Wheelock's Latin, 6th Revised Edition

"Wheelock's Latin" is perhaps the best conservative book of its type -- that is, it's the best of grammar-before-understanding Latin textbooks, and it shows. It thoroughly explains the grammar in ways most college textbooks don't, and it has plenty of selections from the original authors, which, if quickly understood, helps build enthusiasm: "Look, Mom! After 1/2 an hour of sweating, I finally understand these three sentences!" Moreover, there are additional readings in the back, in case you'd like to test (or brush up on) your knowledge of mechanical decoding.

But, that's where the fun ends. I used this book in a summer intensive course, and loved it. We finished most of in 8 weeks, and I, too, was pretty confident like the hypothetical student above. Soon, though, I noticed that learning Latin felt unnatural. After a semester of prose, we moved on to Ovid, and something became clear: I wasn't "reading," but decoding.. Wheelock and subsequent instruction trained me to do exactly that.

Decoding -- it's when a student looks at a sentence, and hunts: there's a noun, there's the adjective, but, they're in different cases; oh, the adjective probably goes with this noun, then. Verb, adverb, subject.. and, ECCE! Puzzle solved.

Is this reading? Why are students of German, or Russian (a more difficult language, by the way) able to build the kind of proficiency in 2 years that many 5-year students of Latin only daydream about? The difference is in the approach: German and Russian are taught as languages, while Latin is usually taught as a synthetic, mechanical puzzle. And, don't try to say that German and Russian are still spoken -- that's not an excuse, considering that it's possible to at least approximate Latin fluency by constructing artificial social situations: audio, continuous prose composition at very early levels and beyond, and exposure to low-level readings.

Wheelock does not help this problem. Instead, Wheelock does the following: he gives you a great grammatical introduction, and then throws sentences at you, which you either translate into English or into Latin. These exercises are graded by difficulty, but there's no continuous reading.. there's no introduction of "baby prose," of substantial narrative-nuggets that might get the student thinking in Latin, and thinking of Latin *as* Latin -- that is, as an individual language, one that should not be forced into an Anglicized word order, or puzzled out, piece by piece.

Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with the above if it's immediately followed by a different approach. But, Wheelock is not designed with an alternative in mind -- high schools and colleges start you with Wheelock, and then throw you into advanced prose or poetry. There is no side-step, or, even more helpful, a step back.

Students that are just starting out, like me, at one time, don't realize the following: they will never learn to read Latin properly with such an approach. Sure, they may learn to read Latin properly if they do something on their own *in conjunction* with typical formal instruction, but, I suspect the formal approach then becomes a burden, a distraction from the student's "real work."

Obviously, that's a problem.. the student never really gets used to Latin word order, among other things, because he's never around enough of it in quick, digestible chunks. Moreover, if he never practices generating Latin quickly and proficiently, there will always be a barrier between the original Latin text and his true abilities, especially in terms of reading speed. Although we have only a tiny portion of original Latin literature extant, it's pretty much inconceivable for a student to ever get through those works in his entire lifetime, if, that is, he never leaves the Wheelock approach.

Instead, I'd recommend Orberg's "Lingua Latina." It's an excellent book designed for Latin fluency, if used in conjunction with other materials. It's all written in Latin, as one continuous narrative broken into different scenes and chapters. Although it starts out very simple, it moves up to real sophistication, but slowly enough that, with a little patience and review, the student is reading the final chapters (which approximate unadapted Latin, by the way) at a respectable speed, and only sometimes hunting for objects, subjects, etc., in some of the more difficult or unclear sentences. At the end of the first chapter, you will have done several pages of solid reading, which might be more reading than in all of Wheelock's chapters combined. Interestingly, your reading speed, while it will decrease as you move on to the harder stuff, won't decrease significantly. And eventually, you can get it back, and move beyond your initial stages.

I'd also recommend Adler's "Practical Latin Grammar," which is out of print, but nonetheless available on Google Books. Adler's textbook is especially good as a supplement to "Lingua Latina," since it eventually covers every important point of grammar, including complex subordination. It's focused on *conversational* Latin, which forces the student to generate and verbalize good Latin sentences from the very beginning. The entire book has been rendered into audio on Evan Millner's "Latinum Podcast" site, which -- at least a few hundred hours worth, if not more -- is available for free. In this way, you're doing two things: you're practicing complex prose with proper reading skills with Orberg's book, and practicing listening and speaking Latin with Adler and Millner.

An article criticizing the typical Latin-teaching approaches mentioned something interesting and revealing: in the Renaissance, students were first taught conversational Latin for five or six years before ever cracking open some Caesar or Cicero. And only years later, perhaps, did they ever touch poetry. Doesn't this seem sensible? To truly understand a language, or even to simply be competent enough to read at a decent speed, from the start of a sentence to the end, without juggling endless case endings and objects in your mind, requires this kind of approach. Sure, if you're doing Latin academically, there may be no time -- you're expected to have decoded at least a couple of hundred of pages of Latin by the time you hit your Ph.D. stage, in some schools. But, if you're interested in doing well and improving every day, and visibly, for that matter, forget about Latin literature for as long as you can tolerate it, and start with the basics: easy reading, and conversation.

