Comprehensive Guide to Wheelock's Latin: A Tried and True Escort Through Wheelock

If you want to learn Latin you're probably already some kind of odd person with self-study skills, since if you weren't I dunno why you'd bother. The good news is that with Wheelock 6 and this book you can teach yourself. Grote compliments the Wheelock text perfectly, providing more verbose explanations and exercises to fill lacunae in the text that can haunt the student who lacks a teacher. It's a bit cliched to say this book is like having your own personal tutor, but it's the truth.

I first learned Latin using Wheelock's text (as have many, many students over the years) nearing 30 years ago. While going through the text, the teacher or professor would add many items of consideration not in the text, as the text to be as comprehensive as it should be would need to be twice the size.When I picked up my copy of Wheelock years later to refresh my knowledge of Latin, I discovered just how valuable the instructors' input had been been, as I kept coming across questions of grammar, tense, declension, etc. that were not fully explained, or clearly explained, in Wheelock. For a good eighty to ninety percent, the Wheelock explanations were sufficient, but for those who need a mastery of the language, eighty to ninety percent is not enough.Particularly when talking about the various voices and verb conjugation issues, and the spelling/vowel changes that occur in conjugation or declension, Grote's notes are very valuable. Also, Grote seems to have more a sense for the modern student, adding little flourishes in the text, both in the description as well as the examples, to make things more fun and interesting. Sometimes I wondered in Wheelock if the only thing Latin was good for was writing funeral dirges or speeches about duty (I wonder how Gilbert & Sullivan would sound in Latin, since they are all about duty? But I digress...)As Grote says in his introduction, students are having increasing difficulties with mastering Latin grammar because they have less training (it seems) in English grammar. Studying Latin becomes a formal training not only in the foreign language, but also in general language structures. I must say I am envious of his students, having two semesters to get through the forty chapters of Wheelock; when I took the course, we did the whole thing in one semester, and it was an abbreviated summer term at that! Professor Dale Grote, trained in Classics from Cornell College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is on faculty at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches. As such, he experienced first-hand the struggles of teaching Latin using the classic Wheelock textbook. While it is a superb text, it just doesn't always go far enough. Grote's organisation follows closely the pattern of Wheelock's presentation, so that the two books can be used side-by-side with ease. Certainly for the self-study learner, this book is a real godsend.

This book is almost an essential companion to Wheelock's classic grammar. Linguistics is one of my hobbies and so I've read many dozens of grammars on various languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian to Japanese to Ilocano, so I think I know a good grammar book when I see one, and this is one of the best I've seen, especially on the more inflected languages.Professor Grote is a gifted teacher and writer. His ability to illuminate the more technical aspects of Latin noun declensions and verb conjugations is a joy to read. Although I am primarily a neurobiologist, as I said, one of my hobbies is comparative linguistics and theoretical linguistics, so my background in grammar is pretty strong, and yet I still found this book valuable in helping me with my Latin.For the average student without such a background who is struggling with the complexities of the grammar, this book is worth its weight in gold, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I only wish there was a comparable book for Greek, which has 8 cases, as compared to Latin's 6 (and the vocative case is rarely used in Latin). In addition to the grammar, his explanations of how the various verb tenses and moods are used semantically are equally good, along with his discussion of the vowel changes and mutations that may seem puzzling at times. And there is the occasional oddity, such as that Latin lacks a true conditional tense, unlike Greek and most other Indo-European languages, and professor Grote explains that, too. Professor Grote makes even the most difficult grammatical concepts seem, if not easy, then much less difficult and abstruse than they seemed at first blush. Overall, a great book and one of the best ever written in its field.

This supplement to Wheelock is indispensable if you are trying to learn or re-learn Latin on your own. It does not replace a good instructor, but, like a good teacher, the book corrects mistakes before they become entrenched.On several occasions the author saved me from myself by stopping me from memorizing an improperly conjugated verb or a declension that was mostly the product of my own imagination. It is way annoying to commit to memory something that you got wrong from the start.I also appreciated the author's efforts to place grammatical rules in a broader context. It's helpful to understand the vowel shifts that create some of the irregularities in the language. It makes it easier to recognize patterns instead of relying on memory exclusively. Also recommended to the autodidacts in the crowd: 38 Latin Stories. Because the vocabulary is on the facing page, you don't need to cart around a dictionary. Because the stories are short and easy, you can get a very cheap thrill of accomplishment.

Latin is such a boring subject. Or at least that's what I've been told. The truth is, I wouldn't really know. You see, I've had the good luck of learning the subject under a great teacher with an awesome, no-nonsense text -- WHEELOCK'S LATIN -- as my guide. My teacher was the man who wrote this book, Dr. Grote. And what made him great is that he had the ability to make the rough spots in WHEELOCK not rough at all. This is not to say, at all, that Latin was easy. It isn't, and I doubt it will ever be. But his style of teaching turned a subject that was perhaps overwhelming into a subject that could be learned, even mastered, over a summer. Now, thankfully for you, that "style" has been transcribed from the spoken to the written word. In the pages of this COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE you'll be led by a reassuring, calm teacher who knows the problems that a beginning student faces. The book offers plenty of repetition that is missing in WHEELOCK and which a person teaching themself the subject or a confused student ought to find most valuable. One big plus, that I can add after reading the reviews of other Latin workbooks that go along with WHEELOCK, is that this guide has the answer key printed in the back of the book (meaning there's no wait to receive a copy if you get one at all). And, on top of all this, the web site that goes along with this book is as valuable as the cost of a guide like this by itself. It contains an answer key to WHEELOCK, taped lectures explaining the answers to all the self-tutorials at the back of the book, and sample quizzes for practice. Frankly, I don't think I could have gotten through Latin without it (and I am by no means a dull student). Because of this, I gave the book five stars -- meaning it served its purpose perfectly.