Classical Languages Guide

Featuring a traditional, grammar-based approach, A New Latin Primer offers beginning students a solid overview of Latin grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. It provides concise, straightforward grammatical explanations and illustrates them with unadapted Latin examples so that students can learn from Roman authors how to employ the syntax under discussion.

This book contains over fifty passages of Latin from 200 BC to AD 900, each with translation and linguistic commentary. It is not intended as an elementary reader (though suitable for university courses), but as an illustrative history of Latin covering more than a millennium, with almost every century represented.

What did Greek speakers in the Roman empire do when they wanted to learn Latin? They used Latin-learning materials containing authentic, enjoyable vignettes about daily life in the ancient world - shopping, banking, going to the baths, having fights, being scolded, making excuses - very much like the dialogues in some of today's foreign-language textbooks. These stories provide priceless insight into daily life in the Roman empire, as well as into how Latin was learned at that period, and they were all written by Romans in Latin that was designed to be easy for beginners to understand.

Why learn to write in a dead language? Because a really good understanding of a language can only be attained by using it actively. Unlike earlier textbooks aimed at schoolboys, this work addresses modern adults who want to understand concepts fully as they learn. Drawing on recent scholarship where appropriate and assuming no prior background except some reading knowledge of Greek, the course combines a structured review of paradigms and vocabulary with clear and comprehensive explanations of the rules of Greek syntax.