Of traditional-type textbooks there's no doubt that Wheelock, now in its
5th edition and redone by Rick Lafleur of U.Ga., is one of the best. As a
self-teaching text it has a very nice and extensive set of self-testing
exercises with an answer-key. I happen to be using it in a Beginning Latin
course right now that I had to take over from a colleague. Still, I
wouldn't have chosen it for the primary reason that it teaches by using the
context-less sentence as the unit of discourse for practice and for ancient
texts to read until pretty late in the sequence of things, whereas I think
one needs to start reading paragraphs of connected discourse right away; it
also doesn't introduce the subjunctive until 3/4 of the way through the
course, although the subjunctive is indispensible for ordinary Latin
discourse and needs to be introduced early, as is done by Moreland and
Fleischer, _Latin: An Intensive Course_, U.Cal. Press; this is the book
used in the 8-week intensive courses at CUNY and UC-Berkeley. It has keys
too and it also has much fuller grammatical explanations--and it introduces
the subjunctive in the third lesson. Probably one of these two is the best
bet, although if I were beginning my own course right now with a class, I'd
use the JACT textbook, _Reading Latin_ published by Cambridge UP. There's
no simple right answer on this one; I would say that if you have two or
more languages other than English already, it may not make much difference
which textbook you use.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/