Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1 Student's Book North American Edition

by North American Cambridge Classics Project

Book Overview

The Cambridge Latin Course is a well-established introductory program in four Units, originally developed by the Cambridge School Classics Project. Under the sponsorship of the North American... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521343798
• ISBN13: 9780521343794
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 11 to 14 years
• Grade Range: Grades 6 to 9

Customer Reviews

Secondary school textbook

I used this course for four years when I was at secondary school and found it to be excellent. The vocabulary is slowly introduced so that instead of looking at a text and seeing a jumble of letters, like I did with French and German, you can understand most of it and don't need to be looking at the vocabulary lists all of the time. The cultural parts are very interesting and link well with what you are studying and the story flows throughout the course so that you are interested to find out what happens next. Although the grammar isnt forced into you, you do learn it by using it, which I think is the easiest and the best way. But I wouldn't suggest using this course without a teacher - mine was brilliant.

A gem . . .

This is the series we used when I learned Latin in high school. It is the best language text I have ever read, and I have a soft spot for it in my heart. Many traditional Latin teachers are uncomfortable with the premise of the series: that Latin can be learned intuitively. Phinney wanted students to learn the grammar without effort, and the book is amazingly effective in its mission. This book begins with baby Latin that it is simple enough to understand, but no one ever wrote in Latin that way. Then each unit increases the complexity of the passages. In Unit IV, historic Latin texts are introduced. The greatest problem with the series occurs in the transition between Unit III and Unit IV. You must learn the declensions, etc. in tabular form before you can truly parse historic Latin, and parsing is what ensures an accurate translation.Fortunately, you shouldn't have any problem doing this, because the tables will make perfect sense to you due to the Phinney effect. All you should be doing is formally naming what you already knew. (As one reader points out, all this formal stuff is in the back of each book, too.) If you are worried, I would suggest buying Phinney's Guide to Latin Grammar. It is meant to be used with this series from day one, and it has all the hardcore grammar you could desire.

Umm.

If this book seems the least bit confusing, it's not because it's badly written, as some of the reviews imply. It's because Latin is the hardest major European language to learn (yes, even harder than classical Greek, once you've taken a day to learn that alphabet). There is no simple way to approach it, but there certainly are worse ones than Phinney's -- such as the Oxford Latin series. After taking Latin for several years I started on French as well, which seemed pathetically simple (though it's a beautiful language) in comparison. I've never used such a good textbook -- the cultural information, the grammar exercises, the pictures (yes, the pictures), and the English vocab connectors make it a masterpiece. Don't expect to go and use it on your own, though. That holds true for any text-based language study.

stirring translations

You won't get bored reading Latin with this series. I took Latin in high school for three years using this series of books, and liked them so much I bought the first two in the series (because that was all I could afford at the time). I plan to buy books 3 and 4, using 4 to teach myself further. Though the characters and stories you translate change from book to book, the continuing sagas in each help keep you interested and wanting to translate more. Not to spoil the ending, but I got so attached to the characters in book 1 after a year of working with them that when one of them dies at the end of the book, I actually cried- I was very distraught!

An excellent and fun way to learn Latin

I used the first two books in High School, and am teaching myself the other books. I felt like I caught onto the language almost from day one. These books are simple to grasp and have interesting stories that make you want to translate them immediately.