Mofobabe,

I'm in my 4th year of my BA in Psychology/Social Anthropology (graduating in April), and I've decided to take Latin to fulfill my language requirement. I've completely fallen in love with the language, and thankfully it's coming fairly easily to me. The problem is that I wish that I had taken Latin earlier so that I could've worked my way up to more advanced courses in the language and used them as electives.

I was hoping that Teller might have some advice on where to look if I wanted to go the self-taught route for learning more advanced Latin after I've finished this course. We're not using Wheelock, but apparently the textbook we are using ('Introduction to Latin' by Susan Shelmerdine) is similar in content, and we're covering the entire book. Would it be enough to sit down with a book like Harrius Potter and a Latin-English dictionary and flounder my way through it, or is there an intermediate level textbook that lends itself well to self-study?

Thanks,
-Wes

I looked here

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

but they don't have any Latin courses at all.

Wes, sorry I haven't checked the board in a while so I didn't see this. If you can get a copy of Wheelock, try to work your way through that as well. There are also a lot of ancillary materials out there for Wheelock - readers, workbooks, etc. What authors are you interested in? I wouldn't recommend going into Harrius Potter with the intention of learning Latin. It's a fun read but mostly for the neologisms the author concocted. There are a few universities that offer online Latin courses. One of the best is the University of Georgia. The program is under the direction of Dr. Richard LaFleur, and perhaps he could answer your questions. I'm sure you can get his email from the University website. Tell him Penny from NJ sent you.
I'll try to think of some other sources and texts and write more later.
I've been teaching Latin for 39 years now so I have a lot of contacts.

Thanks for your advice and suggestions, Penny. I picked up a copy of Wheelock's, and will work through it after I'm done with this course. My prof recommended picking up an annotated version of Cicero's writings to start with, so I'll probably do that as well (if I can find a decent one). I also found the Latinum site online which looks rather unwieldy and intimidating, but it also looks like a good resource.

And my best friend's girlfriend has suggested that we play Latin scrabble sometime. I have no idea how advanced her Latin skills are, but I know my Scrabble skills are absolutely terrible. I think the whole idea equals a double fail score, but it should be fun (or at least extremely humbling!). I even found places on the net for customized scrabble sets and letter distributions. I guess there are even Latin scrabble tournaments held in some places.

I had no idea what I was getting into with this whole learning Latin business, but I like it. :P

-Wes

Gee, why not learn Ebonics or Esperanto while you're at it? Maybe you can become a professor of dead languages at some university. I hear Druid is making a comeback, also Neanderthal grunting.

What's wrong with learning Latin? Unlike with Ebonics, many great works were written and published in Latin. And it's definitely more lyrical than anything I've heard on a rap station in a good long while. shudder By the way, do we even know what language the Druids spoke? I mean, I can pretty much muddle through Neanderthal and Troll-ish (mostly grunting and gesturing at stuff) but I'm not too sure about Druidic....

It's like deciphering code. I'm learning french because I think it's pretty. Hebrew because I'm (ostensibly) Jewish. Yiddish for similar reasons, and because it's rather earthy and just plain fun to use. And finally, Scots-Yiddish because it was so short lived and is kind of a linguistic oddity.

"If Life is a Lottery Lets All Take a Chance But if Life is a Monkey, Let That Monkey Dance!" ~Artie Wayne

www.ahklein.homestead.com

Aside from being a beautiful language in and of itself, Latin is the base for all romantic languages ("romantic" doesn't mean "love" here), like French, Italian, Spanish, and their many variants. Having a basic understanding of Latin greatly improves the learning and understanding of these languages.

Additionally, Latin forms the roots of nearly all scientific terms and many legal terms. I wish my middle school had offered Latin; my future studies in chemistry and biology would have been vastly easier, not to mention improving my schools are more imperative, graduate level tests (e.g., GRE).

The way things are going, you would be better off learning Chinese.

Kevin,

Sola lingua bona est lingua mortua.

Cheers,
Paul