Opinions on Wheelock's Latin?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m taking Latin 101 to meet the third language requirements for my M.A. I’m thrilled, been waiting FOREVER to do it, but it never meshed with my undergraduate schedule.

For the most part, Wheelock’s Latin is a really good text, and explains things in a straightforward manner. I’m told that this text is **the **standard in Latin university courses. As such, I suspect at least a handful of people on this board have used it.

But these Latin sentences. Dear God.

In the four chapters we’ve done so far, we’ve gotten “Make haste quickly,” from the get go, followed by twenty contorted and convoluted phrases by Seneca, talking about the perils of anger and greed. I imagine part of it was the “dumbing down” of the language to accommodate the limited Latin we know, but still…some of these “Latin Phrases” read like complete and utter sophistry.

And if I wanted sophistry, I would have taken Greek! -rimshot-

Anyone else have a similar experience? Does it get better as the book progresses?

2

Wheelock is just a rite of passage, is all.

3

I did Wheelock with a tutor who was brilliant and very socially awkward, at the Centre for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. All I remember of it was sitting in a little room with manuscripts on the walls, priests (real, live priests!) walking around, and reading sentences like “Oh, Girl, please give me many roses and kisses” to this weird guy. Aaaaawkward.

4

Hahaha, great story!

5

I remember thinking, about halfway through Wheelock’s, that it was completely absurd that I now knew how to say “They have the fruits of victory and peace in that republic” but not “I’m eating fruit.”

6

I used Moreland and Fleischer as my intro text and the sentences constructed for exercises are as bad if not worse than Wheelock’s. Par for the course – don’t pay much attention, just work on learning the basic inflectional forms cold so you can start the hard work of reading.

The Wheelock Reader – a graded, glossed primer of 2nd-year-type texts is pretty good, and I learned quite a bit by working through it.

7

I’ve taught using Wheelock; be aware that there are a couple of grammatical errors in the current edition among the sentences (that is, if the current edition is the 6th. It’s been a couple years since I’ve taught a section of Latin, and they may have corrected the problems by now).

I studied using an older version of Wheelock at university from 1983, but I’d had Latin for years prior to that, so it was more like review to me. My favorite parts were doing the English to Latin sentences; I used to enjoy tormenting my students with them, too. :slight_smile:

8

I’m laughing because I took Latin at the Pontifical Center for Mediaeval Studies too and I think I know who you might be talking about. Small world.

9

I used Moreland and Fleisher as an undergrad, but it’s the same deal.

Those sentences are written by bored grad students.

10

I also used Wheelock. The ‘sophistry’ pretty much stays that way, though I guess you’ll eventually get used to it.

IMHO, there’s a pretty big gap between finishing Wheelock and being able to read the original Latin. I remember it was a struggle transitioning to Cicero’s In Catilinam during the third semester.

11

Yeah, it’s funny how those Roman guys couldn’t write any good proper Latin. :slight_smile: I was in the last class of Latin Prose Composition offered at my alma mater. Maybe one of the last around at all, I’d think. Anyway, there were only three of us!

12

Jealous!

I was hoping to find someone that doesn’t speak English (or one of the other more living tongues I know) to become Latin penpals with as a means of practicing it. Not sure how that would work out.

Google searches for “Latin Penpals” turn up a lot of Hispanic mail order bride services, so the internet has been of little help in this endeavor…

13

It is, in fact still the 6th edition. We had a sentence today that the teacher was scratching his head over, saying it didn’t make much sense.

He said that we don’t need to worry about remembering the ‘longs’ at this point in the course, but am I shooting myself in the foot by not doing it, should I want to continue on after this semester?

14

If you ever want to read poetry, then you will need to understand vowel quantity. But if you do enough poetry, you will grasp quantity whether you like it or not. So I’d suggest you to be aware of it now but don’t kill yourself.

15

I like the way Wheelock is organized to bring a diligent student all the way to pretty fair grasp of the grammar of the language in the space of 40 chapters. One of the things it is valued for is that it uses increasingly unmodified ancient sentiments as exercises. As I used to joke, for modern languages you study such phrases as “I wish to go to the library” whereas when you study an ancient language it’s more like “He certainly denied himself ever to have oppressed free men.”

Why not? If you’re studying the Latin, you might as well be absorbing Roman wit and wisdom while you’re at it. Yet, years after I finished my 40 chapters but still couldn’t pick up and read a piece of Latin for the life of me without having to painfully convert it to English, I discovered that on the internet there were people out there trying to learn to speak and read the language, and build a modern vocabulary on everything from the absurd to the sublime.

