Latin Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide

I gave this book 5 stars because of the layout and clear presentation of information. I have purchased several other Latin textbooks over the last year to try and Learn Latin. I found this book to be the easiest approach to learning the technical details (grammar) because of its clarity. The presentation of material made more sense to me than the other books I studied. I don't think you will go wrong by spending a few dollars on this book.

This is a fantastic introduction to Latin. I have been slogging through a few of the mainstream options out there. Like pretty much everyone who has ever suffered through Wheelock, I found many of the available books on Latin to be dull, unnecessarily confusing, dense, backwards and generally unhelpful. (One of the best ones out there is Professor Grote's Comprehensive Guide, which was initially written as a collection of class handouts to explain Wheelock. When you have to write a whole book just to explain and interpret another book, you have a problem.) Latin Demystified is a breath of fresh air. The book starts in a slightly unusual place -- with verbs instead of nouns, and with the perfect and imperfect tenses instead of the present tense. Then, once you get around to studying nouns, you are introduced to the accusative case before discussing the nominative case. Now that I am over halfway through the book, I understand why the author organized the book this way -- the present tense is more irregular than the perfect and imperfect. And the nominative case is less important than the accusative, since the verb in a Latin sentence carries more information than they do in English. In all, I found Latin Demystified to be logical, clear and concise. It has reignited my enthusiasm, and I find myself looking forward to my next opportunity to spend an hour working through a new section. It has helped make my self-directed journey into Latin everything I hoped it would be.