An Excellent Companion to an Awesome Textbook, July 12, 2001

Latin is such a boring subject. Or at least that's what I've been told. The truth is, I wouldn't really know. You see, I've had the good luck of learning the subject under a great teacher with an awesome, no-nonsense text -- WHEELOCK'S LATIN -- as my guide.

My teacher was the man who wrote this book, Dr. Grote. And what made him great is that he had the ability to make the rough spots in WHEELOCK not rough at all. This is not to say, at all, that Latin was easy. It isn't, and I doubt it will ever be.

But his style of teaching turned a subject that was perhaps overwhelming into a subject that could be learned, even mastered, over a summer. Now, thankfully for you, that "style" has been transcribed from the spoken to the written word.

In the pages of this COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE you'll be led by a reassuring, calm teacher who knows the problems that a beginning student faces. The book offers plenty of repetition that is missing in WHEELOCK and which a person teaching themself the subject or a confused student ought to find most valuable. One big plus, that I can add after reading the reviews of other Latin workbooks that go along with WHEELOCK, is that this guide has the answer key printed in the back of the book (meaning there's no wait to receive a copy if you get one at all). And, on top of all this, the web site that goes along with this book is as valuable as the cost of a guide like this by itself. It contains an answer key to WHEELOCK, taped lectures explaining the answers to all the self-tutorials at the back of the book, and sample quizzes for practice.

Frankly, I don't think I could have gotten through Latin without it (and I am by no means a dull student). Because of this, I gave the book five stars -- meaning it served its purpose perfectly.

Indispensible companion to Wheelock's for self-learners, November 6, 2002

Ok, so you're in your first year Latin course, or perhaps you're taking one of the on-line Latin courses offered (as I did). You have your Wheelock's, and Wheelock/LaFleur's explanations are not quite clear. What do you do?

Professor Grote to the rescue! He picks up where Wheelock leaves off and often approaches explanations from another angle. Don't get me wrong - Wheelock's and (especially) LaFleur's experience as Latin teachers comes through in their explanations. But the great virtue of Grote's book is that he can assume that the basic explanation and vocabulary has already been given in Wheelock, so he can focus on explanations that may help those of us who "just don't get it."

To be sure, Rick LaFleur adds some of these to Wheelock too, but Wheelock's would have to be 1,000 pages long to give this much explanation, and not all explanations are needed by all students. I did not need some of Grote's alternate explanations - but I'm sure somebody did. As an example, Wheelock explains the imperfect subjunctive as being "essentially" the present infinitive plus personal endings (essem/esses/esset/essemus/essetis/essent). Grote explains what Wheelock meant by "essentially". Perhaps not absolutely necessary to know, but a good way of remembering it.

The only thing I would change about this book is to have more vocabulary explanations. There are many vocabulary puzzles in Latin or any other language, and Grote helps with some of these (I love his line "Wheelock gives 'thing' as the primary definition of 'res' - well, forget that.") However, the ones included are few and far between, and in some cases I am sure that better and more necessary ones could be chosen.

But this is only a minor nit. This book is great, and I highly recommend that anybody who really wants to learn Latin through Wheelock's should get it. If you are still not sure, you can download an early version of Grote's notes (just do an Internet search for "grote wheelock study guide" and you'll find them). These are good for getting the flavor of Grote's book - for example in chapter 7: "Many people consider the third declension to be a pons asinorum - but I disagree."

The on-line version will keep you going until your purchased version arrives. But do buy the book - the on-line version has typos, and is for an old edition of Wheelock's, and only goes up to chapter 35. Besides, with such great explanations, I want to do everything I can to encourage Professor Grote!

If you want to learn Latin you're probably already some kind of odd person with self-study skills, since if you weren't I dunno why you'd bother. The good news is that with Wheelock 6 and this book you can teach yourself. Grote compliments the Wheelock text perfectly, providing more verbose explanations and exercises to fill lacunae in the text that can haunt the student who lacks a teacher. It's a bit cliched to say this book is like having your own personal tutor, but it's the truth.

A godsend, June 10, 2004

I first learned Latin using Wheelock's text (as have many, many students over the years) nearing 30 years ago. While going through the text, the teacher or professor would add many items of consideration not in the text, as the text to be as comprehensive as it should be would need to be twice the size.

When I picked up my copy of Wheelock years later to refresh my knowledge of Latin, I discovered just how valuable the instructors' input had been been, as I kept coming across questions of grammar, tense, declension, etc. that were not fully explained, or clearly explained, in Wheelock. For a good eighty to ninety percent, the Wheelock explanations were sufficient, but for those who need a mastery of the language, eighty to ninety percent is not enough.

Particularly when talking about the various voices and verb conjugation issues, and the spelling/vowel changes that occur in conjugation or declension, Grote's notes are very valuable. Also, Grote seems to have more a sense for the modern student, adding little flourishes in the text, both in the description as well as the examples, to make things more fun and interesting. Sometimes I wondered in Wheelock if the only thing Latin was good for was writing funeral dirges or speeches about duty (I wonder how Gilbert & Sullivan would sound in Latin, since they are all about duty? But I digress...)

As Grote says in his introduction, students are having increasing difficulties with mastering Latin grammar because they have less training (it seems) in English grammar. Studying Latin becomes a formal training not only in the foreign language, but also in general language structures. I must say I am envious of his students, having two semesters to get through the forty chapters of Wheelock; when I took the course, we did the whole thing in one semester, and it was an abbreviated summer term at that!

Professor Dale Grote, trained in Classics from Cornell College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is on faculty at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches. As such, he experienced first-hand the struggles of teaching Latin using the classic Wheelock textbook. While it is a superb text, it just doesn't always go far enough. Grote's organisation follows closely the pattern of Wheelock's presentation, so that the two books can be used side-by-side with ease. Certainly for the self-study learner, this book is a real godsend.

A Must Have!!!, December 19, 2003

This book is for sure a must have for any Latin Student. Puts Wheelock's in a easy, understandable light!!! If you are studying Wheelock's..... Get this book!!

Truly outstanding, November 11, 2003

This book is almost an essential companion to Wheelock's classic grammar. Linguistics is one of my hobbies and so I've read many dozens of grammars on various languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian to Japanese to Ilocano, so I think I know a good grammar book when I see one, and this is one of the best I've seen, especially on the more inflected languages.

Professor Grote is a gifted teacher and writer. His ability to illuminate the more technical aspects of Latin noun declensions and verb conjugations is a joy to read. Although I am primarily a neurobiologist, as I said, one of my hobbies is comparative linguistics and theoretical linguistics, so my background in grammar is pretty strong, and yet I still found this book valuable in helping me with my Latin.

For the average student without such a background who is struggling with the complexities of the grammar, this book is worth its weight in gold, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I only wish there was a comparable book for Greek, which has 8 cases, as compared to Latin's 6 (and the vocative case is rarely used in Latin). In addition to the grammar, his explanations of how the various verb tenses and moods are used semantically are equally good, along with his discussion of the vowel changes and mutations that may seem puzzling at times. And there is the occasional oddity, such as that Latin lacks a true conditional tense, unlike Greek and most other Indo-European languages, and professor Grote explains that, too.

Professor Grote makes even the most difficult grammatical concepts seem, if not easy, then much less difficult and abstruse than they seemed at first blush. Overall, a great book and one of the best ever written in its field.