The big question is... should I stick with Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, which I really like, or add in some other stuff?

I like the idea of the Hieronymous monks books, because they have CDs to go with them, and they told me they would sell me extra text books

I like the Father Foster stuff too--I'm weird, I actually like learning the grammar of a language I am studying.

So, what would anyone suggest?

Thanks!!!!

A lot of people like the Latin for Americans series of textbooks, but I have never warmed up to it. The advantage is that Glencoe is a big publisher with web resources and other extra materials.

It looks good, that's for sure But since I am not a school system I can't afford it

Used textbooks!

I have a couple of old Latin textbooks. One of them has dip-pen ink, writing notes from it's original student in 1916! I think she was a girl in a Catholic high school or some sort of college for women. It's very neat to read her writing, which is in perfect penmanship.

One time, I found a copy of Hilaire Belloc's The Jews in the special collections of a university library, and a Rabbi whose name was written as the owner on the title page, certainly pre-WWII, had written comments in the margins throughout. Most of the comments were sympathetic to Belloc. Awesome.

What finds! Books like that are great; it's hard to believe that some people say we shouldn't write in our own books


Anyway, I've decided to see if I can find out more about the monks' Latin course, and use Fr Foster's work as a supplement and guide to memorizing the hard parts of Latin. What I realized is that memorizing as the only thing would not achieve the goal of myself and of Lingua Latina, which is to be able to read the Latin rather than continually deciphering it, but that it is important to help one get over the hard bits, and I'm going to use Fr Kenobi's 5-pile flashcard idea (elsewhere), and another idea I picked up which is to write them 200 times--which I may not require 200 times; that's a lot!--but also to have more change exercises, where we start off like this:

The dog bit the man.

The dogs bit the man.

The dogs bit the women.

The man bit the dog.

Etc.

Gotta run!

I would indeed suggest using different materials. My own route in tutoring others was three fold. Lingua Latina, coupled with having them both ask and answer questions orally in Latin about the story, hence making it their own. Latin by the Natural Method by Fr. Most...the supplementary stuff for the "second year" is very valuable, as he teaches you the various and different ways to express things (like the multiple ways of expressing indirect statements). Again this is geared to actually reading Latin, but for most of the first year section still retains explanations and exercises in English.

Then we use two works. Elementary Latin Translation. And Elementary Latin Exercises. So that they gets used to both translating and rendering into Latin.

I think your approach would work well. Fr. Foster is great and listening to Latin aids a lot

Thanks so much, PED

being a newcomer, i'm late in coming into this topic. but FWIW, i came into Latin as part of a seminary curriculum: grammar, vocabulary, syntax - all nested progressively in primary grade-level stories in Latin, then the Gallic Wars, Cicero's orations and finally, Vergil's Aeneid. From this classical syllabus, we were expected to swim through the Latin of the Vulgate (specially the Psalms), writings of the fathers of the Church contained in the canonical hours of the Divine Office. The same expectation was applied in wrestling with the writings coming from the Vatican. All this, happening during pre-Vatican II days. Since nowadays English translations abound, my best suggestion is to take the syllabus above and target the Vulgate as the resting place of current Catholic Latin lovers. The Navarre Bible is my bias.