Thread:JonathanTennysion/@comment-4142476-20151009122258

Thought I'd put it here so that you can have input from other people on this wiki who also know Latin or have had experience studying Latin.

I've studied Latin from 7th grade and we had the Aeneid in 11th grade, so quite late on. I think texts is actually the best way to get around studying Latin because that's the only way you will get in contact with the language anyway.

In the seventh and eight grade we had simplified texts, such as a simplified version of a drama by Plautus about a rich man (Centesimus) who doesn't like to spend a penny, whose son falls in love with a poor girl. I found the Latin version (or maybe only parts of it) here: http://www.scholieren.com/vertaling/14635 with Dutch translation next to it that you can ignore. We had a couple of other such stories too that I don't remember well.

In ninth year we started authentic Latin texts, with Caesar's De Bello Gallico first. Tenth grae was mainly Ovid's Metamorphoses, eleventh was Vergil and other poetry, and twelfth was Cicero's rhetorics. Eleventh and twelfth grade of people who study classical languages here are traditionally called "poetica" and "retorica" for this reason, but I don't think many people are aware of these terms anymore.

I actually especially liked Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vergil's Aeneid. Both are written in dactylic hexameter, so once you get at reading proper texts I'd advise you to try out Ovid too as well! They're shorter stories and in a more poetic and less epic style than Vergil, but a decent stepping stone towards the Aeneid imo. De Bello Gallico is also great practice at long, complex sentences in Latin as Caesar wrote his sentences quite compound.

For starters I think it'd be very important to get yourself some core vocabulary and then up that as you go. This looks like a nice vocabulary list: http://dcc.dickinson.edu/latin-vocabulary-list and you can also use Flashcard programs like Anki http://ankisrs.net/ to memorize vocabulary at a regular pace [X minutes every day]. If you know you have the basics down and possess ~1000 words as active vocabulary, you might want to think about purchasing a paper dictionary because for languages as Latin these might be better than their online counterparts.

As for grammar, I'd say to start with grammatical cases of first class (nouns: type "dominus" "rosa" "donum", adjectives: type "bonus" "miser") and present simple tense (verbs: type "amare" "monere", "tegere" "audire" "capere"). You can then go to the cases of second class (nouns: type "rex" "nomen", adjectives: type "fortis") and past simple tense (same verbs). You can do irregular pronouns is/ipse/ille and things like that together with future simple tense, and then finish with third class (nouns: type "fructus", "cornu", "res") when doing the perfect tenses of present/past/future conjugation.

It's probably best to do syntax after you've mastered the grammatical items I listed, mostly because word order doesn't matter too much in Latin anyway (only base rule is that personal pronouns aren't always needed and verbs mostly stand at the end). It's mostly important to go over syntax when learning compound sentences, because those do have more structure. When learning those, you need to already know conjugations etc. though.

As for grammar, I personally think grammatical cases are really doable but verb conjugations a bit harder. You might find difficulties in different places though, we'll see. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. My final words of advice: Latin is a dead language, so not based on conversation, and therefore I think it's doable to learn it on your own. However, definitely when you want to achieve proficiency in a short time span, you need to invest some hours in it on daily basis. Try to make daily goals of "X new words" and "1 small grammatical item" and repeat a lot of the knowledge you've already learnt before so it moves to long-term memory and doesn't clutter your short-term. Also, never be afraid to ask for help. 