improve my latin

I think it is time to remember it. I learnt part of it at college, but since I had to cancel this semester I have to practice by my own…

This… will be receiving a series of SMART goals in 2008. Stay tuned.

I’m pretty damn good at it, but I’ve been letting it languish since I stopped teaching. I want to get back into it again. Maybe I’ll pick up Ovid’s Metmorphoses. They’re fun and not too strenuous.

I have completed my review of chapter 1 of Wheelock’s Latin. I’m disappointed because the workbook exercises, while tedious, are great review. However, there’s no answer key. From looking over the main text book, I think the answer key is electronic through the website, and in order to access it you need to be an instructor who has adopted the text.

Oh well, I managed to find all of the answers in the chapter itself to correct it. I’m just worried about correcting my work when I get into chapters 20+ and start hitting concepts that are new or that I never understood in the first place.

On to chapter two!

Ok… I broke out my Wheelock’s. I have the text book and the workbook. Even though this will be a pretty severe review, I plan to do one unit a week. It should take me 40 weeks to complete the book. That’s 40 weeks of constant review of Latin.

Okay, I have about a million Latin textbooks – Wheelock (which I have already worked through once, but it was very fast, so I don’t remember much – hence improve my latin), Henle, Ecce Romani (first edition, from the 70s!), Lingua Latina, I think that’s the main ones…. And of course Dooge, from online, if I want more!

I think my goal with be to finish Henle First Year Latin in the next year – by the end of 2007. When I have done this, I will consider this goal done. (Then I can move on to ‘continue to improve my latin’ or something!) I would also like to finish Lingua Latina and Ecce Romani by this point, as I think I will use these mostly for reading practise as I work through Henle.

My first goal will be to finish the first Ecce Romani book, by the end of the year. I got through more than half of it earlier in the year, so it shouldn’t be that hard!

I’d love to say that I’ve been keeping my Latin up and running, but in the more-than-a-year since I finished my last high school Latin course, I’ve found that the motivation hasn’t faded so much as slipped from my attention. I haven’t been making the effort, although I could probably still pick up Ovid and know what he was talking about.

I guess it’s just a matter of finding a simple and (preferably) entertaining way of re-educating myself. Whatever the solution, however, I’m going to find it before I forget my Latin completely, because my best memories of high school classes involved Latin, and I always found that the language came more easily to me than most other things I tried learning.

So… fingers crossed.

Ok, so I got the latin Harry Potter – Harrius potter et Philosophi Lapis, and I read the first chapter.
I understood it pretty well, although there were some verbs that bowled me over…
Anyone know a good (cheap) dictionary?

Not much to it, just gotta hunker down with a copy of Wheelock’s and something silly that I might enjoy.

Oh, and there’s an Augustine course this fall that sounds pretty sweet.