re looking at a tradition that’s changed and morphed right up until 50 years ago. We know many of our community will continue to use the 4th edition, so the resources on this site will still refer to both.