Latin: A Complete Course

THIS IS A VERY GOOD BOOK TO LEARN BEGINNING & SOME INTERMEDIATE LATIN FROM. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT.

I haven't taken Latin since middle school, high school, and college. This book is a thorough review of those years, with the wonderful addition of many quotations from Latin authors, which is the best way to see how Latin actually works.

"Dense" is the word that comes to mind when I think of this book. The typeset is not the easiest to read, especially the bold print. And the grammar is introduced at a demanding pace. (Which is OK; nobody said that learning had to be easy. You're definitely allowed to take your time, and absorb the material.)The presentation of grammar follows a fairly traditional path. Each lesson introduces a large number of grammatical points, but there are plenty of examples given. Early lessons have vocabulary lists; the vocabulary for readings in later lessions must be looked up in the glossary in the back. Most critically, the answers to the exercises and translations of the readings are given in the back of the book.Unless you have a high level of linguistic sophistication, my recommendation would be to start your study of Latin with something a little gentler (like Wheelock). But this is a great resource, and should not be missed. My suggestion would be to work through Wheelock's "Latin" (or at least halfway through), and then tackle this book. It will be a good review of the grammar you know already, you'll learn a LOT more about Latin grammar and syntax, and you'll get a great deal of practice reading some pretty tough Latin (with the translations available to check your understanding).In summary, you might not want to START with this book, but you will definitely benefit from working through it somewhere along your path.

This book is concise, clear and comprehensive. Any one who has a basic amount of lingusitic knowledge will find this book a treasure.After teaching a section of Latin grammar there are sections dealing exculsively with Latin prose and poems and their corresponding styles. These varying destractions brings the Latin culture alive and in doing so shows you that Latin has a rich history that is well worth looking at through the linguistic looking glass.Pax vobiscum!

This book has helped me learn the very basics of Latin and much more. It is marvelous because it teaches all the important stuff of this extinct language. Compared to other books, it is excellent. It gives thorough explanations about nouns and verbs and their usage. Also, in this book, there is information about Roman lifestyle in the excursus section.Gavin Betts also gives extra sections in this book which show us readers works of the masters like Horace and Homer. Overall, it is a very good book.