Best textbook or tapes for learning Latin?

[gez722]

I’m not sure of the best forum to post this, so I’m putting it here for now. I am looking to learn ecclesiastical Latin, especially pronunciation. Can someone recommend a good textbook or series of audio tapes/CDs that well help me? I am especially looking for a course that will assist me with the pronunciation of the words, not just the ability to read them.

God Bless,
Gary

 

[mark_e_rhodes]

The best book/tape series I know of is CURSUS LINGUAE LATINAE VIVAE, put of by the Familiae Sancti Hieronymi (–Jerome in English) in Clearwater, Florida. It’s 13 tapes and a big paperback back. Cost? About 70 bucks. Steep, but worth it. You HEAR the language and learn to THINK in it. The speaker is a Carmelite priest and the focus is on Latin as the living language of the Catholic Church.
If you’re not ready to go that far, you could start with LET’S READ LATIN by Ralph MacInerney, the philosophy prof at Notre Dame (and author of the Father Dowling mysteries), a paperback/CD set that teaches you several prayers and helps you work through a few Scripture passages as well as short texts by (if memory serves) Augustine and Aquinas. Again, you HEAR the language, and you learn prayers so that you can say the Rosary in Latin.
Hope you find this helpful.

 

[Karin]

magisterhoran.com/index.html

artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/cml/rcape/latin/
Oxford Latin Course

perseus.tufts.edu/

 

[tee_eff_em]

mark_e_rhodes:

The best book/tape series I know of is CURSUS LINGUAE LATINAE VIVAE, put of by the Familiae Sancti Hieronymi (–Jerome in English) in Clearwater, Florida. It’s 13 tapes and a big paperback back. Cost? About 70 bucks. Steep, but worth it. You HEAR the language and learn to THINK in it. The speaker is a Carmelite priest and the focus is on Latin as the living language of the Catholic Church.

They have a website: Familia Sancti Hieronymi. For catalog (in English), click on *VENALIA *then *Editiones (Anglice) *(Or, go direct to Publications of the Familia Sancti Hieronymi)

tee

 

[tee_eff_em]

While it won’t help with pronunciation (there is a tape available via overseas shipping, but I’m sure it exemplifies the restored classical pronunciation), I also have to recommend my favorite beginner’s book, the one that allowed to recapture my highschool Latin after half a lifetime’s lapse:

Learn Latin: A Lively Introduction to Reading the Language by Peter Jones.

(It was only after chancing upon this work that I was able to go back and complete the *Cursus Linguae Latinae Vivae *which I had false-started a time or two in my quest to recover Latin)

:bounce:
tee

 

[Geremia]

Here are excellent resources:

• [Simplicissimus (http://www.latin-mass-society.org/simplicissimus/), an excellent, free, online Latin course from the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales
• [Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/resolveform?lang=la&lookup=), the famous Latin dictionary accessible for free online
• Perseus Word Study Tool, a morphological analysis of inflected Latin words

It is great you want to learn Latin. Read what the Baltimore Catechism says about Latin:

Q. 566. Why does the Church use the Latin language instead of the national language of its children?
A. The Church uses the Latin language instead of the national language of its children:

1. • To avoid the danger of changing any part of its teaching in using different languages;
   • That all its rulers may be perfectly united and understood in their communications;
   • To show that the Church is not an institute of any particular nation, but the guide of all nations.