And it's not all bad: I'm glad I did Wheelock, because "Lingua Latina" was much easier for me, given the vocabulary and abstract grammatical knowledge I had. So, if you're completing Wheelock now, or about to start it, consider it preparation for what comes ahead.

For more information, read William Dowling's homepage -- a fluent reader of Latin, he first turned me on to this "natural method" of language acquisition. He doesn't accept e-mails, but you can write some snail mail to him, as I did:

[Author of [[ASIN:B00PJF2F36 Woody Allen: Reel to Real (Digidialogues)]]]

I just finished the book after 3 months of very disciplined self study. I lost many hours of sleep, doing latin until 3 am having to wake up just a few hours later. I used

1. This book

2. The workbook

3. Grote's notes.

I do not think that this book on its own is enough for self study. You definitely need all three books. Then, you just have to plow ahead until you are done. And, do I mean plow ahead. Forty identical in format chapters that inexorably and mercilessly introduce a point, then translation drills, then some text. Some "fun" material has been added, but you have better things to do: the next chapter.

You see, this book I find is for people who have an enormous left brain hemisphere. If you are into inductive learning, stay away! This is not the book for you!

So, yes, this book is the best as far I am concerned, but it is not for everyone. No, it is not difficult, but unless grammar is a favourite pasttime of yours or have some natural inclination for it, this book will be boring.

So, do I feel that I know latin now? Hmmm.... Tricky question. Latin grammar I know like the back of my hand, but I feel that my reading level is not at the same level (which makes sense, if you ask me). I think that this is quite a common remark when it comes to this book.

But, for this reason, he has the second book in the series where you hone your reading skills. One goal at a time.

Guess what I am doing next?

Wheelock's Latin is traditionally the dominant system for learning the classical language, and I think it maintains that position solely because some people haven't tried anything better, namely the Cambridge Latin series (four-part). I've learned Latin as an adult on my own, meaning I don't have hours a day to spend on exercises. I started with the Wheelock's book and never got anywhere. I started making progress with Cambridge right away. Why is the Cambridge system better?

1) Wheelock's throws all the conjugations of a given declension - sometimes more than one declension - at you in a chapter. So for the pronouns, for example, you have to learn all five cases for masculine, feminine and neuter at once. Unless you have about four hours a day to spend on this for days on end, it is maddening. The Cambridge system focuses on text rather than grammar drills, and then incorporates the grammar as you go along. For the adult learner, that is the only way to go.

2) Lack of text - because Wheelock's is overwhelmingly focused on grammar, you don't get much contextual understanding. With the Cambridge system, you start reading basic texts right away.

3) Culture & history: each chapter has a section in English on some point of Roman culture and history, which is especially good if this is for children.

This may be the "Gold Standard" in Latin learning guides according to the experts commenting here, but as someone who is NOT a Latin expert (and learning Latin on his own), this text has been impossible for me (and I am not someone new to learning languages; I have learned Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin without any problems).

Before I bash this book, however, let me start with its strengths. First of all, the author should be commended for his use of authentic, real world phrases in each chapter, as well as a short text from a real Roman author at the end of each chapter. This is excellent and, I can only assume, will serve one well in future readings.

The problem with this, however, is the presentation of the vocabulary. In the first chapter, a list of 20 vocabulary words--listed at random; they are not in alphabetical order, nor are they in the order in which they will appear in the exercises--is followed by only 15 sentences in Latin (and 5 sentences in English). Your job is to decode these 15 Latin sentences, which is a nice idea, but it did not work for me. First of all, you have had no time to absorb this massive amount of new vocabulary (sure, I could make flashcards and my own little exercises to learn it, but, isn't that why I am paying for a book?), and the horrendous organization of the vocabulary makes it a scavenger hunt to find the word that you are looking for(would an alphabetical organization really be so bad?). To make things even more fun, the author decides to use very few of those vocabulary words from the list anyway (most of the exercises have "new" vocabulary with an explanation in parentheses afterward). This not only deters me from wanting to take the time to teach myself that ridiculous vocabulary list, but also makes me feel like I have no chance of ever being an independent reader if the author is just going to blurt out the answer at the end of the sentence. Perhaps altering the vocab list to actually match the exercises would be helpful. The end result is that by the time I finished the drills in the first unit, I personally did not feel that I had learned any Latin at all. The optional self-tutorial in the back helps to mitigate this problem, but only slightly.