Latin happens to be really good for opening up ancient ideas, or even relatively modern ones from the dawn of modern science. But there exists a kind of attitude that it’s somehow profane to make other use of the language. I’ve given spiels on this general issue elsewhere on this board, but I do believe that Wheelock’s own emphasis on antiquity re-enforces this attitude to the detriment of the study of Latin.

I’m not just talking about the reliance on Sententiae Antīquae. Take, for example, the fact that it doesn’t introduce the verb eō, īre (‘go’) until the 37th chapter. The verb is irregular, but there are many forms with pre-fixes compounded to it which are essential if you want to be able to say a good number of perfectly ordinary things. The reason there are so many compounds and the verb is so irregular is precisely because it was used so heavily. This is a verb that seriously works for a living and has the callouses to prove it. Exactly the kind of thing that is the very breath of a language. But you don’t need to know it until late because Wheelock’s Latin is not about saying perfectly ordinary things. But, you’ll run into īre almost immediately when you start reading outside the text book, so they do let you have it before they’re done with you.

Still, it’s a nicely organized introduction to Latin grammar. If I were teaching Latin and got to choose my texts, I would favor the inexpensive and readily available Wheelock’s Latin Grammar as a good supplement to Lingua Latīna per sē Illūstrāta as the main text. I find the “direct method” (learning Latin by being asked to understand it in its own terms) much more effective, but the benefits of special attention to grammar stack with the benefits of direct reading.

Absolutely keep track of your Macrons. Read LaFleur’s own take on this subject. It’s not so that you can later mark quantity in a poem. It’s so that you can right now feel the language in your mouth, which will do a lot more for your understanding of verse than an ability to mark quantity, with the added benefit that it will add force and vivacity to prose. And, really, it’s not even quantity itself that is of principle interest, it’s really vowel quality. In Latin that happens to have mapped neatly onto quantity for the classical period. And, the nice thing about Wheelock is that in the paradigms provided, they also give the accents. Observe those when you recite the paradigms out loud.

16

Johnny Angel, that was a great post. Thanks.

My organ teacher, who never balks at an opportunity to brag about his knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic or any of the texts of the Bible, once told me that he read a Latin translation of one of the Harry Potter books. Asides from wrapping my head around all the new Latin terms that must have been created to make a cogent story, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that seems faintly “profane,” to use your word. Yet I would absolutely do it if I had the ability to!

17

One problem with the several children’s books that have been translated into Latin is that they tend not to be written in Latin that simply be read by someone whose done 40 chapters of Wheelock. And this is not too mysterious, of course, because if you try to translate simple stuff that any kid should understand into Latin you’ll find that little kids are expected to understand some pretty sophisticated grammar. We just don’t usually realize how much about the language a child implicitly understands, and yet we do implicitly expect the kid to understand it. For example, take the following from Linus dē Vītā:

If you agree with me that the english translation I’ve provided is something we would expect a child quite young to understand, then look at how much grammar you need to know to render it into Latin. In the first panel we have a subordinate clause. In the second we have an ablative of ‘time within which’ serving as an adverb. In panel 3 you have a passive subjunctive. The last panel you have a complimentary infinitive and a hortative (possibly jussive, I forget) subjunctive.

The grammar has not been tarted up to look fancier when going into Latin. The Latin version says just what the English says. It just turns out that buried in our simple-seeming Enlgish is a great deal of semantic information which we absorb without understanding the underlying structure.

I’ve been practicing Reading with Oerberg’s Lingua Latīna for about a year now (about four hours of reading aloud per week), and I can now mostly read the Asterix comics. I can also broadly understand what’s going on in Harry Potter, though I’m considerably hampered by my limited vocabulary. When that happens, I often find that I can turn to my Wheelock-memorized materials as a sort of cheat sheet to solve some mysteries. Thus gradually I am learning to read something that would have been light, fun reading for a Roman child. It can be done, but not really by a Wheelock-only approach.

18

I don’t if anyone is aware of this, but Rosetta Stone has a multi-level Latin course.

19

Have you had a chance to work with it? I’d love to hear testimonials. I only got a brief look at it once, but I never saw anything like lessons in “age, family relations, household items… buying and selling” like the web site mentions.

Of course, I’m not likely to want to drop hundreds of dollars on it in any case. I’m still saving up for my Oxford Latin Dictionary and the stand and magnifying glass it takes to be able to actually use the thing. But I understand that some schools are using Rosetta Stone in language labs, supplemental to their regular grammar teaching.