It's very popular online, but it's methodologically bunk.
Also, you're much better off reading The Hobbit in English. The Latin translation is known to be less than superb.
If they're measured by traditional academic metrics (parsing, recalling declension tables, translating into English), then Wheelock's grammar-first approach really does optimize for that. On the other hand Ørberg optimizes more for reading fluency and intuitive comprehension, which is harder to measure on a standard Latin exam.
I learned English with the direct method (the teacher was an old Esperantist free to do his own thing) and German with the traditional grammar memorization way, and I wouldn't be able to write this post in German.
If done well, the grammar-centered approach leaves a lot of blanks, but the blanks are more or less “just add vocabulary”. So assuming you’ve retained whan you were taught (!), once you want to read any classical text, you can take a dictionary and work through it. Do that enough times over a few years and eventually you’ll be able to get rid of the dictionary. Again, you see why one would choose to do this when one needs to equip their students for any text to the greatest possible extent in a limited time; but that’s a different goal from having them read some texts as soon as possible. And it’s not always done well either, of course.
But latin is a dead language. What you describe is what it is used for. It is a grammar exercise.
Medieval Latin is influenced by the modern European languages, so it uses a similar word order and similar methods for expressing various things.
On the other hand for Classic Latin, e.g. for works written during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar is absolutely essential for understanding the texts.
The order of words can be very different from what a modern European expects, and frequently you cannot understand which is the syntactic role of some word without being able to recognize precisely various grammatical markers for case, mood, time etc.
Understanding Latin grammar in isolation is more difficult than when you also know at least some things about the historical evolution of the Latin grammar and its correspondences with Ancient Greek grammar and Proto-Indo-European grammar.
For learning any language, in my opinion it is less important to use textbooks, than to start as early as possible to try to understand something that you are interested in, for example a movie spoken in the target language or a book written in it. For Latin obviously you must start by reading some books, since it is a dead language. An example of a relatively easy book is Caesar's book about the Gallic Wars. Another easy choice is the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. The simplest way is to use bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb Library, and to consult a grammar and a dictionary whenever you do not understand yet something (because in a bilingual edition you may look at the English page to get the general meaning, which can guide you, allowing to avoid too frequent interrupts for searching a dictionary, but that does not have a word-to-word correspondence with the Latin sentence that you must understand).
There is a good Latin dictionary that is online:
https://www.prima-elementa.fr/Gaffiot/Gaffiot-dico.html
but it is a Latin-French dictionary, so you must know French (or you may use Google translate or an LLM for French, which are far more reliable for translating French to English than when translating Latin to English). A dictionary provides additional essential information not normally available in automatic translations, like which vowels are long, related grammatical forms and a long list of possible meanings with examples of usage.
A large number of Latin books are online at:
There are more Christian and Medieval works on TheLatinLibrary though.
[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext...
[3] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download
The fastest that I've learned a language was by buying a grammar and spending hours on end doing grammar exercises. It doesn't just work by "traditional academic metrics", it works and fast. That's because it's faster to learn something if you're explicitly shown the pattern and then you do repetition, than if you just do the repetition.
Of course you need to do grammar exercises, the interesting question is whether it's good to avoid your native language when exercising, as Lingua Latina per se Illustrata does but most language training materials don't.
Like, outcome of language classes you describe are people who cant watch movies, cant listen to podcasts, cant talk with natives ... but are decent in solving grammar exercises. And to add insult to injury, the whole process so massively sux, that you are likely to conclude that learning languages is not for you.
Recently I was wondering if I should work on a modernization of the concept (using audio and a more interactive medium). If anyone has thoughts on this topic, I'd be happy to discuss more.
We've also toyed with the idea of learning it as a living language, which seems to be an increasingly-popular method among autodidacts these days.
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1. Disci latíne quando cathólica eram quia melius Missam ac Offícium légere volébam. Nunc non christiána, neque Missa assísto nec Breviárium canto, sed multas antiphónas pulchras (et verba pauca!) iam mémini.
On one hand, it is really short. There are very few words assembled into very few phrases, and they are not even particularly popular words. (New Latin for “New York”? I mean, I guess, but was that really the best you could do?..)
On the other hand, for how short it is, it confronts you with quite a bit of grammar. As is customary for Duolingo, you’ll have to infer that grammar from the examples—except, per the previous point, you won’t get nearly enough examples. (It’s cute that some usages of the Latin verb “studeo” correspond to the English verb “study”, but the Latin one governs an unusual case, which depending on declension looks exactly like one of the other cases, so perhaps having it be one of the first verbs is unwise, especially when a lot of your target audience ostensibly has no concept of “govern”, “case”, or “declension”.)
On the gripping hand, because of how short it is, there is a lot of grammar that it does not even hint at. Including parts that any classical text will hit you in the face with within the first paragraph, and that will completely befuddle you unless you’re aware of them. (Like the quaint custom of plopping the preposition in the middle of its complement, as in “qua de causa” lit. “which for reason” i.e. “for which reason” i.e. “therefore”, or for that matter “magna cum laude” lit. “great with praise” i.e. “with great praise”.)
By comparison, Ørberg excels at this to a downright supernatural extent. It’s like La Disparition except instead of writing a (pretty natural-sounding) novel without using the most popular letter of the language he wrote a third of a (pretty natural-sounding) textbook without using the most popular category of nouns and adjectives in the language, and his version is actually useful. And it’s like this for any grammar concept he wants to defer. His way does take quite a bit of time, though, I’ll give you that.
I've found it fairly useful for picking up other alphabets, as opposed to languages.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
Source: I did the whole thing before I learned Latin from a different course. Duolingo's is unfinished.
Most other grammatical structures are also directly comparable.
So you can make your life easier by studying a Slavic (or a Baltic) language first.
(mwahaha!)
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
That pipeline has since dried up as well, especially since 2004 when immigration began to shift toward the EU. And since then, we see the reversal of that process, with far more Poles returning home from abroad.
So, Polish immigration has effectively ended. Old Polish neighborhoods are in the process of being displaced by new immigrant groups and yuppies.
(Curiously, even under foreign occupation, a good deal of Polish immigration was intended to be short-term. Poles would move to places like the US to earn some money and return home. Naturally, immigration is “sticky”, so a good number stayed behind and assimilated.)