Christophe RicoForum: Lectiones Latinitatis Vivae: Speaking Latin As A Living Language (Latin Edition)

This is the Latin book that really does go at it like a modern language; right away they do TPR, classroom words, and conversation templates. Soon after that you get colors, clothes, food—all the stuff that normal people want to talk about anyway. And the activities look pretty good.As for grammar, by the end of the book you have all the forms of the main pronouns, all five declensions, lots of uses of the ablative, and a bunch of idiomatic and irregular stuff like “operam dat” and “velle.” It does hold back quite a bit on verbs. There are only indicative and imperative forms, and only the present active until some of the last chapters. Then you get the future and perfect active, plus the present passive, all conjugations, plus irregular verbs. To me it seems like a reasonable approach—get used to the conjugations before adding anything more, just as the more reasonable books start with the nominative and accusative instead of telling you to memorize a full declension right away. And I love the idea of skipping the stupid imperfect until after the perfect. <rant>So many books want you to teach the future and the imperfect too close together, and then a bunch of students get them mixed up. Besides, it is called *im*perfect, and is defined in opposition to *perfect*—so what fool decided that we must teach it before the perfect? This way you can just tell your students that the perfect is past, instead of trying to explain tense and aspect and extra verb endings all at the same time, to learn some form that is way less useful than the simple past if you want to say real things to real people, instead of “Agricola frumentum portabat.”</rant>Despite its excellent points, it does need more work; as another reviewer pointed out, it appears to have incorrect answers someplaces. It also seems odd to have fill-in-the-blank stuff in a textbook; why not have a separate workbook? Then we can all ignore the workbook and just write out all the exercises on looseleaf like humans. But I know some other books have this fault as well. A bigger problem to me is that there is no easy way to find stuff in it—the back has no index, tables, or dictionary, and the table of contents gives only the theme of the chapter, not the kind of grammar. Anyway, I haven’t actually tried teaching with it yet; it could turn out to be interesting.In summary, it looks like a great 1st year book, with an unusually sane grammar progression, vocabulary for actual humans, and fun activities. It just needs a second edition with corrections, the fill-in stuff put in a separate volume, and a good index.[Edit February 2019]I have used this book a fair amount now. I think the best way to summarize its shortcomings is that it isn't really a textbook at all; it seems rather like all the dialogues, exercises, activities, and grammar explanations that a teacher used throughout the year, put together in one book, without any explanation of how long things should take, which words are important for memorization, or anything like that. They are excellent materials, however, and you should definitely get the book if you do spoken Latin. Just be aware that you will need to do a lot of planning work if you want to use this by itself as a textbook.

It is good book and audio track that one can access help. One should have some basic Latin knowledge to help use it efficiently. Some text is very small and that is one deficiency.

Very helpful in increasing my knowledge of Latin.

This is an inductive method of language learning/discovery. The idea is to get you thinking in the language without translating it in your head. It is the opposite of, for instance, Gavin Betts "Teach yourself Latin" (The Classical "Oxbridge" approach to Latin instruction and an excellent text).As an autodictat, I am using both books (and more). I'm making good progress and am learning a lot. I hope to participate in a Latin Colloquium at some point to speak with other Latin learners. Vale bene!

Bought this for my son who is a high school Latin teacher. He says it is great!! He loves it.

While looking the preview. In page 26 I saw that some of the answers to the negative questions are incorrect, such as telling that table is a chair or a pen is a book.Afterwards I bought the book it is really great.

Clever, attractive way to present the Latin language as one we can speak. Great way to refresh what was learned years ago!

Great for teachers of Latin!!!! Lots of activities.

The introduction talks of six renaissances of classical studies the current one coming with the internet and the fourth industrial revolution. It argues that a different way of studying is now more possible. The living language natural language method seems to keep coming back but the difference now is we are not limited to books provided by schools or libraries which no longer supply books. This follows the Polis Learn Greek course which has so far has the first of 8 books of a two year course. If you worked through this book over ten weeks it's designed to get you speaking in Latin. LLPSI is designed to get you reading in Latin. Together it might be possible to progress especially for younger students. On its own though it's more of showing a style a way of studying. It doesn't teach enough vocabulary or grammar to enable you to read any classical work. So long as you don't have high expectations. You cannot learn any language by using just one book might work. Babies too young for now.

Com algumas manchas de uso ou na hora de embalar embalaram com as mãos sujas.Capa na parte inferior empenada se abrindo.Como comprei pelo preço de varejo (20 reais a menos do preço de um novo, na época) vou relevar esses danos.Tirando esses transtornos, livro excelente.Lamentável. 😡

* Cette note est la moyenne de mes appréciations.* J'ai aimé et j'ai profité de cette méthode audio-orale (sans oublier l'écrit) tout en latin. Les acteurs qui la sonorisent rendent la langue latine vivante et animée.* Je regrette principalement le nombre d'étourderies, des permutations de légendes pour quelques images, le signe de longue souvent manquant, et parfois attribué à tort. Tout se passe comme si l'éditeur avait imprimé l'avant dernier manuscrit et raté les dernières corrections.Un débutant ne peut pas détecter tout seul les "coquilles". D'autre part, l'auteur du projet original avait prévu de marquer l'accent tonique par un caractère gras, mais ce procédé a été remplacé par le signe de longue, or en cas d'erreur, l'élève "calcule" un accent faux. Il aurait mieux valu ajouter les signes de longue (je les apprécie) mais en gardant les accents gras.Qui plus est, un lexique latin-latin réalisé dans le projet a disparu. Il n'y a pas de lexique dans cette édition.Quelques autres défauts :- Il manque un CD : l'acheteur est "invité" à télécharcher lui-même les fichiers .MP3 de la méthode.- Il manque la version sonore des exercices audio-oraux. Les exercices "audio-oraux" sont... écrits !- 39 € c'est un peu cher (compte tenu des défauts énumérés)* J'espère franchement que la prochaine édition soit au moins nettoyée de ses coquilles, et que les exercices audio-oraux soient enregistrés.* Je ne le recommande à un débutant que s'il est assisté d'un moniteur ou d'un professeur. Je peux le recommander à un faux débutant, mais équipé d'un bon dictionnaire avec les longues, comme Oxford, ou les longues et les brèves, comme Gaffiot. Je le recommande au latiniste avancé qui souhaite "dérouiller" son latin, le parler, peut-être, mais sûrement arriver à penser en latin et lire sans traduire.

Es un libro, muy bien editado, bien organizado. Empieza con frases sencillas y va aumentando la dificultad. Puede usarse como auto estudio, si bien está más recomendado para trabajar con alguien ha avezado en latín.

This looks like a great latin course. It's not based on tables and grammar. As I see it, it doesn't have the intention the analyse sentences and be an expert in latin language, but to be able to understand the basic meaning of texts in a natural way. It's quite intuitive (just the first part is in English) and it has good audio complements (online).