I was suprised to see that no one had reviewed this work, but downright disappointed to see that the majority of viewers are choosing to purchase a different text instead. I just came through a Summer Intensive program in the University of Arizona using this text, and cannot recommend this work highly enough. What separates this text from the other beginning Latin textbooks that I've seen is that our dear friends Rita and Floyd have placed the emphasis on grammar over vocabulary. Everything is given at a very early stage, including the subjunctive mood. This makes it easy to differentiate between similar words, and prevents the student from forming poor mental habits. The vocabulary lists for each chapter are not excessively long, which means that by the end of the exercises in Chapter 2, the student will likely tire of learning about poets and queens. I cannot stress enough what a gift this actually is. Vocabulary is easy to learn once the morphological patterns have been imprinted. If a large vocabulary list had been included, the grammar would necessarily have suffered. In the first half of the summer (four weeks), I made it through this entire text and was ready to translate classical Latin with the help of a dictionary. For English speakers, this won't seem like much of an accomplishment, but keep in mind that Latin is an inflected language. The English words "She is carrying a large thing" can each be looked up, while in Latin, the endings and forms of words change to reflect their tense, mood, voice, case, gender, number, etc. "magnam rem fert" cannot be properly looked up in a dictionary, because they are formed from "magnus, magna, magnum; res, rei; fero, ferre, tuli, latus" If you are a teacher, consider using this text at a slower pace for a regular semester of Latin. If you are a student and your course does not require this text, try to pick it up anyway. Answers to the exercise are not included in the text, so you'll have to ask your professor to review your work, but I assure you it is well worth the effort.
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