Personally, I feel that I am having much better results from combining Gunnison's "The First Year of Latin" (which is now considered part of public domain and available free on the Internet) to strengthen my grammar and vocabulary and Orberg's "Familia Latina" to help my reading comprehension. While neither of these begin with authentic Roman quotes and excepts, they give you a better feel for the language, its grammar rules, and its vocabulary. Both of these texts do also eventually make their way up to authentic Roman texts, but I personally am glad of the slower pace that allows me to absorb what I am learning. After two hours in each of the books that I just mentioned, I felt like I had ABSORBED more Latin than I had in two days of Wheelock.

Hope that this review is helpful!

This book is not only a textbook for learning latin, but makes the learning process more straightforward.

This book is not only a textbook for learning latin, but makes the learning process more straightforward.

This book is not only a textbook for learning latin, but makes the learning process more straightforward.

I have fond memories of Wheelock's Latin: it was the stern taskmaster that gave me my sea legs in Latin.

What I like about it is that it gets right to work, not wasting the student's time with a bunch of pictures, introducing yourself activities, or historical blurbs. If you want to be able to read Latin, you've got some tedious lucubrations ahead of you, and I smile when I think of this book, since it makes this clear from the starting gate.

Three things to note:

1. It's true what they say: when students finish working through the 40 chapters herein, students invariably fancy themselves as having a much greater facility in reading Latin than they really do.

2. This book is not ideal for self-study, since even the revision by LaFleur does NOT HAVE ANSWERS TO THE EXERCISES! But thank God for the Internet, on which you can find reliable translations of the Sententiae Antiquae. I largely self-studied this book years ago, and I remember that sticking in my craw not a little. The layout and tone of this book obviously mark it for mature learners, so what's the harm in putting translations in one of the appendices? What's the point of peeping at the answers if you're teaching yourself?

3. It has often been said that Wheelock produces arrogant little 19-year-olds, in the sense that when you're done with it, you're made to feel you know a lot more Latin than you really do. Yeah, I agree. That was tough to take: starting a 2nd year Cicero course thinking you're the bees knees, and slowly realizing that Wheelock & Co. stacked the cards in your favor.

The principal method that this book employs is to overwhelm the reader with huge ammounts of grammar, and then confuse the reader by presenting a bunch of pretentious classical poetry which barely makes use of the grammar if not directly throwing the grammar out of the window entirely (there are a number of lines within these poems that do not even include verbs).

Other issues I had with this book were to do with the order in which vocabulary and grammar is introduced. There is a lot of emphasis on the verbs "to warn" and "to praise", perhaps the Roman Senators did a lot of warning and praising, but the rather more useful verbs "to go", "to get" and "to have" barely get a look in, in fact the verb "to go" only gets mentioned at the very end of the book. Furtermore the various verb tenses are presented in a non-sensical order. Since most people learn Latin to study history, it seems sensible that the past perfect tense would be the most useful one to learn early on, with particular emphasis on the third person singular and third person plural (i.e. he/they went, he/they had, he was/they were, etc.) But this tense is not introduced until chapter 12, where as the past imperfect (I was going) and future (I will go) tenses are introduced as early as chapter 5. Why an earth is so much early emphasis placed on the future tense in a language that is used primarily to study societies in the past not the future?? There is also too much emphasis on the various subjunctive tenses, the reader has to sit through many chapters on the various subjunctive tenses before even being taught how to say "I go".

I do not understand why the authors felt it was neccesary to introduce at least 6 different ways of saying "therefore" in a beginner's textbook (ita, itaque, quare, sic, ergo, ideo). Instead they should have only included the most common 2 or 3 ways, or if they are all equally common, then a whole section should have been written about this peculiarity of Latin and emphasizing that all 6 words should be memorized.

The book is a useful resource, but perhaps not for a beginner, if you are going to use this book to learn Latin, do so in combination with other texts that focus more on the basics, I can recommend Lingua Latina per Illustrada for that.

Edit: I removed my complaint about the answers not being available, having learnt that an answer key is available for free online.

This latest edition of Wheelock's Latin is much improved from past year's editions. While the book retains much of the copious factual and many of the grammatical features, each chapter now contains a section called "Latina est gaudium -- et utilis!" which brings a little light-heartedness to the format. Dr. Rick LaFleur has done a great job with his additions to the book, and this book is the preferred text for many U.S. universities.

I only have a few irksome issues with the book, but this is because I learned Latin originally from the Ecce Romani series of texts. I can understand why the writers choose to leave out some obscure forms and spellings, but then again, when they are encountered in "real" Latin, one wonders what he's seeing then. A good bit of the translation, especially the self-tutorial sentences, is "canned" Latin, changed from the original, and while this is necessary in the begining chapters, later it is not. It is kind of a shock to try to then go over to something like the Aeneid. As well, some of the grammar is called by different names in Wheelock versus other texts, gerundive vs. future passive participle, for example.

In all, the text is a compromise between the old school approach to Latin pedagogy (memorization and regurgitation) and the newer approaches that concentrate more on understanding Latin as Latin rather than stilted English translations.