Latin Demystified

Author: Richard Prior
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book

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Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars

2 reviews
Sales Rank: 356991

Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.4 x 1

ISBN: 0071477276
Dewey Decimal Number: 478.2421
EAN: 9780071477277
ASIN: 0071477276

Publication Date: June 11, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

Become a bona fide master of Latin

English vocabulary owes a great debt to Latin, ergo you already know many Latin words and phrases. Now you can move beyond the status quo and learn this classical language. With Latin Demystified, nihil obstat (nothing stands in the way).

Beginning with an overview of Latin, basic pronunciation rules, and a discussion on the differences between inflected and analytical languages, Latin Demystified covers key grammar fundamentals such as nouns, verb forms, and syntax. You'll build your Latin vocabulary with essential words and phrases and quickly master this challenging language. Test yourself at the end of every chapter for reinforcement that you're fast on your way to reading and understanding Latin.

This fast and easy guide features:

Clear and straightforward explanations of Latin grammar fundamentals
Numerous examples of simple and complex sentence structures
Full coverage of Latin noun declensions and verb tenses
Helpful writing exercises
Quizzes at the end of each chapter to reinforce new material

Simple enough for a beginner, but challenging enough for a more experienced student, Latin Demystified is your shortcut to mastering this complex language.

Customer Reviews:

1 out of 5 stars

Peculiarly odd help book for students of Latin. September 23, 2008
I got this book recently and felt it was entirely not very well written.

Please examine page 23 prior to purchase. On page 23 you'll note the author has included the irregular verb sum, number 4 in this exercise. However this chapter does not include any irregular verbs! You'll have to skip to page 70 to answer this problem on page 23. Do you think this is beneficial to a new student of Latin?Spending your time hunting, flipping through ahead chapters to answer a problem in chapter one? A futile exercise indeed.

Please spend time at the bookstore reviewing this book prior to purchasing. If you can, spend time with end chapter exercises. You might save some pain and suffering and anger for purchasing a poorly organized Latin tutorial in my honest opinion.

5 out of 5 stars

I love this book July 18, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

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.