You Have to Start Somewhere..., February 15, 2004

Latin is probably the most difficult of the Romance languages to learn, but learning it is also extremely rewarding (your English will improve immensely, for example). No book, by itself, will be sufficient or make learning Latin easy. Nevertheless, Betts' book is not a bad place to start. I taught myself to read Latin competently from an earlier edition of this book (which I no longer had), but let my skills get rusty, and made the ill-advised purchase of "Latin Made Simple" (see my review of that book) in order to brush up. Having given up on that one, I bought the edition of Betts' book that I review here. The most valuable new feature of this book is its supported web site, which has additional readings and practice sentences, with translations and answers. If you have a certain facility with languages, you'll get the hang of using this book quickly. If you're not adept at foreign languages, stick with it all the same. Unless you've no knack for languages at all, the light will eventually go on. Wheelock's Latin is another useful book, but many of the practice sentences have no translation, as the book was designed to be used in a classroom. "Teach Yourself Latin," as its name implies, is designed for you to do just that. I'm giving the book five stars, because I found it relatively easy to learn from once I got over the shock of declensions (my first and best foreign language is French; I thought having to deal with masculine and feminine was bad enough). For more opinions on this book, see the earlier edition that is posted on Amazon.com. But, if you're committed to learning Latin (or any foreign language, for that matter), don't expect one book to do it all.